Loft Orbital Solutions, Inc. and LeoStella, Inc. have extended their production agreement to secure multiple additional LEO-100 buses from LeoStella. These satellite buses are the latest in a series Loft Orbital has secured from LeoStella.
The satellites are based on LeoStella’s existing product line of ESPA-class buses. LeoStella’s active production line of commercial buses creates an opportunity for customers to acquire high-quality satellites while staying within new-space cost and schedule constraints. This procurement exemplifies Loft Orbital’s novel strategy of using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) satellite buses to fly any kind of payload in LEO at unparalleled speed to orbit and reliability. This partnership is a crucial enabler for Loft Orbital’s focus on making space simple.
Loft Orbital operates satellite infrastructure and flies customer payloads as a service. By using common bus designs across its missions, Loft Orbital shields its customers from the technical and schedule risks that typically impact space missions.
LeoStella’s continuous manufacturing model enables the company to produce commercial satellites at scale. The company’s intelligent manufacturing facility uses a digital process tethered to a robust supply chain to make satellite production more flexible and efficient. Its Tukwila, Wash., factory is designed to maximize efficiency while remaining scalable to keep pace with the rapidly accelerating market demand.
"We chose to procure these additional buses from LeoStella given the excellent performance of its LEO-100 satellite bus, which we used for our YAM-3 mission that launched earlier this year, and YAM-5, which is launching in 2022," said Pierre-Damien Vaujour, CEO of Loft Orbital. "Our strategy has been to partner with best-in-class bus providers with significant on-orbit heritage and active production lines. We focus our efforts on the hardware and software products that enable us to treat these buses as payload agnostic platforms, allowing us to fly any payload onboard and provide our customers a high degree of operational control."
"Our COTS buses provide industry-leading data quality, throughput, and up-time as demonstrated on-orbit across multiple operational constellations," said Brian Rider, chief technology officer at LeoStella. "LeoStella has a continuous production line of satellites that we can repurpose for a wide range of missions. This approach aligns well with Loft Orbital's focus on offering its customers fast and reliable access to space. We are excited to be part of that ecosystem."
