UAE's Marlan Space and US Firm Loft Orbital Lead $1B French AI Satellite Constellation with Abu Dhabi Manufacturing
PARIS / ABU DHABI — In a major expansion of sovereign deep-tech and space manufacturing capabilities, UAE-based space investor Marlan Space—a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Company (IHC)—and U.S. space-infrastructure firm Loft Orbital are leading a consortium executing a $1 billion investment in France to develop Altair-Next Gen, planned as the world’s largest artificial intelligence-enabled satellite constellation.
The bilateral initiative was formally signed at the International Space Summit in Paris in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron. Under the agreement, the initial phase will comprise 50 multi-sensor satellites, with the entire first batch manufactured in the United Arab Emirates by commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) developer Orbitworks at its high-volume manufacturing and operations facility in Kezad, Abu Dhabi.
Formed in 2024 as a joint venture between Marlan Space and Loft Orbital, Orbitworks operates the Middle East's premier commercial satellite production hub. The Kezad facility provides the industrial capacity to scale production from an initial ten-satellite baseline to 50 spacecraft, anchoring the UAE’s transition from an importer of space assets to an advanced exporter of space hardware and orbital data services.
Technical Architecture & In-Orbit AI Processing:
Edge Compute Over Raw Downlinks: Traditional Earth observation platforms downlink gigabytes of uncompressed imagery to ground stations for delayed processing. Altair-Next Gen utilizes onboard edge processors to analyze observations directly in orbit, transmitting actionable event alerts within seconds rather than raw sensor feeds hours later.
Multi-Sensor Payloads: Each satellite integrates sub-meter optical imagers, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), shortwave infrared (SWIR), thermal, hyperspectral, and radio-frequency (RF) sensors to maintain multi-layered observation day and night.
Orbital App Store Ecosystem: Services will be delivered through a distributed space AI application marketplace, allowing sovereign and enterprise clients to deploy customized AI models—including algorithms from France's Mistral AI—onto shared orbital hardware.
Operational Mission Profiles: Initial commercial and public deployments will target maritime domain security, emergency disaster management, real-time wildfire tracking, and critical infrastructure and port defense.
Loft Orbital, which currently manages over 100 payloads and 20 operational AI space missions, will supply flight-proven modular platforms, autonomous constellation management software, and flight operations expertise. The program also integrates optical satellite inputs from U.S.-based BlackSky, building on long-standing trilateral aerospace collaboration between the UAE, the United States, and France.
With the 50-satellite fleet maintaining persistent low Earth orbit coverage, the network ensures continuous global observation, delivering sovereign situational awareness across government and commercial sectors in Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.
