Clarity Satellite Being Prepared for 2025 Launch
VLEO Earth Observation Satellite has been Three Years in Development
A satellite the size of a phone booth (remember those?) that will fly two times lower than LEO satellites is being prepared for launch in 2025.
The Clarity-1 Satellite being built by Albedo Space Corporation at its manufacturing facility in Denver, CO is designed to collect imagery at a resolution previously only possible from drones & planes. According to the company, hardware is being built; mechanical structures, boards, wiring, embedded software, cloud software are all being integrated and manifested in real time. VLEO is a new domain, but with a first-principles approach from a team of smart engineers, Albedo says its first satellite is a truly novel platform with big benefits for earth observation.
SpaceX will launch the 10 cm visible x 2 meter thermal infrared satellite into Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO) aboard the Transporter-13 Rideshare mission no earlier than February 2025. Seven customers have reserved a portion of Clarity-1’s tasking images to empower their applications, including power line vegetation-management, commodity trading, mining elevation surveys, gas pipeline monitoring, AI infrastructure, consumer tasking, and defense & intelligence. Those customers include:
AiDash is an enterprise SaaS company making critical infrastructure industries more climate resilient and sustainable with satellites and AI.
Japan Space Imaging (JSI) has been the leading provider of satellite imagery and geospatial solutions in Japan since 1998.
Open Grid Europe (OGE) is Germany’s largest gas transmission grid operator, managing over 12,000 km of pipelines to ensure safety, integrity, and environmental sustainability.
PhotoSat provides geospatial solutions for the mining and geology industries, leveraging proprietary deep learning algorithms to build accurate elevation surveys and alteration maps. They will use Albedo’s visible + thermal imagery and stereo collections to enable higher accuracy and to fill gaps in areas where drones are challenging to deploy.
ScaleAI
SkyFi
Unnamed major multi-strategy hedge fund
By participating in Albedo Reserve, these customers have guaranteed their access to tasking — meaning that they won’t have to worry about conflicts, priorities, or any of the other issues that commonly get in the way of acquiring fresh satellite imagery. If Clarity-1 ends up fully reserved, the next opportunity to task will be mid-2027.