T-7 Months to Launch

You know that classic scene from Jurassic Park where Dr. Grant, Ellie (shoutout Laura Dern), Jeff Goldblum (forgot his character’s name), and the crew roll up in the custom Jeep Wranglers (consumer advertising has gone massively downhill since the 90’s) and see a Brachiosaurus for the first time?

That’s basically how I feel each time I walk into the Albedo lab and a new piece of flight hardware has shown up. For our visually-minded learners:

IMHO, Space-grade hardware is equally as cool as dinosaurs — plus, you don’t have to worry about the whole “getting eaten” thing.

(Officially) T-7 Months to Launch

If you haven’t heard, we’ve ~officially~ announced that we’ll be launching our first satellite with SpaceX in early 2025! If you missed the blog post, here are the high points:

• In the SpaceX approved language, Albedo will launch “aboard the Transporter-13 Rideshare mission no earlier than February 2025”. I’ll leave it to y’all to sleuth around a bit and see how much wiggle room there is..

• Clarity is the name of Albedo’s first satellite constellation! Clare - because we love to anthropomorphize and project our hopes and dreams onto this metal child we’re collectively birthing - represents the belief that clarity begets certainty in decision-making for our users. Excuse the reproductive references, we have a lot of parents at Albedo, and we’re learning there are a surprising amount of parallels between babies, startups, and satellites.

• We featured a subset of our Reserve customers who have reserved a portion of Clarity-1's limited tasking images. These customers span an incredibly diverse swath of applications: vegetation management, mining, agriculture, commodity trading, AI infrastructure, pipeline monitoring, and defense and intelligence — and we've had more customers join Reserve since the time of the blog post 🫣 

Engineering Progress

I have this theory that people who work at startups are inherently attracted to pain, difficulty, or struggle - and at Albedo, I think we’re suckers for all three. Even putting execution aside, the idea itself is incredulous:

• Capture the level of resolution you’d expect from planes and drones — but from space

• Design for the crazy drag, wicked atomic oxygen, and limited photons (power-gen) in VLEO

• Build state-of-the art precision pointing while zipping along VLEO well over 17,000 MPH

• Launch Clarity-1 during the solar maximum

• Strap not one, but TWO sensors to the dang thing

Double It

Speaking of sensors, we’ve recently completed routine prep work for both our visible and thermal sensors to be integrated into our larger optical assembly.

In the video below, Mike is integrating our visible sensor into its mechanical housing, which must be performed wearing a bunny suit in the clean room. I imagine the suit is pretty un-fun to wear, so I took the creative liberty to make him move like a ninja in post-production. Mike approved 👍

Our thermal sensor required less housing intervention, but Oren still gave it a quick hygiene check up — mainly a sweet, pressurized air bath to make sure it was free of any particulates and contaminants.

Stability is 🔑

In order for Clarity to capture quality imagery, we need to hold steady to take a picture. In the same way that sports photographers use tripods to stabilize their fancy telephoto lenses, Albedo needs to ensure its own space-grade stability.. it's just that we're 7108 times further away with angle that’s 23.5 times smaller than the telephoto lens snapping picks at the Broncos game. Yes, the word “picks” here was intentional — you have two years of Russell Wilson to thank.

A key ingredient in this is how we hold our optic, especially in conjunction with the rest of the vehicle. It needs to be able to seamlessly accommodate the external forces of atmospheric drag balanced against the internal dynamics of maneuvering around to capture imagery for our users.

Another important structure is the lattice that frames our space vehicle. This stiff lattice ensures the dynamic stability of our primary load path to minimize image motion, similar to what we mentioned above. The lattice also holds our solar array panels, of which I have some exclusive content.

Bam — Razz-colored solar array panels! As much as I would like to say that we planned this from the get-go, I think we’ll have to chalk it up to some good ole’ divine providence. Some things are just meant to be and our custom VLEO-optimized solar arrays being AyJay’s favorite color might be one of them.

Everybody gets a test

I like to think of our current phase like that episode of Oprah where she gave everyone in her audience a car — except that it’s the Albedo team and a bunch of HW/SW tests. It makes it much more fun in your head and gives you another reason to appreciate the early 2000’s.

When you need more horsepower for mission capability, you do it yourself. The above photo shows our custom avionics peripherals. We have gone from idea to space-grade hardware in lightspeed — these boards have been designed, fabricated, and tested in less than a year.

We are deep in the weeds of integrating hardware and the many, many layers of software needed to bring it all together. All of this testing needs to conclude ahead of space vehicle environmental testing (testing Clare to make sure she can handle the rigors of launch and space).

Speaking of — with launch being less than 7 months away, we’ve also started to put ourselves through the paces of launch operations. The screenshot below shows the team after a successful bus calibration rehearsal with nominal telemetry. This rehearsal is one of many we’ll conduct as we get closer and closer to prime time. Practice makes perfect!

ICYMI

The only news that matters: Albedo-related news. Here’s the quick rundown:

On the Internet

In Real Life

How You Can Help 🤝

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Hope you enjoyed this month’s newsletter! These will start showing up in your inbox on a monthly basis until Clarity-1’s launch, so get ready for more content. For now, I’ll leave you with our latest internal motto.

Until next time,

Winston & Team Albedo