It’s Heating Up 🔥

Not only is the weather warming up, but so is the activity at our manufacturing facility and lab! Custom electronics boards are undergoing thermal vacuum (TVAC) testing, our solar array assembly process is laid out, and our bus structure is now fused together — let’s dive in while it’s hot! 🥵

“Wow Winston, did you really just parlay a comment about the weather into Albedo’s recent engineering accomplishments"?” Yes — yes, I did. Now sit back and keep reading for more 😏

The People Making It Happen

Before heading into the thick of assembly, integration, and test (AI&T) for our first satellite, we found time to get together as a company for some valuable face time. The in-person time was high-leverage for planning out the rest of the hectic year and reminding ourselves of the magic of our Albedo relationships. We even managed to get over to the Space Explorers: THE INFINITE exhibit and experience the glory of the ISS in VR as a company.

And to top off an already incredible week: our inimitable Strategic Advisory Board stopped by to spend quality time with the team and give us their #1 piece of advice for the crucial months that lay ahead of us. What better advice than advice from those who have done the thing you’re doing — but many times over?

Hardware — Assemble!

Flight hardware is coming together. The team has been heads-down testing and integrating various flight hardware and software components as the spacecraft begins to take shape. They have also begrudgingly agreed to humor my requests for photos (very “parents before high school prom” vibes), but if this newsletter issue is a smashing success, maybe they’ll let me take more?

Bus structure is fully assembled

This baby was designed, analyzed, and built in 1 year. From start-to-finish, that’s slightly longer than the average human baby — and even more impressive when you consider that this bus is custom-tailored for Albedo’s VLEO needs, namely precision pointing and design-for-manufacturability (we’ll be pumping multiples of these out on a production line at some point in the near future).

This bus structure is extremely stiff for its weight and ready to support a heavy payload — in everyday terms, you’d want a stable tripod for your camera with a big telescopic zoom lens. But don’t let the visual simplicity fool you: careful considerations have been made to account for the dampened dynamics of the propulsion tank emptying over time, a unique thermal control system, and rapid assembly/disassembly for both AI&T and production scalability.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” — someone who knows what they’re talking about.

TVAC testing

Thermal vacuum testing is the most realistic thermal simulation of a flight environment you can do — short of actually sending your spacecraft to space. Albedo subjected our various electronics to a number of hot-cold cycles and successfully passed acceptance testing levels, including the batteries pictured above. We’ll repeat the TVAC testing process for a few of our larger, integrated subsystems and finally our entire space vehicle — the latter of which will be done in a much bigger chamber 👀

Ready, set, integrate! 🏃 ‍🔄

Flight hardware is pouring in, and the team moving in an established rhythm of getting it appropriately stored, unboxed, and ready to be used. The lab is busier than ever, meaning strict protocol has been put into place and actively enforced — I am most certainly not allowed in.

Our earlier integration and test campaigns are focused on the basics: individual safe-to-mate tests, verifying basic commands like power on/off propagate through the various electronics, and validating nominal telemetry output. This benchtop testing (pictured above) is incredibly important to ensure interfaces are aligned across software and hardware, pre-mechanical installation. The patience and procedural rigor we’re building now will pay dividends as we head into final integration and functional testing towards the end of the year 🫡

Out and About

LinkedIn is the best place to get the most recent news on Albedo! Follow us and keep your eyes peeled — we have some big announcements coming soon 👀

Not just Earth Observation

Perhaps our biggest news from the past month: Albedo is setting its sights on Mars!

Thanks to a contract from NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, we’ll be studying how we can adapt our Earth-imaging, VLEO satellites and space-ground software systems to collect imagery of the Red Planet’s surface, as a both more affordable and higher performing imaging capability than legacy government-developed systems. We’re stoked for the future of collaboration between the public and private space sectors and hope we can play a pivotal part in it. Who knows, maybe we’ll see some of those green people from our old team photo over there?

Not just Earth Observation (continued)

Earth, Mars, … geez, what else? That beautiful bus you saw pictured above provides us with the agility to not only image the Earth, Mars, but also objects in space from our Earth-bound VLEO orbit! The same sensor that produces our 2-meter resolution thermal imagery is coincidentally very useful for detecting thermal anomalies in the cold expanse of space. Read through the Booz Allen Hamilton report to learn why their investment in Albedo is not only an Earth Observation bet but also a Space Domain Awareness (SDA) play as well.

GEOINT 2024

If you were super lucky, you managed to get some important face time with Katie, Dan, and AyJay in Orlando for GEOINT! If not, no worries — we got the recap.

According to people live at the scene, there was not a single 10-second period where these three weren’t talking to separate groups of people. There were lines (lines!) of people queueing to chat with us. Pretty crazy, right? I normally only hear about lines for a schmoozy, new brunch spot or cronuts, but to be fair, we were giving away Albedo drink coasters.

Speaking of — in a classic, CTO move, AyJay thought of a neat infographic to illustrate how Albedo’s 10 cm pixels compare to current market offerings using the above-mentioned coasters, where each square coaster actually has a length of 10 cm.

How You Can Help 🤝

Want to support Albedo and don’t know how? These things all take less than 10 seconds to do and create massive leverage for us:

• Do you know a great RF engineer who would be perfect for Albedo? Tell them to apply and let us know you sent them by replying to this email; you can also repost our LinkedIn announcement.

• Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram and reshare our content!

• Login to use the custom link below to share this newsletter with others! Each person that subscribes helps to win you Albedo swag: stickers, t-shirts, hoodies, and even some custom Albedo Crocs 😉 

Until next time,

Winston & Team Albedo