UAE Royal Family Holding Company Injects New Joint Venture Between Abu Dhabi-Based Marlan Space and Startup Orbital loft With over US$100 million to develop local satellite manufacturing capabilities in the region.
The joint venture, called OrbitworksEmirates Aerospace Industries will be the UAE’s first commercial company to mass-manufacture satellites. It is majority-owned by Marlan Space, a new space company under International Holdings. Emirates Aerospace Industries is majority-controlled by the Royal Group, a conglomerate owned by the ruling royal family of Abu Dhabi.
The UAE has lofty ambitions in space—and deep pockets to fund them. The UAE Space Agency is less than a decade old, but the government has spent billions of dollars investing in local capabilities and building partnerships with other countries and commercial entities. The UAE sent its first astronaut (or privately funded “spaceflight participant,” as NASA calls it) to the International Space Station in 2019; two years later, it became the latest member of a very small group of nations to put a probe into Mars’ orbit.
The Gulf state’s space ecosystem has a few major players other than the UAE Space Agency: Space42, a merger between Emirati satellite company Yahsat and data analytics company Bayanat; EDGE, a large industrial conglomerate; and a handful of universities and research institutions such as the National Space Technology and Science Center. The country has reached the point where it wants to deploy satellite constellations and bring satellite manufacturing capabilities in-house.
“Even when we started Loft, it was in my mind from the beginning that I wanted to open activities in the UAE and contribute to the ecosystem there,” Loft Orbital CEO Pierre-Damien Fougere said in a recent interview.
San Francisco-based Loft buys satellite buses in bulk and delivers payloads to customers, using a modular payload adapter that integrates the customer’s hardware into the spacecraft. Loft handles all launch integration and operation of the spacecraft once it reaches orbit. The startup can also implement “virtual missions,” where customers can deploy applications in orbit that leverage the vehicle’s onboard sensors, computing and cameras.
The flexible hardware offered by LOFT will enable the joint venture to work with a wide range of emerging players in the Middle East space ecosystem, said Fogor. “LOFT can work with any payload provider, any bus or subsystem provider, any ground station provider, any cloud provider… We provide the joint venture with the production, operations and technology manual for satellites,” he added.
OrbitWorks plans to manufacture up to 50 500-kilogram satellites per year, and has already purchased hardware for the first 10 satellites. The company will operate out of a 50,000-square-foot facility in Abu Dhabi, and the first satellite platform is expected to be assembled, integrated and tested there by early 2025.
Fogor said the startup has entered into agreements with Marlan to ensure that Loft complies with U.S. regulations and export licenses. Loft Federal, a separate entity of Loft, will continue to provide classified contract work to U.S. national security clients.
“These entities that have been created have a mandate to be the national champion in the country for the production and operation of satellite constellations, and that’s something that’s fairly new,” Fogor said. “While we’re starting with something small, the idea is really to scale this up to a different scale. The ambitions, whether from the state, the region or internationally for something like this, are very big.”