Albedo

Albedo builds satellites for very low Earth orbit, the band a few hundred kilometres below where most spacecraft fly. Its first, Clarity-1, weighed 580 kilograms and operated at around 275 kilometres, low enough for its telescope to resolve ten centimetres per pixel, detail that otherwise takes an aircraft. Flying there means constant drag and corrosive atomic oxygen, so the bus is shaped to slip through the residual air and the solar arrays are built to withstand it.

The reasoning is geometric. Halve the altitude and the same telescope sees twice the detail, so a mid-sized instrument flying low matches a large one flying high. Topher Haddad and his cofounders started the company in 2020 to sell aerial-quality imagery from orbit, and Clarity-1 flew in March 2025 to prove it, returning ten-centimetre visible imagery and two-metre thermal infrared.

The problems arrived early. One of the control gyroscopes seized a month after launch, traced to a wrong temperature limit in its specification, and the team flew on with the remaining three. Nine months in, contact was lost to a suspected radio fault, and the satellite reentered in June 2026. By then Albedo had already shut its imagery business and laid off staff, concluding the value was in the platform rather than the pictures. What it sells now is the bus itself, to customers who want radar, electronic warfare or communications payloads flying low. The next satellite, Vicinity, is aimed at 2027, and nothing of Albedo's is in orbit today.