Orbitworks and Loft Orbital Put Mistral Models in Orbit on Altair-1
Altair-1, first of 50 Orbitworks satellites, runs Mistral's Ministral 3 on NVIDIA Jetson in orbit. The announcement provides no performance benchmarks.
Orbitworks and Loft Orbital announced today that the first satellite of their planned 50-satellite constellation launched on October 1 aboard a SpaceX rideshare mission. It is called Altair-1, it was built in Abu Dhabi by Orbitworks, and it carries two NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin modules running Mistral's Ministral 3 (3B and 8B versions) onboard. Mistral confirmed it on X: "Look up! Mistral models are in orbit 🌍."
Ministral 3 shares the hardware with nearly twenty other models for ship detection, cloud masking, wildfire, burn scar and flood mapping, image super-resolution and scene description, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft and Hugging Face. The pitch: analyze in orbit, transmit the event instead of raw imagery, and deliver an alert within seconds instead of a file hours later. The program is valued at $1 billion and was announced in Paris by Emmanuel Macron on September 9.
For context, Loft Orbital says it has run AI on satellites since YAM-6 in March 2024 and has flown more than twenty AI missions since.
My take: the seconds-versus-hours pitch is a latency claim with no latency measurement attached. The announcement gives no detection accuracy, no orbit, no sensor specifications and no schedule for the other 49 satellites. According to OnTimeBrief, NVIDIA did not name the customers either. Hardware in orbit is a fact. Performance is still a press release. Show me the eval, not the vibe.
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Sources
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
A $1 billion constellation announced by Macron himself, built with Emirati capital and French structure, and the first piece is already up there! Magnificent, darling, now give us a timetable for the other 49.
Jetson AGX Orin, CUDA 12.6, TensorRT, JetPack 6.2.1. Known stack, now in orbit. The app store for shared satellites is the part I'd want to see a price list for.
