Swiss startup DPhi Space hosted Liquid AI’s large language model to analyze an EO image—without first transmitting the image to the ground.
That was the first public result of DPhi’s second mission, Clustergate-2, which rode to orbit on a Momentus Vigoride 7 sat in March. The transmission, which was announced today, signifies a new age in space-compute capabilities, in which engineers can quickly upload and test their software in space, without having to build and deploy satellites of their own.
Hey Siri: The LLM was asked to describe an image taken by an onboard camera. Its response:
“This image is a highly detailed, close-up view of Earth as seen from space, likely captured by a satellite or space telescope. The Earth is depicted as a large, circular sphere with a predominantly blue hue, indicating the vast oceans that cover most of its surface. The blue is interspersed with swirling white clouds, which are particularly prominent over the landmasses, suggesting the presence of weather systems and atmospheric activity”.
White hats: The mission is more than just a win for this specific AI use case. It validated DPhi’s ability to operate a compute platform in orbit. With Clustergate-2, DPhi is proving it can quickly and easily get companies access to orbit. DPhi has also shared pricing and software specs publicly in an attempt to remove the barriers for developers looking to begin testing their software in space.
To gin up new use cases, DPhi co-organized a hackathon with Liquid AI to help developers workshop how to use in-space compute power, and broaden the potential customer base for future orbital rack-space. DPhi registered ~500 applications for the ongoing hackathon, with use cases including vision-language models to detect illegal mining, and maritime anomalies.
“We’ve had this huge gap between software developers and satellite manufacturers,” DPhi CEO Aziz Belkhiria told Payload. “What DPhi Space aims to do with the hackathon, and Clustergate-2, is to just create a bridge that’s a direct link to us…once developers are happy with what we do, they will evangelize us within their own organizations.”
Demo no more: Clustergate-2 also brings an end to DPhi’s two-step demonstration campaign. The campaign began in March 2025, when DPhi launched Clustergate-1 to validate the company’s ability to integrate and fly hosted payloads.
Now, DPhi plans to put lessons from Clustergate-1 and -2 together into a new production class satellite—called OmniSat—which is designed to host payloads and software capabilities alike. OmniSat is targeting to launch as soon as late 2027, and will carry hosted sensors and NVIDIA GPUs.
Meta Secures Overview Energy Space Solar Power Capacity
Meta announced an agreement today to secure up to 1 GW of power capacity through Overview Energy’s planned solar power-beaming satellite system.
Slingshot Introduces AI-Powered Portal Platform
Slingshot Aerospace introduced a new platform today that will allow operators to spot anomalies—and make decisions—in an AI-powered, one-stop-shop.
Sophia Space and Kepler Sign Agreement to Demo ODC Tech
The agreement, announced today, is Sophia’s first opportunity to validate its orbital-data-center software in space.
Albedo Ratchets Up the Power for its Second VLEO Flight
Albedo announced a new VLEO capable satellite bus today that’s aiming to fly the company’s second orbital mission in 2027.
NEW YORK CITY—Industry is planning to largely rely on commercial tech for Golden Dome to make the program affordable and able to scale, according to three industry execs.
Asked what a Golden Dome satellite bus would have that a commercial satellite bus doesn’t, Apex Space CEO Ian Cinnamon’s answer was simple—”Hopefully, nothing.”
“If we really want to get the price down, you need to be using commercial-off-the-shelf systems that are on a set assembly line,” Cinnamon said on a panel at the NYSE Space Summit, which also included Impulse Space President and COO Eric Romo and K2 Space CEO Karan Kunjur.
Keep reading