Albedo announced a new VLEO capable satellite bus yesterday that’s aiming to fly the company’s second orbital mission in 2027.
The new satellite bus, dubbed Vicinity, hopes to build on the success of the company’s first mission—Clarity-1, which launched in March 2025—by adding deployable solar arrays, upgraded flight software and in-house electronics. The goal is to open the door for a wider set of high-power applications, including SAR, electronic warfare, and tactical D2D comms payloads.
- Albedo expects Vicinity to be capable of offering 3 kW of peak power, with about 400 W of orbital average power;
- The sat will have space to host up to one ton of payload capacity;
- Vicinity is also designed to survive five years on orbit flying at altitudes of 320 km.
Drop it low: Vicinity is Albedo’s latest step into the world of satellite-bus manufacturing, after the company dropped its commercial imagery business in October. Albedo is betting that the space below LEO will become increasingly valuable as orbit grows more congested, and customers start taking advantage of benefits that closer proximity can offer.
- Many high-power payloads benefit from closer proximity to their target, such that a payload flying at 600 km would need 16x more power than one flying at 300 km.
- Flying in VLEO, below the Van Allen Belt, also creates protection from nuclear radiative blasts in orbit, allowing Albedo sats to offer government customers more resiliency compared with LEO.
- VLEO is also self-cleaning, meaning that sats flying lower to Earth have less debris to maneuver around—and less to worry about at their own end-of-life.
What’s next: Albedo plans to fully self-fund the first flight of Vicinity, but CEO Topher Haddad expects demand to follow soon after—from both defense and commercial customers.
“We see a future where VLEO is just as proliferated as LEO, across every different mission set that flies in LEO today,” Haddad told Payload. “Partners might want to use this as a bus…they might want to use us as a full space vehicle…We are flexible across all of those.”
Albedo’s ultimate aim is to provide optionality, where customers can utilize VLEO to achieve higher dynamism on orbit—or to solve high-power problems by flying closer to home, instead of building more efficient payloads or buying bigger power systems.
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