Postmortem: Our first VLEO satellite mission (with imagery and flight data)

Summary

On March 14, 2025, Albedo's first satellite, Clarity-1, launched on SpaceX Transporter-13. We took a big swing with our pathfinder. The mission goals:Prove sustainable orbit operations in VLEO — an orbital regime long considered too harsh for commercial satellites — by overcoming thick atmospheric drag, dangerous atomic oxygen, and extreme speeds.Prove our mid-size, high-performance Precision bus — designed and built in-house in just over two years.Capture 10 cm resolution visible imagery and 2-meter thermal infrared imagery, a feat previously achieved only by exquisite, billion dollar government systems.We proved a ton. We learned a ton.We achieved the first two goals definitively and validated 98% of the technology required for the third. This was an extraordinarily ambitious first satellite. We designed and built a high-performance bus on time and on budget, integrated a large-aperture telescope, and operated in an environment no commercial company had sustained operations in, funded entirely by private capital.This is the full story.VLEO WorksLet's start with the result that matters most: VLEO works. And it works better than even we expected.For decades, Very Low Earth Orbit was written off as impractical for normal satellite lifetimes. The atmosphere is thicker, creating drag that would deorbit normal satellites in weeks. If the drag didn't kill you, atomic oxygen would erode your solar arrays and surfaces. To succeed in VLEO required a fundamentally different satellite design.Clarity-1 proved that our design works.The drag coefficient was the headline: 12% better than our design target. Measured multiple times at altitudes between 350 km - 380 km with a repeatable result, this validates our models producing a satellite lifespan of five years at 275 km altitude, averaged across the solar cycle. This was one of our most critical assumptions, and we exceeded it.Atomic oxygen (AO) is the silent killer in VLEO. The deeper you go, the more AO you encounter. It degra...