Loft Orbital CEO Pierre-Damien Vaujour said in a recent interview that he’s long had an interest in the UAE’s space ecosystem: “Even when we started Loft, I had in mind at the very beginning that I wanted to open activities in the UAE and contribute to the ecosystem over there.”

San Francisco-based Loft buys satellite buses in bulk and flies payloads for customers, using a standardized modular payload adaptor that integrates the customer’s hardware with the spacecraft. Loft handles all of the launch integration and operates the spacecraft once it achieves orbit. The startup can also perform “virtual missions,” where customers can deploy applications on orbit that leverage onboard sensors, compute and cameras.