Loft Orbital Expands Satellite Inventory with Airbus Longbow and Apex Nova Bus Procurements

Loft Orbital announced two platform procurements that significantly expand its inventory of satellites available off the shelf. Loft has secured 10 additional Longbow satellite platforms from Airbus Defence and Space (“Airbus”) and will also be adding a high-power platform to its inventory, leveraging Apex’s Nova satellite bus. 

Together, these broaden the range of missions Loft can support for government, defense, and institutional customers worldwide. They reflect Loft’s strategy of building an increasingly deep and diverse inventory of platforms, from smaller rideshare missions to large constellations.

235 kg mass Longbow platform: Scaling Constellations and Sovereign Capacity 

The 10 additional Longbow platforms, derived from the Airbus Arrow 150 bus, deepen Loft’s ability to deliver reliable, AI-enabled satellite services at scale. The Longbow platform has extensive flight heritage with more than 600 copies flown. It is capable of flying payload masses up to 85 kg, continuing to serve diverse missions to meet the needs of customers looking to rapidly deploy constellations and build sovereign capacity. Loft has procured 32 Longbow platforms in total, since 2022. The continued partnership with Airbus reflects a high demand for the readily available platform.

In France, the procurement underpins Loft’s ongoing partnership with the French government and the French Space Agency (CNES), spanning multi-mission technology demonstrations, SAR imaging capabilities, and AI-powered Earth observation. To date, Loft has signed three agreements with the French government using several Longbows. The platforms are also being leveraged by Orbitworks, Loft’s joint venture established in 2024, which is extending sovereign, AI-enabled space infrastructure capabilities to customers in Europe and the Middle East.

“This procurement is another step forward in providing reliable access to cutting-edge space infrastructure services for organizations around the world,” said Pierre-Damien Vaujour, CEO and Co-founder of Loft. “It reflects our partners’ confidence in Loft and the continued momentum toward leveraging commercial services to quickly deploy new capabilities on-orbit. Loft is uniquely positioned to keep pace with this demand and make space simple for the institutions that depend on it most.”

New 600 kg mass platform: Meeting High-Power Mission Requirements

Alongside the Longbow expansion, Loft is also introducing a new 600 kg platform leveraging Apex’s Nova bus to expand its off-the-shelf portfolio. This high-power platform provides 1 kW of orbit-average power (OAP) and can support payload masses up to 300 kilograms. The platform targets proliferated, power-hungry national security applications including advanced sensing, high-throughput communications, and missile warning systems. The contract includes up to 10 buses, the first of which is scheduled for delivery from Apex in October 2026.

The Nova bus will be outfitted with Loft’s full hardware and software stack, giving customers the same standardized interfaces for power, command and control, compute, and communications used across Loft’s existing fleet, while unlocking significantly higher size, weight, and power (SWaP) capacity than previously available through Loft’s platform lineup.

“Adding a new platform to our portfolio with Apex’s Nova bus expands the mission envelope we can serve for U.S. government and national security customers,” said Chris Daywalt, Vice President of Growth at Loft Federal. “It gives us the additional capability for larger sensing, communications, and edge-processing payloads while preserving the part that matters most to customers: Loft-standard mission avionics, software, payload interfaces, and secure operations. This lets us match the bus to the mission and keep payload integration, command and control, and on-orbit mission execution on a predictable path.”