Alba Orbital

Alba Orbital is a space company that builds small satellites called PocketQubes. It is based in Glasgow, Scotland, and was founded in 2012. The company also arranges launches for these satellites.

The site says Alba Orbital has launched 62 PocketQubes on 11 orbital missions. Nineteen of them were Unicorn satellites that the company designed and built. Unicorn-2 is described as its most capable pico satellite platform. Launch prices on the homepage start from 25,000 to 30,000 euro. Launches use a deployment system called Albapod.

Its product list has several parts. Alba Launch puts customer satellites into orbit. Unicorn-2 lets a customer fly an own mission as a hosted payload. Night Lights is a plan for high resolution images of the Earth at night. The company says it is building a fleet of night time imaging satellites for government and commercial clients.

Alba Orbital also sells test and ground services. These include a vibration table and a thermal vacuum bakeout chamber. There is a mobile ground station for UHF and S-band links, and a subscription service called Alba Connect.

Customers named on the site include the European Space Agency, TU Delft and Stanford University. The company says it has over 30 customers on four continents. It has offices in Glasgow, in Wilmington in the United States and in Berlin. It raised seed funding of 3.4 million dollars in 2021 with Y Combinator. The site has a contact form and a careers page.