Marlan Space and Loft Orbital signed a $1 billion plan in Paris on September 9, 2026, to build Altair-Next Gen, a 50-satellite constellation that runs models in orbit and sends down events instead of raw imagery. The Emirates News Agency said the signing happened at the International Space Summit in the presence of Emmanuel Macron, president of France.

Marlan Space is a UAE space investor and operator and a subsidiary of IHC. Loft Orbital is the US and French partner that supplies the flight stack. The first batch of satellites will carry radar, optical, and other sensors for French, European, and Emirati government users, plus commercial and sovereign customers. WAM said a user gets an alert in seconds. Conventional pipelines wait until the image is on the ground.

A French company, an Abu Dhabi factory

The infrastructure will sit in a dedicated French company. The satellites are to be built by Orbitworks at its plant in KEZAD, Abu Dhabi, which WAM called the region’s largest high-volume site for commercial constellations. Orbitworks was formed in 2024 as a joint venture between Marlan Space and Loft Orbital. Marlan’s site says the 5,000 square meter factory can produce up to 50 satellites a year, each up to 500 kilograms.

Fifty satellites is the threshold the partners use for a standing watch rather than a pass every few hours. Services are meant to run through an application store so several programs share the same birds. First jobs listed are maritime domain awareness, wildfire and disaster response, and the security of ports and other infrastructure. Customers already on the books, WAM said, include commercial and government users in France and the UAE.

The announcement follows IHC’s agreement, dated September 8, 2026, to take an 80 percent stake in Marlan Space. Syed Basar Shueb, CEO of IHC, called Altair-Next Gen a platform that ties satellite infrastructure to sovereign capability. Dr. Hamdullah Mohib, CEO of Marlan Space and Orbitworks, said the UAE is trying to sell satellite services, not only buy them.

Decoded Take

This is an industrial policy story wearing a constellation press release. France gets a company on its books and a presidential photo. The UAE gets a factory that can print 50 buses a year and a claim on the software layer. On-orbit inference is the product only if the satellites actually downlink events in seconds and if more than one government’s models can share the same aperture without a fight over tasking. Watch the first ten spacecraft, not the fifty. If Orbitworks slips, or if the French holdco becomes a paperwork wrapper, the $1 billion is a memorandum, not a fleet.