DPhi’s Second Demo Brings Compute Space to Orbit

Swiss startup DPhi Space hosted Liquid AI’s large language model to analyze an EO image—without first transmitting the image to the ground. That was the first public result of DPhi’s second mission, Clustergate-2, which rode to orbit on a Momentus Vigoride 7 sat in March. The transmission, which was announced today, signifies a new age in space-compute capabilities, in which engineers can quickly upload and test their software in space, without having to build and deploy satellites of their own. Hey Siri: The LLM was asked to describe an image taken by an onboard camera. Its response: “This image is a highly detailed, close-up view of Earth as seen from space, likely captured by a satellite or space telescope. The Earth is depicted as a large, circular sphere with a predominantly blue hue, indicating the vast oceans that cover most of its surface. The blue is interspersed with swirling white clouds, which are particularly prominent over the landmasses, suggesting the presence of weather systems and atmospheric activity”. White hats: The mission is more than just a win for this specific AI use case. It validated DPhi’s ability to operate a compute platform in orbit. With Clustergate-2, DPhi is proving it can quickly and easily get companies access to orbit. DPhi has also shared pricing and software specs publicly in an attempt to remove the barriers for developers looking to begin testing their software in space. To gin up new use cases, DPhi co-organized a hackathon with Liquid AI to help developers workshop how to use in-space compute power, and broaden the potential customer base for future orbital rack-space. DPhi registered ~500 applications for the ongoing hackathon, with use cases including vision-language models to detect illegal mining, and maritime anomalies. “We’ve had this huge gap between software developers and satellite manufacturers,” DPhi CEO Aziz Belkhiria told Payload. “What DPhi Space aims to do with the hackathon, and Clustergate-2, is to just create a bridge that’s a direct link to us…once developers are happy with what we do, they will evangelize us within their own organizations.” Demo no more: Clustergate-2 also brings an end to DPhi’s two-step demonstration campaign. The campaign began in March 2025, when DPhi launched Clustergate-1 to validate the company’s ability to integrate and fly hosted payloads. Now, DPhi plans to put lessons from Clustergate-1 and -2 together into a new production class satellite—called OmniSat—which is designed to host payloads and software capabilities alike. OmniSat is targeting to launch as soon as late 2027, and will carry hosted sensors and NVIDIA GPUs. Related Stories Business • Technology Muon Space Unveils New, Larger Satellite Bus Condor-Ultra is three times larger than its Condor-XL satellite bus, and geared toward the nascent orbital-data-center market. Military • Technology Northrop Grumman Taps Apex for Golden Dome SBI Collab Northrop Grumman is on track to deliver on-orbit missile defense capabilities with Apex in 2027. EO • International • Technology Bellatrix Aerospace Tapped to Build Korean VLEO Demo Sat Bellatrix Aerospace is teaming up with Korean optical payload manufacturer TelePIX on a new VLEO demo satellite, launching NET 2028.    Europe Europe Celebrates its Sovereignty Progress at SmallSat Europe made its most concrete claim yet for sovereignty in orbit this week. More Stories Business • Military Golden Dome Will Use COTS Parts, Space Execs Say Jacqueline Feldscher April 28, 2026 May 1, 2026 Share Twitter Linkedin Facebook Copy Email NYSE Space Summit. Image: NYSE NEW YORK CITY—Industry is planning to largely rely on commercial tech for Golden Dome to make the program affordable and able to scale, according to three industry execs.  Asked what a Golden Dome satellite bus would have that a commercial satellite bus doesn’t, Apex Space CEO Ian Cinnamon’s answer was simple—”Hopefully, nothing.” “If we really want to get the price down, you need to be using commercial-off-the-shelf systems that are on a set assembly line,” Cinnamon said on a panel at the NYSE Space Summit, which also included Impulse Space President and COO Eric Romo and K2 Space CEO Karan Kunjur. Keep reading Load More