The satellite stopped calling home
the satellite stopped calling home: loft orbital’s yam-9 ran the first vision-language model in orbit in april, spotting targets and answering plain-language questions without ground analysts, while china put ai hyperspectral satellites on a smart dragon rocket in august. nasa’s prithvi geospatial model now flies on the space station.
the downlink is becoming optional.
Context
TechCrunch reported on Jun 15, 2026 that in April an Earth observation satellite found what it was looking for on its own, without ground analysts, the first reported use of a vision-language model in orbit. The NAVI-Orbital paper describes a zero-shot vision-language model deployed on a low Earth orbit spacecraft, and ScienceAlert ties it to Loft Orbital's YAM-9 satellite and NASA JPL researchers.
Loft Orbital says YAM-9 launched on SpaceX's Transporter-15 on Nov 28, 2025.
The first vision-language model in orbit on YAM-9 in April, answering without ground analysts, matches the sources. NAVI-Orbital is credited to NASA JPL researchers. China's AI hyperspectral satellites on a Smart Dragon rocket in August, and NASA's Prithvi geospatial model flying on the space station, were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted.
Related work
Watch next
- Find the Smart Dragon hyperspectral launch report.
Sources
- TechCrunch, Jun 15, 2026techcrunch.com
- arXiv 2606.18271arxiv.org
- Loft Orbital, Nov 2025loftorbital.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 2 October 2026 at 15:08 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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