Umbra Lab, Inc.

Umbra builds synthetic aperture radar satellites in Santa Barbara and sells three things off the back of them. Imagery, whole missions, and the hardware that makes a spacecraft work. Founded in 2015, the company flew its first radar satellite in 2021 and has eight on orbit, with a planned constellation of thirty two flown in pairs so that two spacecraft can image the same scene at once. Around 230 people work for it, all of it American owned, engineered and operated, with offices in Arlington and Reston, Virginia alongside the California base. The company is privately held and venture backed.

Remote sensing is the visible business. Radar sees through cloud, smoke and darkness, and Umbra's satellites resolve detail down to 25 centimetres in Spotlight mode, which slews the spacecraft in azimuth to hold a target and stretch the synthetic aperture. Dwell mode squints forward and back for very long collections over a single point, producing colourised sub-aperture imagery. Scan mode trades resolution for width, covering large areas between 50 centimetres and two metres off track. In 2023 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lifted the licensing conditions the company had been operating under, and Umbra released a 16 centimetre image, the sharpest ever offered commercially. Tasking runs through an interface called Canopy, and an open data programme launched in March 2023 has put thousands of images of more than twenty recurring global sites into the public domain through Amazon Web Services.

Mission solutions is the government line. Rather than selling pixels, Umbra designs a system around a customer requirement and offers it built to own, leased, or some arrangement in between, with the stated design goal of working through jamming, deception and disruption. The National Reconnaissance Office kept Umbra as one of three commercial radar providers after its Commercial Radar Capabilities study, awarded it a Strategic Enhancements stage to advance sensor performance, and issued it a Radar Commercial Augmentation contract running from August 2026.

Space Systems opened in August 2025 as a merchant hardware unit, selling nine flight proven components in four groups out of a 50,000 square foot factory in southern California. Power covers a lithium ion battery module, a body steered tri-fold deployable solar array and a power package built around a management unit. Control covers a reaction wheel, the Magnetorquer 6 torque rod and a combined magnetometer and sun sensor. Communications covers an S-band command and telemetry radio and an eight port gigabit network switch. Deployment is SyncRelease 4, a synchronised four point separation system. Every part had already flown on Umbra's own spacecraft, or was manifested to fly, before it went on sale to other operators. Selling the pieces of its own satellites to rival constellation owners is an unusual move, and it reflects a bet that what the market is short of is manufacturing capacity rather than ideas.