YAM-6

YAM-6 (Yet Another Mission 6) is a smallsat operated by Loft Orbital, launched 4 March 2024 on a Falcon 9 Transporter-10 rideshare from Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 4E.^[1] The satellite carries NORAD catalogue number 59126 and the COSPAR designation 2024-043AE, orbiting in a sun-synchronous orbit at 97.55 degree inclination and approximately 463 km mean altitude (range 458-468 km), with a 93.7-minute period and near-circular eccentricity.^[2][3]

YAM-6 has an 83 kg bus mass.^[1] The catalogue lists the platform as longbow-bus. Loft Orbital confirmed that YAM-8 is the first mission on the Longbow bus,^[4] while the YAM-6 mission blog and community tracking sources describe the spacecraft as using the same standardised bus as prior YAM missions.^[5][1]

YAM-6 is the first Loft Orbital virtual mission satellite. Rather than customers purchasing dedicated spacecraft, YAM-6 enables customers to deploy software applications on-orbit via Loft Orbital Cockpit, accessing the hosted payload suite without owning the hardware.^[5][6] The satellite carries five hosted payloads: a hyperspectral imager (the payload customer has not been publicly identified as of May 2026), an RGB imager, a software-defined radio, an inter-satellite link for real-time connectivity, and a CPU/GPU compute payload supporting on-orbit AI workloads including image processing and change detection.^[5] YAM-6 remained operational as of May 2026.^[2][7]