Satellogic Brand Guidelines: Bariloche CubeBugs, NewSats Named for Scientists & Merlin

A satellite start-up in an Andean town.

Satellogic was founded in 2010 by Emiliano Kargieman and Gerardo Richarte; the company’s own timeline puts the start in July 2010. Spanish Wikipedia says it began in Bariloche, in Argentina’s Río Negro province, inside the business-incubator programme of the state technology company INVAP, and became independent in 2012. In a 2026 interview with Forbes Argentina, Kargieman said the idea came from ten months spent at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, and that his first aim was satellites costing hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than hundreds of millions.

The first products were tiny. Satellogic built Argentina’s first two CubeSats, English Wikipedia says: CubeBug-1, launched from China on 26 April 2013, and CubeBug-2, launched from Russia on 21 November 2013. Both were sponsored by Argentina’s science ministry. Their nicknames set a pattern of local humour: CubeBug-1 was “Capitán Beto,” after a song by the rock band Invisible, and CubeBug-2 was “Manolito,” after a character in the comic strip Mafalda, Spanish Wikipedia says. A third test satellite, BugSat 1, known as “Tita,” followed in June 2014.

Commercial satellites came next. The first two of the ÑuSat, or NewSat, series, nicknamed “Fresco” and “Batata,” were launched from China on 30 May 2016, starting what the company called the Aleph-1 constellation; a third, “Milanesat,” was named by public vote and launched in June 2017.

From nicknames to scientists’ names.

As the fleet grew, the names changed register. The company’s timeline lists NewSats called Ada and Maryam, Hypatia, Sophie and Marie, and, on its first dedicated rocket launch in November 2020, ten satellites named Alice, Caroline, Cora, Dorothy, Emmy, Hedy, Katherine, Lise, Mary and Vera. Five launched on 1 April 2022 carried the full names of women scientists and astronauts, among them Annie Maunder, Mary Somerville, Kalpana Chawla and Sally Ride. Later batches are listed simply by number.

The hardware itself is described in English Wikipedia as small, light and designed to be made in quantity, with each commercial NewSat carrying two cameras: one for high-resolution multispectral images and one hyperspectral. The early CubeBugs were more experimental still: Spanish Wikipedia says CubeBug-1 weighed about two kilograms, that its software and hardware were released as open platforms for amateurs, universities and research institutes, and that it was tracked from the Radio Club Bariloche.

The work is split across countries. Forbes Argentina reported in 2026 that design and engineering remain in Argentina, that satellites are integrated and built at a plant in Montevideo, Uruguay, and that commercial and operations teams are spread across the United States and Europe. Kargieman told the magazine the company is vertically integrated and makes all its components, and that Satellogic had launched 55 satellites, 20 of them then in operation; those are his figures. The magazine also reported that Steven Mnuchin, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary whose fund invested at the listing, now chairs the board, and that Kargieman, who earlier co-founded the computer-security firm Core Security Technologies, keeps the Latin motto per aspera ad astra as a statement of principle.

The company went public through a merger with CF Acquisition Corp. V, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald. The deal was announced in July 2021, and Satellogic began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SATL on 26 January 2022, the company says. It had been incorporated in the British Virgin Islands; on 26 March 2025 it completed a move to become a Delaware corporation, keeping the same ticker, a company release dated that day says.

How the category presents itself.

Earth-observation companies sell something most customers never see being made. Their satellites are small, distant and short-lived, so the brand has to be carried by what comes back: the picture, the signal and the map. The companies in this guide build or operate satellites that take optical photographs, record radar echoes, or listen for radio signals from ships, aircraft and the atmosphere, and most of them now describe themselves as data or intelligence businesses rather than satellite makers.

Their public image leans on a few recurring scenes. Crisp overhead views of ports, farmland and city grids show what optical satellites can see from orbit. Radar companies favour grainy, false-colour textures in which water turns dark and buildings glow, because radar images look nothing like photographs. Small satellites appear on clean-room benches under bright light, handled by staff in gowns and gloves, as proof that the hardware is real and made in-house.

On their websites the satellite often gives way to the screen. Maps, dashboards, map layers and charts present the data as something a customer can open and use, and product names tend to describe a platform, a feed or a service rather than a spacecraft. Many of these firms sell to governments and defence ministries as well as to farming, shipping, insurance and mapping businesses, so their language swings between mission and market.

The trade meets at shows such as the GEOINT Symposium in the United States and the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium in Europe, where launches, contracts and new image products are announced. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it now, where its satellites are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Aleph to Merlin.

Satellogic sells its imagery through a platform it calls Aleph, introduced in November 2021 according to its timeline, and a subscription service, Aleph Observer; it also offers “Constellation-as-a-Service,” in which a customer gets a dedicated share of the fleet. English Wikipedia lists Albania, in September 2022, among the governments that bought such a programme, and names a 2023 contract to supply space technology to the Taiwan Space Agency under a third line, Satellite Systems.

The newest step is Merlin. On 1 October 2026 a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California carrying the first Merlin.01 satellite, two NewSat Mark VI satellites and one NewSat Mark V, the company announced the next day. Satellogic says Merlin is meant to remap the Earth daily at one-metre-class resolution and to cue its NewSats for closer looks, with full operational capacity planned for the second half of 2027; those are company plans, not results.

Today Satellogic presents itself with the phrase “Persistent Global Intelligence,” and its website is aimed at defence and intelligence agencies, governments and commercial customers. Its story still carries Argentine traces: Forbes Argentina noted the “rioplatense” flavour of names such as Manolito, Tita and Milanesat.

For a design guide, Satellogic shows how naming can give a hardware fleet a personality, from comic-strip nicknames to scientists’ names. Compare Planet, another operator of small Earth-imaging satellites, and BlackSky, another listed Earth-imaging company. For this guide we use deep teal, mist and a soft gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Satellogic’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.