Last year I was interviewed over the phone for a piece in The Atlantic magazine. The topic of this unexpected interview was a new company called Skybox. They had a plan to place into orbit a string of low-cost observation satellites all around the world and to provide almost continuous image coverage over all the major cities of the world.
I should probably first explain that I have been in the remote sensing industry for the past 20 years. I have been around since the time that 9-track tapes were state of the art and from the time that satellite images were being delivered as film negatives. My career has taken place as the industry as a whole has seen ups and downs and has been rocked by takeovers and acquisitions. One company that I have worked with has been taken over and renamed 4 times during my career. So I’m not exactly newcomer to this field.
People in business and government as well as private individuals have dreamed of or dreaded the idea of having a satellite overhead watching your every move for decades. However it has been a fantasy for most of this time. The technical hurdles were and to some degree still are quite daunting. Satellites have to be in low orbit to get the level of detail you want but that means that they don’t stay overhead all the time. This means that they can’t be watching your every move all the time. You would need several satellite working together to do something like that.
But what really trips up this concept is the lack of ready capital. Satellites have been the cutting edge of technical innovation for decades. Components were custom-made for just one satellite and made to fine tolerances. Entire new disciplines and programming languages had to be developed to make satellites work. This of course required extremely well-educated and capable engineers and scientists to work with expensive production processes and as a consequence trying to put up a satellite usually depended on having a major corporation or often a large government to foot the bills.
Just the act up putting a satellite, really putting anything into orbit, was and still is extremely high. On average it is about $10,000 per pound. Normal observation satellites weigh tons. Rockets can and do blow up, a tiny circuit can fail and render your satellite useless, a bit of space junk can crash into it. The task of getting permission to launch something into orbit from a government is difficult in and of itself. Overall it’s no easy or cheap task.
Skybox did a couple of clever things. Borrowing from the NASA FBC (faster, better, cheaper) concept of the early 1990s, they created systems that were cheaper than the norm. By using off the shelf technology and cutting down on many components that would be normally found on satellites they have designed a satellite that is around 100 kilograms and is the size of a small refrigerator. A normal satellite would weigh tons and be the size of a car.
Still, the costs of launching just this small satellite were a stumbling block. The second thing that Skybox did that was clever was that rather than trying to go for launching the entire system at one time they decided to do a proof of concept model.
Last year Skybox managed to raise some capital and launch one satellite into orbit (SkySat-1). The satellite successfully deployed and relayed back images. Not the best of images from a satellite but images nonetheless. This proof of concept launch was enough to encourage Google to acquire the company for $500 million.
The acquisition is a perfect fit for Google’s mapping applications. If implemented correctly it would mean that they can update any outdated map information pretty much on demand. Road construction closures, new subdivisions, large outdoor gatherings could all be updated when and if the Google programmers wanted them to be. This along with the aerial drones that Google intends to deploy gives them a potentially crushing edge over Apple in the mapping arena.
In addition to their own mapping revenue there will be the private and government markets that for a long time were ruled by aircraft companies and a small number of satellite companies that mainly did government contract work.
Now mind you this is all still a fairly long way off. The whole scheme rests on the ability of Skybox to put into orbit entire squadrons of these tiny satellites and have them working in concert to provide coverage all around the globe. Even Google will be hard pressed to provide the capital to do this but if anyone has the money to pull this off it’s them. Of course after that they will have to maintain the chain of satellites, replace them as needed, and of course to manage the unimaginable amount of data streaming down from the satellites. All huge technical challenges but with rich rewards.
This will also potentially bring about changes in my life. With a centralized source of image data flowing out to clients from a ubiquitous single source this could mean the end or at the very least a radical change in my job. I have worked in a fairly specialized and obscure field for the last 20 years and suddenly it looks like it may become fairly accessible and commonplace.
Interesting times indeed.
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