On Thursday afternoon, Orbital Sciences Corporation successfully launched [...]]]>

An Antares rocket lifts off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia, on January 9, 2014. The rocket placed a Cygnus cargo spacecraft into orbit on the first of eight such missions Orbital is under contract to perform for NASA. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

On Thursday afternoon, Orbital Sciences Corporation successfully launched its Antares rocket carrying a Cygnus spacecraft, placing the Cygnus into orbit ten minutes after its 1:07 pm EST (1807 GMT) liftoff from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia. Cygnus, on a mission designated Orb-1 by NASA, will berth with the International Space Station at around 6 am EST (1100 GMT) Sunday.

The mission is a significant success for Orbital, as it performs the third consecutive success launch, in as many attempts, of the Antares rocket in less than nine months. The mission is also the first of eight currently cargo missions to the ISS under its current contract with NASA. (And, with the announcement this week of the administration’s intent to extend the station’s life to at least 2024, there will be the opportunity for additional missions under an extension of the current contract or a recompeted one.) “Our team has put in a lot of hard work to get to the point of performing regular ISS cargo delivery trips for NASA,” Orbital president and CEO David Thompson said in a statement. “It’s an exciting day for all of us and I’m looking forward to completing this and our future CRS missions safely and successfully for our NASA customer.”

Orbital is not the only company celebrating the launch. Included in the Cygnus’s payload are 28 satellites for Planet Labs, the San Francisco-based company that is developing a constellation of smallsats to provide Earth imagery. Those satellites will be deployed from an airlock on the station, likely a few weeks after Cygnus arrives, based on company comments made when the launch was scheduled for December (the launch was delayed so astronauts could repair a coolant loop on the station.) The launch also carried some other cubesats, including one from Peru.

The business of commercial remote sensing—taking images of the Earth from space for [...]]]>

An image of the Earth taken from Planet Labs’s Dove-2 satellite in April. The company announced plans in June to launch a fleet of smallsats to provide global, frequent coverage of the Earth for commercial and humanitarian purposes. (credit: Planet Labs)

The business of commercial remote sensing—taking images of the Earth from space for sale to private or government users—isn’t new. In the late 1990s, there was a burst of activity, with three companies in the US alone developing and launching spacecraft to serve this market: DigitalGlobe, ORBIMAGE, and Space Imaging. Weak commercial demand, though, led to greater reliance on government customers, in particular the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which financially supported the development of more advanced spacecraft and purchased images from them. Eventually, these companies consolidated into a single company, DigitalGlobe, a process shaped in large part on that reliance on the NGA—and cuts in the NGA budget.

A new generation of commercial remote sensing companies, though, are taking a very different approach to this industry. Rather than building a few very large and costly spacecraft to provide very high resolution images, these companies are building a larger number of smaller spacecraft that, while not able to match the spatial resolution of larger satellites, can provide much better temporal resolution: that is, they can provide follow-up images of the same area within a day or so, if not within hours. Two new ventures seeking to provide such service achieved major milestones in 2013, with more to come in 2014.

One of these companies is Planet Labs. Early in 2013, the company, then known as Cosmogia and still in its secretive “stealth mode,” raised $10.1 million from Silicon Valley-based venture capital (VC) firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). At the time, few details were publicly known other than it was developing smallsats, apparently for commercial remote sensing applications, with its initial demonstration satellites planned for launch early in the year as secondary payloads on Soyuz and Antares launches.

In June, after those launches, Cosmogia exited stealth mode under the Planet Labs name, showing off some of the images from the Dove-1 and Dove-2 satellites launched in April. The company said it planned to launch a constellation of CubeSat-class spacecraft that would provide medium-resolution (several meters per pixel) imagery for agricultural, natural resources, and other applications. Planet Labs launched two more Dove satellites in November as part of a cluster of smallsats on a Dnepr rocket, and in mid-December announced a $52-million Series B round, brining the total investment in the company to just over $65 million.

Just down the 101 Freeway from Planet Labs’s San Francisco offices is another commercial remote sensing company, Skybox Imaging. Skybox is also planning to deploy a constellation of smallsats, although their spacecraft are larger than Planet Labs’s—on the order of 100 kilograms, versus less than 10—and provide higher resolution images (“sub-meter,” according to the company.) Skybox has been around for a couple of years, including raising $91 million in two rounds of VC financing, but its first satellite, SkySat-1, launched in November on the same Dnepr that carried Dove-3 and -4.

SkySat-1 appears to be working well since launch. Early last month, the company released the first images of the satellite, and just last week the company released what it says is the first high-definition video taken from space (see above), brief clips from several places around the world. That gives it capabilities not available even on conventional, larger imaging satellites, and at a considerably lower cost. “The most revolutionary fact is that SkySat-1 was built and launched for more than an order of magnitude less cost than traditional sub-meter imaging satellites,” Skybox CEO Tom Ingersoll said in the company’s press release about the SkySat-1 video.

Both companies plan to launch additional satellites in 2014 as they ramp up their imagery and related products. Planet Labs has prepared its first “Flock,” or constellation of 28 satellites, that are scheduled to launch next week on Orbital Sciences Corporation’s first Cygnus cargo mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The satellites are part of the cargo contained in the Cygnus, and the satellites will be deployed from an airlock on the station a few weeks after arrival. Skybox plans to launch its SkySat-2 satellite “early” in 2014 as a secondary payload on the Soyuz launch of the Meteor-M 2 satellite, but hadn’t disclosed more details.

A different kind of commercial remote sensing company also achieved some milestones—and a setback—in 2013. Canadian company UrtheCast (pronounced like “Earth-Cast”) plans to provide high-resolution images and video from two cameras installed on the Russian segment of the ISS. A Progress cargo spacecraft delivered the cameras to the station in early December, but during a December 27th spacewalk to install the cameras, controllers failed to get telemetry from them, and cosmonauts brought the cameras back inside the station. In an update on Monday, UrtheCast officials said they believed the problem was with the ISS itself, and not the cameras, and hope to have the problem resolved and the cameras installed in a future spacewalk to be scheduled by mid-January.

Less than six months after coming out of stealth mode, San Francisco-based remote sensing company Planet Labs [...]]]>

The 28 satellites of Flock 1, the first constellation of remote sensing satellites built by Planet Labs. The satellites will be launched on a Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station in January. (credit: Planet Labs)

Less than six months after coming out of stealth mode, San Francisco-based remote sensing company Planet Labs announced a second major funding round on Wednesday. The company said it raised $52 million in a Series B round, adding some new investors in the process. This funding comes on top of the $13.1 million is raised in a previous Series A round the company formally announced when it unveiled itself in June.

Among the new investors is Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who may not have much name recognition outside of business circles, although the companies he’s invested in are certainly well-known. He invested in Facebook several years ago, before the company went public, and also has stakes in companies like Twitter and Zynga. “Planet Labs is revolutionizing the spacecraft sector,” Milner said in the press release announcing the financing round. “Its passionate and high performance team is utilizing elegant science and sophisticated technology in pushing the boundaries of what was thought to be possible in satellite manufacturing and deployment.”

Other new investors into Planet Labs in the Series B round include Industry Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Lux Capital, and Ray Rothrock, while the company’s original investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, also participated in the round.

The company did not disclose in its release what it plans to use the funding for (and, unlike some previous company news, Planet Labs appears to focus its advance briefings on the news on technology and financial, and not space, media.) The company did tell one technology publication, TechCrunch, that it planned to hire engineers to help deal with the “torrent of new data” that will be coming in after the launch of its first constellation of satellites.

The announcement of the Series B round was timed to be on the eve of the launch of that first constellation of smallsats, dubbed Flock-1. As it turns out, though, the company, and its new investors, will have to wait a little while longer. The satellites are included in the payload of the first Cygnus cargo mission to the International Space Station, which was scheduled for launch Thursday night on an Antares rocket from Virginia. However, NASA has delayed that launch until mid-January to allow the ISS crew to first carry out repairs to a coolant loop on the station.

Planet Labs, the San Francisco-based commercial remote sensing company that launched its first two satellites in April [...]]]>

The 28 satellites of Flock 1, the first constellation of remote sensing satellites built by Planet Labs. The satellites will be launched on a Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station in mid-December. (credit: Planet Labs)

Planet Labs, the San Francisco-based commercial remote sensing company that launched its first two satellites in April and exited from stealth mode in June, now has two more satellites in orbit. However, the company is now looking ahead to the launch next month of an entire constellation of small imaging satellites.

A Dnepr rocket launched Thursday from a Russian missile base carrying a payload of more than 30 small satellites. Included in that launch were Planet Labs’s Dove 3 and Dove 4 smallsats, spacecraft based on the CubeSat form factor, about 30 centimeters long by 10 by 10 centimeters. (The launch also carried the first satellite for another commercial remote sensing company: SkySat-1 for Skybox Imaging.)

“We contacted Dove 3 on the first pass,” Planet Labs co-founder and CEO Will Marshall said in a telephone interview Monday. Dove 4 hasn’t been deployed yet: it was launched inside another satellite, Unisat 5, and is slated to be ejected in the next few weeks, he said.

The two spacecraft have more “specific performance,” or capability per kilogram, than the Dove 1 and 2 satellites launched in April, he said. The two new satellites feature upgraded attitude control system for improved pointing, improved radios for faster data rates, upgraded hard drive space on the spacecraft, and an “in house build” of the spacecraft’s telescope. “The most magical thing about what we have here is we have so much capability per unit mass,” he said. “In terms of capability per unit mass, we’re way, way out there” compared to other, larger remote sensing satellites.

Planet Labs is now focusing on an even bigger launch: its first full-fledged constellation of satellites, dubbed “Flock 1.” The company has completed 28 satellites, all similar to Dove 3 and 4, and delivered them to the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia earlier this month. Those satellites will be loaded into an Orbital Sciences Corporation Cygnus spacecraft that will be launched on an Antares rocket to the International Space Station in December.

Once at the ISS, the spacecraft will be deployed similar to launches of CubeSats from the station last week. The timing of the satellites has yet to be scheduled, Marshall said, but would likely be some time in January. The deployment of the satellites would also be phased to evenly distribute the satellites to provide global coverage, he said, although those details have also yet to be worked out.

A successful launch would mean that, counting the four Dove satellites, Planet Labs will have launched 32 satellites in less than a year. “We built these at an unprecedented rate,” Marshall said. “We now have more satellites built in this lab than we have employees.”

A successful deployment would give the company the largest remote sensing constellation in the world, and the potential benefits of access to frequently updated imagery from those satellites has attracted customer interest, he said. “We’ve had tremendous interest,” he said, declining to go into specific details about who has signed on. “We have quite a number of customers, and our investors are very pleased right now.”

A smallsat company that had been operating in stealth mode formally announced its plans [...]]]>

An image of the Earth taken from Planet Labs’s Dove-2 satellite in April. The company announced plans Wednesday to launch a fleet of smallsats to provide global, frequent coverage of the Earth for commercial and humanitarian purposes. (credit: Planet Labs)

A smallsat company that had been operating in stealth mode formally announced its plans today to launch dozens of spacecraft to provide imagery of the Earth for both commercial and humanitarian purposes.

Planet Labs, based in San Francisco, announced today plans to launch what it calls “the world’s largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites to image the changing planet and provide open access to that information.” The company plans to deploy a fleet of 28 satellites as secondary payloads on a launch early next year that will provide global, frequent coverage of the Earth, offering images with resolutions of 3 to 5 meters

“Our big aim, our motivation, is to use satellites to help humanity,” co-founder Will Marshall said in an interview Tuesday. “By monitoring the Earth on a regular basis, we can do a lot to help various humanitarian causes, like deforestation in the Amazon or overfishing or help people improve agricultural yields in developing countries.”

The company decided to reveal their plans after the successful flight of two demonstration satellites, Dove-1 and Dove-2, in April. Dove-1 launched as a secondary payload on the inaugural Antares launch from Virginia on April 21, while Dove-2 launched two days earlier as a secondary on a Soyuz launch of the Bion M1 spacecraft from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Launching the two demonstration satellites almost simultaneously was not their intent, Robbie Schingler, another company co-founder, said in the interview, but was the result of launch delays. Nonetheless, they were able to contact both satellites on their first communications passes. “Both of them worked out of the box, straight away, beautifully,” Marshall said.

Those satellites, as well as the 28 planned for launch next year, are “3U” CubeSats, using the form factor of three 10 x 10 x 10 cm CubeSats to create a spacecraft 30 centimeters long. “We’ve stuffed an incredible amount of capability into them,” Marshall said. The two Dove satellites launched in April used separate designs, one he called “high-risk” and the other “ultra-high-risk”; one of them was built just a few weeks before launch.

The fleet of satellites to be launched next year will operate in a relatively low orbit of only 450 kilometers. That is intentional, Schingler said, both to provide the desired resolution as well as to avoid contributing to the problem of orbital debris. “These do fall out of the sky faster than the other guys,” he said, with a lifetime of perhaps two years. They added this allows them to also rapidly iterate and launch new, more capable spacecraft on a regular basis.

Marshall, Schingler, and third co-founder Chris Boshuizen all formerly worked at NASA Ames, leaving the agency a year and a half ago to devote their time to Planet Labs. Ames has been a hotbed of smallsat work, including the three “PhoneSats” launched on the same Antares flight as Dove-1. However, Marshall said they’re using different technologies as PhoneSat, although maintaining the same philosophy of using commercial-off-the-shelf technology.

Planet Labs believes there will considerable demand for global, frequent imagery from these spacecraft from both humanitarian organizations as well as the commercial sector, particularly agriculture. Schingler said they have several contracts or other agreements in place with potential users, but declined to identify them at this time. “We are working with a select few people to get early access to information and understand the features and priorities around our product,” he said, “so once this data is available online, it immediately has use cases to the applications that we believe are going to be the most beneficial.”

Until today, Planet Labs had been operating in stealth mode as Cosmogia, attracting little attention other than a report early this year that it had raised $10 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The company says it has raised an initial “Series A” round of $13.1 million, including DFJ as well as O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures (OATV), Capricorn Investment Management, Founders Fund Angel, Data Collective, First Round Capital, and Innovation Endeavors.

That diverse group of investors was a deliberate choice, Schingler said. “When we set out to do this, we thought about who we wanted on our team, and what kind of influence and expertise we wanted,” he said. They focused on investors in three “buckets”: technology innovation in space, open data, and a focus on doing good. Their first three investors fell into each of those three buckets: DFJ, O’Reilly, and Capricorn, founded by former eBay president Jeff Skoll.

“As Planet Labs’ first outside investor, DFJ believes in their vision to change the world for the better, and we are delighted to help them execute on their unique vision to make the big data landscape of the planet more affordable and accessible,” Steve Jurvetson, managing director of DFJ, said in a company statement.

As for what’s after the planned launch of 28 satellites next year, “we have a lot of plans beyond that,” Marshall said, but declined to offer details. “We really need to enter into the market and listen to what people really care about, what they want, and respond accordingly,” said Schingler.