After months of rumors, Google made it official Tuesday: they are acquiring commercial satellite remote sensing company Skybox Imaging for $500 million in cash. “Skybox’s satellites will help keep [...]]]>

An image of the Crown Perth entertainment complex in Perth, Australia, taken by the SkySat-1 spacecraft shortly after its launch last year. (credit: Skybox Imaging)

After months of rumors, Google made it official Tuesday: they are acquiring commercial satellite remote sensing company Skybox Imaging for $500 million in cash. “Skybox’s satellites will help keep Google Maps accurate with up-to-date imagery,” Google noted in a brief press release about the acquisition. “Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief — areas Google has long been interested in.”

Skybox was a little more effusive in its announcement. “The time is right to join a company who can challenge us to think even bigger and bolder, and who can support us in accelerating our ambitious vision,” the company explained. “Skybox and Google share more than just a zip code. We both believe in making information (especially accurate geospatial information) accessible and useful.” (The “zip code” refers to the fact that Skybox’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is just a few kilometers away from Google’s own headquarters, the “Googleplex.”)

Google had been rumored for at least the last two months to be interested in acquiring Skybox. The deal made sense for both companies. For Google, it will get access to frequently-updated high resolution imagery for use in its Google Maps and Google Earth products, and perhaps elsewhere. Moreover, Skybox’s satellite technology could be repurposed for other applications, such as broadband Internet service, an area Google is reportedly interested in pursuing.

For Skybox, it will have an owner with deep pockets to help fund the development of its planned satellite constellation. Skybox has one satellite in orbit and a second awaiting launch, but has contracts with Space Systems Loral to build a constellation of at least a dozen satellites and with Orbital Sciences to launch them. While Skybox has raised more than $90 million from venture capital firms, it likely would have needed significantly more to deploy its satellite constellation. That may explain why Google picked up Skybox for “only” $500 million after earlier rumors that valued the company at $1 billion or more.

One area to watch is how this deal affects other companies planning constellations of smaller commercial remote sensing satellites. Planet Labs, which has already deployed more than two dozen CubeSat-class spacecraft to provide medium-resolution images, has raised more than $60 million from VCs to fund its development. In addition, there have been some new ventures announced just in the past month, by Dauria Aerospace and OmniEarth, to deploy constellations of remote sensing satellites.

Skybox Imaging has blazed a number of paths in the commercial space industry, announcing plans a few years ago for a [...]]]>

An image of the Crown Perth entertainment complex in Perth, Australia, taken by the SkySat-1 spacecraft shortly after its launch last year. Google is reportedly interested in buying the company. (credit: Skybox Imaging)

Skybox Imaging has blazed a number of paths in the commercial space industry, announcing plans a few years ago for a constellation of small commercial remote sensing satellites to provide high-resolution imagery, then going out and raising more than $90 million in venture capital. Now the company has attracted the interest of one of the most powerful companies in the world.

The Silicon Valley trade publication The Information [subscription required] reported Monday that Google was in “early talks” to acquire Skybox Imaging for an disclosed sum. Google would be interested in the company to access the high-resolution images the company’s fleet of satellites will provide. While Google currently relies companies like DigitalGlobe for imagery that goes into Google Maps and Google Earth, an in-house source may be less expensive in the long run for Google. Moreover, Skybox’s plans to be able to refresh its imagery quickly—daily or even multiple times a day, depending on the configuration of the satellite fleet—would allow Google to ensure its imagery is up to date.

While it’s too soon to know if Google will go through on the acquisition, it seems likely that Skybox will need additional funds to deploy its satellite constellation. Earlier this year the company announced a contract with Space Systems/Loral to manufacture its next 12 satellites, and a separate contract with Orbital Sciences to launch the first six of them on a Minotaur-C rocket. Since Skybox probably is not generating much revenue from its one satellite currently in orbit, the $91 million it’s raised to date is unlikely to cover the costs of fulfilling those contracts even if it hadn’t spent any of it yet.

The question for Skybox, then, is whether current or new investors are willing to put more money into the company to fund the development and launch of its satellites, or if those investors instead are looking for an exit—and a return on what they’ve invested to date—and letting Google or another company fund Skybox’s satellite system.

Skybox Imaging, the commercial [...]]]>

An image of the Crown Perth entertainment complex in Perth, Australia, taken by the SkySat-1 spacecraft in December, among the first images released by Skybox Imaging’s first satellite. That satellite will be joined by a fleet thanks to contracts with two major aerospace companies announced this month. (credit: Skybox Imaging)

Skybox Imaging, the commercial remote sensing company that plans to deploy a constellation of small satellites to provide high resolution images and high definition video of the Earth, is ramping up its plans to deploy that fleet of satellites. The company’s first satellite, SkySat-1, was built in-house and launched with about thirty other satellites on a Dnepr rocket last November from Russia. Now, the company is bringing in some well-known space companies to help build and launch those satellites, a departure not just for Skybox but also its partners.

Last week, Skybox and Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) announced a contract where SS/L will build 13 Skybox satellites for launch in 2015 and 2016. “By partnering with SSL, we can leverage their unique production capabilities to scale with greater cost-efficiency and speed while allowing us to focus on prototyping next generation systems to better serve our customers,” explained Skybox vice president Michael Trela in a release.

The arrangement is convenience for Skybox, not just because it frees them up from having o develop a satellite production line: SSL’s satellite manufacturing facility is in alo Alto, California, just up the 101 freeway from Skybox’s office’s in nearby Mountain View. For SSL, though, this is a expansion into a different class of satellite. The company—acquired in 2012 by Canadian company MDA—is best known for building large commercial communications satellites, weighing 6,000 kilograms or more. Each SkySat that SSL builds will weigh in at just 120 kilograms, with dimensions of 60 x 60 x 95 centimeters. “Based on SSL’s unique strengths as a satellite manufacturer and MDA’s heritage, we are developing new capabilities that will enable us to pursue other earth observation and LEO satellite opportunities in the U.S. and abroad,” SSL president John Celli said in a statement.

Yesterday, Skybox and Orbital Sciences Corporation announced a contract to launch at least some of those satellites. The contract covers the launch of six of those satellites on a Minotaur-C rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in late 2015. The contract, Orbital CEO David Thompson said in a statement, includes “options for additional launch services to support the development of Skybox’s business” beyond the one launch covered by the contract.

The Minotaur-C is a commercial version of Orbital’s existing Minotaur I rocket, placing the Minuteman ICBM motors used in the lower stages of the Minotaur with commercially-procured motors from ATK. (National space policy limits rockets that use retired ICBM motors to launching government-sponsored payloads, so as not to compete with commercially-developed vehicles.) Orbital has talked for some time about developing a commercial variant of the Minotaur to augment or even replace its existing Pegasus and Taurus rockets, and Thursday’s contract is the first announced award for the Minotaur-C.

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.