US imagery startup BlackSky Global has fully funded the first six satellites of a 60-strong constellation that it plans to start launching around the end of this year.
CTO Peter Wegner told SatelliteFinance that the first two have already secured rides…
US imagery startup BlackSky Global has fully funded the first six satellites of a 60-strong constellation that it plans to start launching around the end of this year.
CTO Peter Wegner told SatelliteFinance that the first two have already secured rides as secondary payloads in Q4 2015/Q1 2016, through the launch brokering unit of its parent SpaceFlight Industries.
The other four birds in its initial batch, which is being built internally through another company owned by SpaceFlight, are close to securing launches in 2016.
They have been funded by an undisclosed portion of the US$28.5m that Spaceflight has raised in total over the last two years, with backers including RRE Venture Capital, Vulcan Capital and Razor’s Edge Ventures.
BlackSky aims to deploy 60 satellites by 2019 to provide global 1 metre resolution imaging services that have revisit times of a couple of hours or less, compared with days or weeks from other systems.
The spacecraft are being designed to operate from a sweet spot of 450km – although they have propulsion to go higher or lower – and will have three-year life spans. This means the constellation needs to be refreshed with 20 new satellites annually as a third of them expire every year.
According to Wegner, the Seattle-based group will be able to keep costs down by cutting out the middleman wherever possible under its vertically integrated business.
It is, however, exploring the possibility of outsourcing to another manufacturer when BlackSky looks to ramp up production in a few years.
That move would follow in the footsteps of California’s Skybox, a similar Earth observation start-up that is also looking to reduce revisit times. Skybox hired SSL last year to build 13 small LEO satellites to join the larger SkySat-1 and SkySat-2 spacecraft it had built itself. Google bought the group a few months later for US$500m.
Wegner believes there is enough demand for so-called Big Data to warrant the multiple satellite imagery firms that have announced businesses in recent years.
As well as the significant US government market, he said many “pixel starved” analytical firms have been unable to get off the ground because of a lack of cost effective providers.
One of the ways BlackSky plans to invigorate this market is to offer its services to these firms for free, and then take a share of revenues once their businesses are up and running.
The company also hopes its low price points and rapid refresh times can kick off a consumer business for satellite imagery, which Wegner said could even become the largest proportion of the market in years to come.
In the meantime, the venture plans to make its products available to the other imagery operators as it positions itself as a “satellite imaging as a service” provider.
BlackSky is set to apply for a licence to provide commercial operations next year. It already has an experimental licence from NOAA and frequency rights from the FCC for its first two spacecraft.
In what would be a rare move for a small satellite venture, Wegner said the group is also in talks about possibly insuring the broader constellation.
The company is also open to debt and equity financing options to fund the full system.
