US-based satellite data start-up Spire revealed plans in late January to launch 20 nano satellites before the end of the year to collect weather data. Spire said its swarm will be able to collect and relay 10,000 readings a day across the globe,…
US-based satellite data start-up Spire revealed plans in late January to launch 20 nano satellites before the end of the year to collect weather data.
Spire said its swarm will be able to collect and relay 10,000 readings a day across the globe, improving on the 2,000 readings per day available from a collection of publicly funded weather satellites.
Last summer the company re-branded as Spire, from Nanosatisfi, and announced that it had raised US$25m in Series A funding.
In an interview with SatelliteFinance, Spire’s co-founder and CEO Peter Platzer said that this relatively small amount of capital would provide funding for all of the satellites, people and launches needed for its initial LEO constellation.
Platzer believes the world economy is currently underserved in terms of meteorological information. He said he has gone from making typical jokes about weather forecasters to having tremendous respect for them because of what they are doing with a small amount of data.
His company leverages a type of GPS technology which delivers valuable data points for weather forecasting. Spire nanosats pick up GPS signals from the other side of the Earth which get bent, just like a beam of light gets bent by a prism.
“We can listen to this bending and as it goes through the atmosphere it picks up the core features of the atmosphere: the temperature, the pressure and the moisture,” Platzer said.
“Based on that pickup you can calculate those profiles which are the core ingredients for highly-accurate weather forecasting.”
Spire plans to sell its raw data to weather forecasting agencies and commercial weather forecasting companies, as well as less obvious customers such as highly sophisticated insurance companies.
Launch manifest
The San Francisco-based start-up is in negotiations to launch some of its satellites every single month for the next two-and-a-half to three years.
“The number per month varies because we can put anything between four and 20 on a single launch,” he said, “but we have identified those launches.”
Platzer said that, of 92 rocket missions in 2014, more than 70 could have launched Spire’s nanosats through their secondary payloads.
Spire’s satellites are 10cm x 10cm x 30cm and, in the next two and a half to three years, it plans to launch up to 100.
“For the ocean and the truly remote areas, the only way to get frequent, high-accurate data is with a large number of satellites, which means they have to be nano satellites, they have to be our technology, because they need to be economical and it needs to be easy to launch them.”
He said that Spire does not necessarily think in terms of number of satellites, but the rather the amount of data it wants to provide, and it is aiming for 100,000 profiles a day.
The nanosats will not be operational for long as Spire aims to replace them every two years – even though they last for up to five years – because it plans to develop its technology and upgrade them. In terms of space debris, the nanosats de-orbit and disintegrate in the atmosphere within five to seven years, and their size means they are not a large target for other spacecraft.
Rocking the boat
In addition to weather, the other main application of Spire’s swarm will be ship tracking.
“We will know where every ship on the planet is every 15 minutes by the end of the year,” Platzer said.
The technology will be used to tackle anything from piracy to illegal fishing. It can also be used by planes, although the timelapse is better suited to ships.
Spire’s swarm will track ships’ AIS vessel tracking signature. This broadcasts the name of the ship, the type of cargo, the GPS location, the origin, the destination, the speed and the heading.
“90% of global trade happens on ships, and over 80% of the time we basically don’t know where those ships are, because as soon as they leave the shore we don’t know where it is anymore,” said Platzer
Spire says it listens to the three-quarters of the Earth no one else does, and that means ships that once went from eight hours up to several days without being heard from will soon have data picked up multiple times per hour.
Initially incubated by hardware accelerator Lemnos Labs, the company has raised US$29m to date.
The venture’s investors include RRE Ventures, Moose Capital, Quihoo and Mitsui & Co Global Investment.
