From flocks to fish (7/19/22)

Good morning. Today, we're excited to publish a Pathfinder podcast episode with a special guest. Read on for more info on how to listen. 

In today's newsletter:🛰️ Illegal fishing monitoring 🌐 UAE constellation🎧 Pathfinder #0008🔁 On the move

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Illegal Fishing vs. Edge Computing

Satellite data can do many things for governments. One under-discussed use case is giving them a leg up against illegal fishing. A team of startups aims to use space-based edge computing to get fishing insights in near real-time. Edge computing = localized computing, in this case on a satellite.

1. Los Angeles-HQ’d Exo-Space will provide their edge computing hardware-software platform.

2. Houston- and Oxford-based Little Place Labs will write the machine learning model to process data. 

Working with an unnamed client in Southeast Asia, the companies aim “to prove that edge computing in satellites, or in space, is a possibility,” Little Place Labs Co-founder and CEO Bosco Lai told Payload. The companies intend to launch the mission in Q2 next year to a 500-km sun-synchronous orbit. If successful, “the possibilities are limitless,” Lai said.

Why it matters: Illegal fishing is a threat to not just national economies but also natural ecosystems. But enforcing fishing regulations is notoriously difficult, and to be effective, regulators must be able to react to illegal vessels quickly.

Satellites have provided some hope, but currently, space-based imagery must be processed on Earth. That can be a slow and costly process. State-of-the-art satellites today can take 5+ hours to complete that process, per Exo-Space. That doesn’t work in time-sensitive situations.

“The current solution doesn't allow the authorities or the agencies to react,” Lai said. “With even a few hours’ delay… by the time you get to it, the boat is long gone.”

This is an abridged version of our full on-site story. Read the full thing, which goes deeper on the technology, this partnership, and future use cases. 

Another Flock of Birds

The United Arab Emirates is getting serious about space.

On Sunday, the Emirati space agency announced the creation of an AED 3B (~$817M) national fund to further nurture and develop the UAE’s budding space industry. The UAE also announced the first project with backing from its new fund: a constellation of SAR (synthetic aperture radar) remote-sensing satellites dubbed Sirb.

UAE space: The Emirates created a space agency in 2017 with the long-term goal of building a full-scale city on Mars by 2117. Looking past the loftiness (albeit on a more realistic timetable than some others have floated), the agency has made strides in cultivating a modern space program since its founding. 

• In 2019, it sent an astronaut to the ISS, and it launched the Hope Mars orbiter in 2020. 

• Looking forward, the Emirates plan to launch a mission to Venus and the main asteroid belt in 2028. 

Sirb would be the country’s first full constellation. The project slots into the agency’s more modest goals of bolstering the Emirati economy, creating jobs, and becoming leaders in science. And these are no afterthought—earlier this year, the UAE set up a space economic zone in Masdar City, and is planning two more in Dubai and Sharjah.

Bird’s eye view: Sirb is Arabic for “flock of birds.” Planning and development will commence soon, with a debut launch expected in ~3 years and full deployment circa 2028.

• The agency hasn’t yet announced how many satellites it’s building or what share of its newly minted fund is earmarked for Sirb.

• The SAR constellation will operate over the X-band.

Not so fast…To build a successful EO constellation, one must do more than simply loft a few satellites to orbit and point the sensors toward areas of interest on Earth. 

As Aravind Ravichandran, author of the TerraWatch Space newsletter and friend of Payload, noted on Twitter, there’s a lot of planning that needs to be done for life after launch. As the UAE builds its constellation, it’ll have to think about how that SAR data will be gathered, distributed, formatted, accessed, analyzed, and applied—and whether there is a sufficiently trained workforce to carry out each of those steps.

Enter international players? Sirb will be built through partnerships “between the Emirati public and private sector, together with international players,” according to the UAE government. 

Share this story with an EO enthusiast:

Pathfinder #0008, ft. Planet's Kevin Weil 

On this week's episode of Pathfinder, Ryan sits down with Kevin Weil, president of product and business at Planet ($PL), a ~$1.3B Earth-imaging company based in San Francisco. 

Kevin joined Planet last April to accelerate software, build new analytics products, and help the company move “up the stack.” Before he worked in commercial space, Kevin held leadership roles at Silicon Valley mainstays that have become household names: Twitter and Instagram. He managed products with hundreds of millions of daily active users.  

Pathfinder is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems, an industry leader in space cybersecurity. 

Sneak peek

• Kevin’s journey from studying particle physics to Silicon Valley startups and quickly shipping code

• How many PM tactics he was able to take from the consumer social world to Planet, and where he needed to start fresh

• Selling to governments vs. commercial users

• The value chain, from data to analytics to insights

• Going public, SPACs, and the trials and tribulations of being publicly traded. On the business fundamentals, “growth is accelerating” and “we have a proven business model,” Kevin says. 

• Planet imagery has been front and center in helping shape the general public’s understanding of the war in Ukraine. “Bringing transparency is a massive positive,” Kevin says, “even if sometimes that means you capture some of the bad things that happen in the world.”

Where to get Pathfinder #0008

🔊 Listen on Spotify🍎 Tune in on Apple💻 Get it online

And...If you'd like to watch the convo on YouTube, keep an eye out for the link, which we'll post on our socials later this morning. 

In Other News

• Virgin Orbit ($VORB) will launch a total of six satellites from the UK on its joint American-British defense mission later this year. 

• The latest addition is DOVER, a pathfinder research satellite that will test transmissions of “an innovative new signal,” per the UK. 

• AST SpaceMobile ($ASTS) posted preliminary Q2 financial results. The company has ~$292M in cash/equivalents (not including its NanoAvionics sale), while total operating expenses are expected to be in the $34M–$37M range. 

• The FCC granted ABL Space a license for the RS1 rocket and Demo-1 mission, set to blast off from Kodiak, AK. ABL recently completed a static fire test of the RS1’s first stage. 

• ESA canceled a joint media briefing with NASA to discuss the future of the ExoMars mission. The meeting was scheduled to take place tomorrow. 

• $UFO (the Procure Space ETF) rebalanced, adding six companies to the fund: MDA ($MDA), Planet ($PL), Satellogic ($SATL), Sidus Space ($SIDU), Terran Orbital ($LLAP), and Virgin Orbit ($VORB).

The View from Space

The JWST images keep on coming. This infrared image of the galaxy NGC 628 was created by an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen using JWST data made publicly available through the MAST (Barbara Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes) archives. The ghostly, purple swirls of dust visualized here reveal new areas of star formation.