campchase

This is great to see from ICEYE. Not only have they gone from only a handful of sample images to now over 200, but they've also licensed it openly under CC BY 4.0, which is a huge deal.

I work at Umbra, another SAR company. Even though ICEYE is flying roughly 10 times more satellites on orbit than we are, we have released over 10x more open data (pacing toward over 100x this year at the rate we're both going).

I don't know why Umbra releases so much more open data than ICEYE. But if I had to guess:

1. Umbra is committed to growing the adoption of SAR and supporting research to make it more useful, and ICEYE is not. We think of our open data as a resource for the broader research community; ICEYE views it as an advertisement.

2. We have nothing to hide, and they do. The more data ICEYE releases, the more obvious it becomes how many of their satellites are not actually working (still flying, though!) as well as making it easy to compare apples-to-apples performance with their competition (something they dutifully avoid when possible).

3. Their satellites do not capture much imagery, relatively. While the gap is not 10x per satellite, it's large. When a single high-demand region takes all of your duty cycle to collect, you don't have discretionary capacity left to capture for your open data initiative.

Overall, I'd give them a C or C+ up from a failing grade. Progress.

It's cherry-picked, but it's a combination of commercial tasking and discretionary tasking. There isn't much to read into in terms of the distribution, it's just one person's best guess at where there's likely to be a lot of diverse types of ships.

Wow, that's a cool idea. I bet you absolutely can. When you image a ship broadside, it gets projected onto the surface in a flattened way we call "layover" - here's an example of how nicely ships pop out on a flat sea: https://x.com/umbraspace/status/1797970305798816030

If anyone has questions about SAR as a tool for tracking human activity - movement of ships or otherwise - I'm happy to answer questions. Mark's work here makes great use of our open data archive, now over 20TBs of openly licensed data free for research or even commercial use: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-ybjvekte4hg7o...

I’m personally really worried. It doesn’t bother me when I hear my neighbor flying his drone. And I never notice the Cessna survey planes overhead. But god forbid, on a clear day at exactly 10am I’m sunning my cheeks on my back porch when the GOVERNMENT snaps a 10cm GSD photo intruding on MY privacy. What a man does in his backyard should be his own business!! Not that I have anything to hide!!!

Absolutely brutal for the SkyFi team trying to have a relaxing Saturday afternoon - keep up the good work, you nuts.

Best comment in the thread, I knew about Onyx but nothing more than the Wikipedia page (hardly anything)

Agree with you!

Fun fast: the largest US satellite imagery provider, Maxar, was founded by the technical program lead for Brilliant Pebbles. It’s a small world and history rhymes.

I can’t comment on Griffin or the history of SDA, but proliferated LEO targets are much harder to take out with an ASAT than a small number of MEO or GEO satellites that are practically sitting ducks. If it costs ~$10M to take out a ~$1B asset, it’s gonna be the first thing to go in an apocalyptic scenario.

I hope so. I wrote a whole article about it: https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/open-all-of-the-satellite...

Even Maxar is starting to deeply discount old imagery via their ARD program: https://twitter.com/marcpfister/status/1541858657473744898?s...

RIP Open California, but at least Planet gives away their monthly mosaic of the mid-latitudes now via their partnership with NICFI (non-commercial use): https://twitter.com/planet/status/1435229673882017794?s=46&t...

> How do see the chances for other competitors to be able to catch up with SpaceX/Starlink?

I like to remind people that it’s actually SpaceX who is still catching up to legacy providers of space-based connectivity. As I mention in the footnotes, my wife’s grandfather was working on commercial comms satellites in the 60s! Starlink will probably become the biggest provider of space-based internet connnectivity soon, but I think when HughesNet still has more subscribers today (Hugheswho?).

And their principle competitor among the new disruptive LEO constellations is Amazon. Famous pushovers.

I don’t think there will be one winner, just as the history of comms in space has shown there likely won’t be. But by owning launch, SpaceX has a large advantage. Thing is…Amazon has its own infrastructure advantage (AWS). Will be fun to watch it play out.

> And are there some other challenges than congestested space and congestested frequency spectrum, when there will be several competitors in space?

Space is not that congested, imo. A huge satellite is the size of a Cessna. LEO is hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Even if it were only a few thousand feet above the surface, if you imagine 10,000 Cessnas flying around the surface of the Earth, they aren’t super likely to run into each other. But I’m no expert.

What I do know is the current procedures for handling conjunction events are scarily shoddy and there’s a lot of room to improve (fear not, a ton of people are working on it).

Will go into more detail on why I believe that in part II but you are spot on.

It’s a dual-use technology, and while my job is to focus the commercial half of the equation, I’m not ashamed to support the US military and intelligence communities, either.

Convenient

Could be. I still think the juice won’t be worth the squeeze (is there an example in the history of comms satellites where they felt it was worth going after the much smaller EO market?). But the rumor in the industry is that they’re comin for everything. And they did just announce a new satellite platform for hosting payloads (including optical).

My name is Joe Morrison, and I’m ready to be roasted on here again. Please feel free to ask me anything or challenge any of what I’ve written!

Stop snoopin and send me a connection request, George!

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Information wants to be free, as they say

It is!

You are correct. I’m talking mainly about low Earth orbit satellites. There are some LEO weather satellites or concepts - Tomorrow.io is a notable one.

Thank you for sharing that, I find it very validating. Sometimes it’s nerve racking to publish an opinion piece like this when I know I am extrapolating from very limited and biased information. Sounds like you worked at Orbital Insight, Descartes Labs, or SpaceKnow (in order of likelihood)?

Very interesting, thank you for sharing that!

Huh I never thought of that, but that’s a great observation

Sorry to break it to you but you already have access to this. It’s called MODIS, and it’s free ;)

Agreed. I’m biased, but keep an eye on synthetic aperture radar. The physics of those systems allow for monitoring with a pretty different theoretical limit on price-per-revisit from their optical companions: https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/why-im-leaving-azavea-to-...

I think this is a fair summary. Don’t sleep on GEE, Orbital Insight, and Descartes Labs, though. All three have incredibly impressive platforms that can spin up new custom models and deploy them at scale very quickly. And Microsoft is starting to make a major push into the space with their Planetary Computer initiative. Early innings yet, though, I agree about that.

I’m sorry to hear that. Planet is a company I admire quite deeply. I think they are well aware of the difficulties folks like you have had working with them in the past and I’ve seen firsthand the lengths they’ve gone to remedy that once made aware. Their new product organization is very focused on taking things in a new direction that I have high hopes for.