Satellogic Selects China Great Wall to Launch Satellite Constellation

Hello reader!

It follows a note published on the day (01/15), in the site "www.spacenews.com", noting that the argentine company Satellogic selected the chinese group "China Great Wall" for the launch of its constellation of satellites.

Duda Falcão

Satellogic Selects China Great Wall to

Launch Satellite Constellation

By Jeff Foust

January 15, 2019

Credit: Xinhua

The Long March 6 is a small launch vehicle that has

flown twice to date, most recently in November 2017.

WASHINGTON — Satellogic, a company developing a constellation of Earth imaging satellites with hyperspectral capabilities, announced Jan. 15 that it will launch its fleet of spacecraft on Chinese rockets.

Buenos Aires-based Satellogic said that it plans to launch 90 of its remote sensing smallsats on as many as six Long March 6 rockets under a contract with China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC). Terms of the contract were not disclosed.

In an interview, Emiliano Kargieman, founder and chief executive of the company, said the first of the launches, carrying 13 satellites, is planned for September or October of this year. Additional launches will follow on a quarterly basis, although he said some of the Long March 6 launches could be replaced with larger Long March 2D vehicles depending on how quickly Satellogic can produce the satellites.

“It’s a turning point for the company and gets us into rollout mode,” he said of the launch contract. “We see this as a milestone agreement for us.”

The Long March 6 is a small liquid-fuel launch vehicle developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology. It is capable of placing a little more than 1,000 kilograms into a sun-synchronous orbit, but has flown only twice, most recently in November 2017.

Kargieman said Satellogic selected CGWIC based on its past relationship with the launch provider, who has launched several other satellites for Satellogic on multimanifested missions.

“We have a very good working relationship,” he said. “I think the combination of the availability and cost of launch has been a winning proposition for us, along with the relationship that we have established.”

An illustration of a Satellogic satellite, equipped with a high-resolution

multispectral camera and hyperspectral imager. Credit: Satellogic.

Satellogic builds its satellites in house, and the company is ramping up its production capability. Fifteen satellites, each weighing about 45 kilograms and measuring 100 by 50 by 50 centimeters, are under construction at a facility in Montevideo, Uruguay. “We need to increase the pace of manufacturing by the end of the year” to meet its current schedule, he said. “We are on a roadmap that takes us there.”

Each satellite carries two remote sensing payloads. The primary payload is a multispectral camera capable of producing imagery at a resolution of one meter. Once the full constellation is in orbit, Kargieman said the company will be able to provide imagery of the entire globe at that resolution, updated weekly.

“Weekly one-meter-resolution data of the planet is just something that is not available today,” he said. “We see one-meter-resolution weekly data really as the sweet spot to enable a very large number of new applications.”

Among the markets Satellogic is pursuing with its imagery are oil and gas, agriculture, environmental monitoring and cartography. “These four are today the verticals where we see more traction and more demand,” he said. “We do expect that, as we roll out the constellation, many other applications will be enabled.”

The satellites carry a second payload, a hyperspectral imager with a resolution of 30 meters. Hyperspectral imagery is still a new application with limited demand, though, Kargieman acknowledged.

“Hyperspectral continues to be experimental at this stage,” he said, although the company has found some promise combining the hyperspectral data with the one-meter imagery in its own data processing systems. “We expect as we collect more data at higher frequency over the planet we will learn to derive more value from it. But to a certain extent the workhorse of this constellation is the one-meter-resolution multispectral data.”

Satellogic raised a $27 million Series B round in June 2017, led by Chinese company Tencent. That funding is sufficient to operate the company through 2019, Kargieman said, but that Satellogic will need to raise additional funding to complete the constellation in 2020.

The company currently has 160 employees in several offices worldwide. Besides its headquarters and research and development facility in Buenos Aires and satellite manufacturing center in Uruguay, Satellogic has an office in Tel Aviv that handles software development and another in Barcelona that does data analytics. The company also has business development offices in the United States and China.

Running such a distributed company does have its challenges, he said, even in an era of ubiquitous connectivity. “But it does have a lot of advantages when we’re building a company that, by its nature, is building a global infrastructure,” he said.

Source: Website www.spacenews.com

Comentário: Pois é leitor, essa noticia é muito triste. Os chineses não tinha que está aqui na América do Sul ganhando mercado. Isso que esta acontecendo tem culpados e esses atendem pelos nomes de Fernando Collor de Melo, Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff e em uma menor escala Michel Temer, este por pelo menos tentar dar uma arrumada na casa em seu pouco tempo de governo. Se não fossem esses energúmenos populistas de merda, o Brasil já poderia esta oferecendo esse serviço há pelo menos uns 10 anos. Esses vagabundos, irresponsáveis, bandidos de carreira, travestidos de paletó tipo italiano e de cueca samba canção, negligenciaram por décadas o Programa de Veículos Lançadores do país, inclusive fazendo acordos estapafúrdios e políticos que jogaram no lixo rios de recursos do povo brasileiro e tudo isso para atender aos seus interesses nefastos. Assim sendo, não poderia ser diferente leitor, e a China, que de boba não tem nada, está se aproveitando com sapiência essa brecha dada a eles por debiloides populista sem visão e irresponsáveis, apesar do aviso de uma comunidade espacial que também tem a sua parcela de culpa. Vale a autocritica galera. Vivemos um momento crucial na história do país, e caberá ao Presidente Bolsonaro e ao nosso Ministro-Astronauta Marcos Pontes mudar toda essa história, transformando definitivamente o PEB em “Programa de Estado” e dando ao mesmo o status (eu diria) de ‘super’ Programa Estratégico, pois não podemos mais errar, e muito menos negligenciar o setor espacial, pois o mesmo é o futuro da humanidade, e o Brasil tem de fazer parte dele como um player significativo e não como um mero coadjuvante. Que a ‘força’ esteja sempre com os senhor Presidente Bolsonaro.