That is a pretty cool engineering feet. Never knew a shoe box sized telescope can give such detailed pictures.<p>They have sent about 200 satellites, cost "six figures" each, so an estimate of 200,000 a piece, they have spent about 40 million dollars, excluding the price of launches.<p>The data collected is definitely worth the price IMO. Imagine the ability to monitor storms and hurricanes, analyze their data and update our climate models.<p>They have about 80 million in funding alone, which is incredible.<p>I wonder what else is possible with so many eyes in the sky.
That sounds very scary to me. If they don't care whether a single satellite is working or not, they are basically asking Kessler syndrom to start within years. Multiple start-ups (etc.) and the article covers not even have a tiny bit about what happens at the end of life of the satellites, what could go wrong ...
I took a tour of their SF office last year. It's a pretty impressive operation. The satellites are indeed quite small; I always compare them to a loaf of bread with some wings. The people that work there are pretty sharp and seem to be very excited about what they do.<p>I was one of the first people to consume their v0 and v1 APIs to get their analytic imagery dataset. It was more challenging than it should have been to transfer ~100TB into our compute cluster. I haven't touched their API in about 7 or 8 months, but from my last meeting with them they said they have eliminated my top pain point. Looking forward to seeing more great things from them.
This is a good Embedded.fm podcast episode interviewing one of the professors that was key in starting the trend of small satellites.<p><a href="http://embedded.fm/episodes/195" rel="nofollow">http://embedded.fm/episodes/195</a>
Kindly can someone tell me how these snall satellites are able to remain in orbit. Don't we need jet propulsion to have them stay in orbit and not fall into earth? I don't much about satellites.