How do you know when a region’s economy has recovered from the coronavirus pandemic? You could wait for the verdict from the unemployment figures, gather reports from individual businesses and scan news reports about business reopeniings. You could count how many cars show up in the parking lots of factories and shopping centers. Or you could just let Spectra do all of that.
Seattle-based BlackSky’s Spectra geospatial data platform can combine satellite imagery and other data inputs to generate insights that are greater than the sum of their parts. It’ll even use AI-enabled image recognition to count the cars.
As the COVID-19 crisis progresses, Spectra is learning how to recognize the early signs of recovery, or the telltale signs of a rebound.
“That’s what BlackSky is really all about: How can we inform you that something is happening, or something is going to happen, before you hear it from anywhere else?” said Patrick O’Neil, director of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Historically, BlackSky has been one-half of Seattle’s Spaceflight Industries — along with Spaceflight Inc., a sister subsidiary that concentrates on satellite launch logistics. Over the years, it’s shared in more than $200 million in investments that Spaceflight Industries has attracted from the likes of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management, the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and the French-Italian Space Alliance.
Now BlackSky is on track to take a dominant role in Spaceflight Industries’ portfolio, due to a recently announced plan for Japan’s Mitsui Ltd. to acquire Spaceflight Inc. Brian O’Toole, president of Spaceflight Industries and CEO of BlackSky, told GeekWire that the transaction should be wrapped up within a month.
Spaceflight Industries is also involved in a joint venture with Thales Alenia Space known as LeoStella, based in Tukwila, Wash. LeoStella’s mission is to build satellites, including the satellites that will become part of BlackSky’s Earth-observing constellation. Four of BlackSky’s Global satellites are already in orbit, and at least four more are due to be launched this year through SpaceX’s small-satellite rideshare program. Still more satellites will be launched on Indian rockets
“Our goal is to get to a baseline 16-satellite service around the first quarter of next year,” O’Toole said.
O’Toole sees the changes that BlackSky, Spaceflight Inc. and LeoStella are going through as healthy signs for Spaceflight Industries as well for Seattle’s aerospace industry. “We now have three new Seattle companies that came out of this … each one on its own, off and running to much larger market opportunities,” he said.
The market opportunity for BlackSky is not strictly in satellites, but in the data coming from those satellites and other sources.
“BlackSky, at its core, is a monitoring company,” O’Neil said. “We want to inform our customers about what’s happening, using whatever data source will help us answer their problem. We have our own satellite imagery constellation, and that obviously is a massive injection of high-quality fuel into that analytics engine. But we also use other data sources to provide insight.”
Subscribers to the Spectra service can set up the topics they want to keep track of, and in response, the software platform monitors news feeds, social-media postings and other sources for events related to those topics, tied to geographical locations.
“We have a system that’s called the collection recommendation system, and what this will do is, it will take events that are flowing into our system,” O’Neil explained. “An event could be a tornado. It could be that the military has procured some new equipment. It could be any number of things. The collection recommendation system will take in those events and score them to determine how valuable a satellite image of this event would be.”
For example, a news briefing by the White House’s coronavirus task force almost certainly wouldn’t merit scheduling a satellite image, but disruptions in maritime shipping probably would. Spectra uses artificial intelligence to decide whether it’s worth ordering up a picture from BlackSky’s satellites, or from other satellites operated by BlackSky’s partners.
“What actually happened when the COVID crisis started was that we started getting major reports very early on of impacts to how businesses and people were conducting their lives. Those events started falling into the system,” O’Neil said. “And because the system is tuned to pick up on things like disease outbreak or troop deployments, the system automatically started tasking our satellites to take pictures of various things going on.”
Satellite-based surveys of parking lots are among the tricks of the trade: Spectra uses image recognition to determine how many cars are in the lots, and then the software compares those numbers against a baseline. If you’re worried about places where congestion might violate social distancing guidelines, you’ll want to stay away from the red areas. But once the threat has passed, increased parking-lot usage might well be interpreted as a sign that things are getting back to business as usual.
Similarly, a survey of how many airplanes are parked at a given airport can provide a sense of how the outbreak is affecting air traffic.
Spectra isn’t just tuned in to the coronavirus outbreak. Another case study involved tracking how a strike at an Australian port affected coal shipments to China over the course of several months in 2017-2018. Computer models projected how shipping congestion was likely to affect port operations three weeks in advance.
“We found that there was major interest in this from commodity traders, obviously, but even the ship operators wanted to know this stuff so they can decide whether to slow down their trip,” O’Neil said. “Maybe they’ll pull off the gas a little bit and travel at a more fuel-efficient rate, because they know, ‘Hey, even if I get there, I’m not going to be serviced for another five days.’ ”
Spectra is drawing interest from the federal government as well as commercial clients. Nearly three years ago, BlackSky won a $16.4 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to deliver a version of the platform tailored for government applications. So, how’s that project going?
“I’m not going to get into specific contracts, but I will say our traction both within the U.S. government and internationally has increased significantly,” O’Toole said. “We now have direct contracts with many organizations … not only for our imaging capability, but for our analytics capability that gets delivered through Spectra.”
Along with Maxar Technologies and Planet, BlackSky is in the running to receive more government business through a procurement process for commercial satellite imagery that’s being managed by the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO is due to announce its plan for procurements this year. O’Toole said he doesn’t expect the coronavirus outbreak to affect that timeline.
With about 100 employees, split evenly between offices in Seattle and in Herndon, Va., BlackSky ranks as the smallest of the three satellite imagery providers on the NRO’s list. But O’Toole said his company is in a good position to punch above its weight, during and after the COVID-19 crisis.
“The speed and economics of our satellites are much different than the traditional guys. They’ve got a couple of really big, expensive satellites that provide exquisite imagery. But when you add in the revisit [capability], the speed of delivery and then the economics — which are going to drive a lot of new commercial information and insights — I think we have a significantly differentiated capability,” O’Toole said. “I’m really excited about what these next couple of years are going to look like.”
