Spire is wading deeper into the ship-tracking business, challenging established competitors operating fleets of much bigger satellites.
The startup has come a long way since the crowdfunded launch of its first cubesat four years ago. Today, Spire’s constellation numbers 40 cubesats — with more on the way. As its fleet grows, so does its ambition.
Vessel tracking : satellite vs terrestrial AIS
The San Francisco-based company debuted two maritime products Aug. 29, a ship-tracking analytics platform called Sense Vessels, and a vessel-location forecaster called Predict, while making thinly veiled jabs at competitors Orbcomm, whose newly launched second-generation constellation has lost six out of 18 satellites, and exactEarth, which lost a satellite in April.
“Our customers have a diverse set of needs but almost all of them can be served by more and better data served with high reliability,” Kyle Brazil, Spire’s Sense product manager, said in an Aug. 29 statement.
“With many competitor’s aging satellite infrastructure increasingly failing, our strategy of launching a constantly upgraded constellation is proving to be a superior approach.”
It’s doubtful Orbcomm and exactEarth see their in-orbit assets as “aging satellite infrastructure.” Orbcomm’s OG2 satellites launched in 2014 and 2015, and exactEarth’s exactView system is mid-deployment — but Spire has established itself as meaningful competitive player.
The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is one of Spire’s customers.
Sixty million ship locations retrieved from Spire Sense satellites visualised
using Geomesa on Amazon Elastic Map Reduce.
Spire satellites carry automatic identification system (AIS) sensors for tracking boats and ships, as well as GPS radio-occultation sensors for commercial weather data.
More recent satellites include Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) sensors for an aircraft-tracking service the company plans to launch later this year.
Spire, which began deploying its constellation of weather and maritime data-gathering satellites in earnest in 2015, uses cubesats to compete with Rochelle Park, New Jersey-based Orbcomm, whose 170-kilogram OG2 satellites also carry AIS payloads, and exactEarth, a Canadian company with a first-generation constellation of seven AIS satellites and a second-generation network consisting of AIS hosted payloads launching on Iridium Next’s 860-kilogram satellites.
Because of OG2’s unexpectedly high failure rate, Orbcomm is planning a third-generation supplementary satellite system while relying more heavily on partner Inmarsat of London to fill the gaps.
Orbcomm said Aug. 3 that its three most recent malfunctioning OG2 satellites are worth roughly $10 million each. Note : Orbcomm did not respond to SpaceNews inquiries by press time.
In April, exactEarth received a nearly $2.7 million insurance payout for EV5, an AIS satellite from Fairfax, Virginia-based SpaceQuest that ceased communicating in February.
The satellite had launched in November 2013 on a Kosmotras Dnepr rocket.
This movie shows one month of AIS plots (20 million plots) as provided by Spire and visually analyzed by a LuciadLightspeed application.
The movie shows the vast amount of data instantly visualized, filtered, and analyzed at over 60 FPS on a desktop machine.
The data consists of a set of terrestrial AIS plots with detailed information in the San Francisco and Los Angeles harbors, conflated with a worldwide coverage of satellite AIS data.
The two data sets and the conflation happens on the fly in the model.
This meaning that the two files are merged into one model of 20 million plots, where the highlight of a single ship, highlights the tracks of both source data files.
(credit : Luciad)
Despite that setback, exactEarth has 65 hosted payloads launching on Iridium Next satellites, spokesperson Nicole Schill told SpaceNews Aug. 31.
From the two SpaceX Iridium Next launches completed, exactEarth has 13 hosted payloads in orbit, she said, nine of which are in service and four are drifting to their orbital planes.
The hosted payload constellation, operated by Harris Corp., will comprise exactEarth’s second-generation constellation.
The company has one more first-generation payload awaiting launch on the long-delayed PAZ satellite that investor Hisdesat of Spain recently shifted from Kosmotras to SpaceX. Schill said PAZ is expected to launch in December 2017; Kosmotras was originally to launch the satellite in 2014.
“Today the exactEarth/Harris alliance is operating the world’s highest performance satellite AIS system and this capability will get significantly better over the next year as the remainder of the Iridium NEXT constellation is deployed to complete the real-time exactViewRT system,” Peter Mabson, exactEarth CEO, told SpaceNews in an Aug. 30 email.
Schill said exactEarth’s total constellation will be over 70 AIS payloads by the end of 2018.
Spire spokesperson Nick Allain told SpaceNews Aug. 29 that Spire still intends to field 100 nanosatellites, but can’t give a date for completion due to the unpredictable nature of launch delays.
Launch delays will likely decide whether exactEarth or Spire control a larger AIS constellation.
Spire had projected in 2015 that by this year the company would operate 100 cubesats.
Last month’s Soyuz launch carried eight Spire satellites, one of which was placed in the wrong orbit.
“Our satellites now collect data from over 75 thousand unique ships each day,” said Spire CEO Peter Platzer said in an Aug. 29 statement.
“They’re tracked in a database of over 300 thousand ships that we keep tabs on, and we can predict where ships are going based on their past and present behavior.”
The 65 satellites in exactView RT powered by Harris revolutionizes the ship tracking industry providing the only solution for global real-time vessel monitoring
Spire, exactEarth and Orbcomm have all weathered launch delays that set back their constellation goals by at least a year or more.
Schill said the delays to Iridium Next were long enough to afford the company time to add more hosted payloads — the original number was 58, not 65.
Spire attributed its ability to launch the new maritime products to new satellites, ground stations and on-orbit upgrades, and said progress on these fronts will continue throughout this year and 2018, along with advancements in machine learning.
In addition to the 40 cubesats Spire operates today, Allain said the company has a network of 25 ground stations to downlink data, and is continuing to grow that number as well.
Polar Row crew members, from front, Fiann Paul, Alex Gregory and Carlo Facchino departing from Longyearbyen in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Credit The Polar Row
An international team of rowers ended a record-breaking expedition through the Arctic Ocean on Monday after becoming stranded on a remote Norwegian island partway through their month-and-a-half-long journey.
They had set out to break several world records while using the mission to raise money for a school in the Himalayas.
They achieved 11 of 12 expected world records, related to distance traveled and location in the Arctic, before having to call off their mission.
courtesy of DailyMail Beginning in July 2017, a crew of international rowers carries the coveted Explorer's Club flag on a pioneering two-stage Arctic expedition.
The stage of the expedition departs Tromsø (Norway) for Longyearbyen (Svalbard), and tried to be officially recognized as the first ever South to North row in the Arctic, reaching the northernmost latitude achieved by a rowing crew.
The exploratory Polar Row then continued as the crew depart Svalbard to cross 2000km of icy Arctic waters to reach Iceland.
The crew had no sails and no motor to aid them in their quest, and was buffeted by strong and unpredictable Arctic winds (in stark contrast to completely wind dependent lower latitudes' ocean rowing routes).
Now, it could be at least another week before the crew of six adventurers, whose expedition was called the Polar Row, is evacuated from the island where they sought refuge on Aug. 19, according to social media posts from its members.
The rowers — from Britain, Iceland, India, Norway and the United States — took to sea from the northern coast of Norway on July 20 and headed north to an island on the Svalbard archipelago.
They then continued to the Arctic ice shelf — the first rowing crew recorded as making it that far north — before turning south toward Iceland.
But with the skies cloudy for days at a time, the boat’s solar-powered batteries drained, and its electrical equipment shut off.
That left the rowers without navigational aids and forced them to rely on manual steering, according to a post on the Polar Row Facebook page that recounted the decision to head for shore.
Jan Mayen Island: Detailed Topographic Map from 1878
As conditions aboard the 30-foot boat deteriorated, the rowers abandoned their intended course and headed for Jan Mayen island instead.
That small volcanic island is about halfway between Norway and Greenland.
“I’ve never been so wet and cold for so long,” Alex Gregory, a British rower and two-time Olympic gold medalist, wrote in an Instagram post on Aug. 17, two days before the crew reached land.
“It’s seeping into my bones, there is absolutely no escape from it.”
On Monday, nine days after reaching Jan Mayen, the crew officially ended its journey.
Arriving at the Arctic ice shelf.
Credit The Polar Row
“A successful expedition is also one where everyone goes home safe and in good health to their family and friends,” one of the rowers, Carlo Facchino, wrote on the Polar Row Facebook page.
“With that, our expedition now comes to an end having achieved the ultimate in success.”
Jan Mayen is not permanently inhabited, but is staffed by around 18 members of the Norwegian Armed Forces and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute who have a base there and welcomed the crew into their facilities.
As crew members wait to be evacuated, they have been detailing their journey in social media posts.
“The hospitality has been unbelievable — they’ve saved our lives,” Mr. Gregory said in a video posted to his Twitter account.
The clip shows a desolate beach strewn with driftwood and whale bones.
My hands after spending so long in wet gloves. The blisters were never bad on this Polar row, but the wet & damp seeped into the skin... pic.twitter.com/N3Y6s3m4Uh
Private airplanes are not permitted to land on the island, so the rowers are waiting to see when they might be able to return home.
“There is news that a boat may be coming past next week that may have space on board for us,” Mr. Gregory wrote in a post on Saturday.
“Hopefully they will be willing to allow us to jump aboard and begin the journey home.”
The expedition’s captain, Fiann Paul, initially tried to have a fresh crew brought to the island to continue the journey, he said in an email.
Flight restrictions on Jan Mayen made that impossible, but Mr. Paul vowed to attempt the Arctic journey again.
“We will row again,” he said, “maybe an even bigger route than this one.”
