Satellogic

Current satellite technology is not cost-efficient for agriculture in the words of Emiliano Kargieman, because it takes too long for a satellite to circle the earth. What that means is a farmer could only get a snapshot of his fields between long time periods. His company called Satellogic plans to change that by launching a network of satellites that are all tied together, so in effect, farmers end up with constant coverage of their fields: "The current state of satellite technology and in particular, satellite high resolution imaging, is typically very expensive to make, a few hundred million dollars and very expensive to launch because they are really big. So they are very expensive to put in space and to operate. The current situation with satellite imaging is very expensive to get the images and the frequency of images that you get in the best possible scenario is every few days or every week or, in some cases, two weeks. Both the high price and the low-frequency of the imaging have prevented satellite images to be used on a day-to-day basis in agriculture. What we are building is a constellation of satellites that are much smaller and have a much smaller price tag so we can put a lot more satellites up. We are working on an initial constellation of 10 to 15 satellites that we will launch next year and a final constellation of hundreds of satellites. There would be up to 300 satellites. With a large constellation like this, we can take imaging of any spot on earth every few minutes.