The Commercial Satellite Imagery Business Model Is Broken | Hacker News Reader

The Commercial Satellite Imagery Business Model Is Broken

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5 pointsjofer9 comments

Cube sats are about to shake this business up. In the past the cost of entry was very high = few entrants, that went to fewer by predatory pricing against any new entrants. The old birds are complex beasts that operate across many spectral bands and are task commanded. The Cubes will be single band small units with large lenses and larger sensors. They will accumulate and send data to a ground based cloud and as time goes by will cover the earth in all bands and in all seasons - all of which will be saleable at a price that will make the old commercial monopolists to crap their pants. I am sure they will lobby to limit these cubes, but many are immune to pressure. They might well agree to no military base imagery. A trip to the planetlabs web site does show that a huge acquisitive beurocracy lurks therein as there is zero mention of any sort of fee structure = high fees IMHO, it is not the solution for all mankind that cube sats might bring. Their videos seem to be staffed by summer students??

Planet has hundreds of cube sats in orbit already. Low and medium resolution data is not suitable for most commercial use cases. The only way to get high res data is from big lenses = big satellites = big costs. I agree that cubes sats are exciting especially for non-optical use cases like blanketing the earth with internet or GPS-RO or Synthetic Aperture Radar. But they are not a game-changer for visible-spectrum earth observation data in my opinion.

Yes, but a crack in the monopoly edifice has appeared. It is true - the large lenses rule - for now. I anticipate larger sensors, coupled with Cassegrain reflectors(which are far lighter than glass and fold to shrink the path and can fold even more for launch - unfolding on cue) will soon be flying and will begin the cube sat's climb towards parity with the big boys as the weight saving will enable their implementation in cube sats. This will make the big boys fight back via access and price relaxations. I hope the cube sats people stay independant and do not make common cause with the big boys? Better and lower power SARs and control electronics are emerging to run within the smaller power budget of the cubes.

Interesting, I’m unfamiliar with Cassegrain reflectors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassegrain_reflector

The selling model sounds strangely like the car buying model. Pre-COVID, even the suggestion that the total price of a car be listed on the car was viewed as idealistic nonsense. Only until a pandemic broke out, did car dealers admit "you're right, we could always sell you a car online"

I sympathize. I sell stuff without a price tag all the time--it's the trap of having large, high-paying customers and trying to lean down to serve small customers. They're incompatible sales motions, and the effort to set up an entirely independent, second distribution model is very expensive and time consuming so it doesn't seem worth investing in.

So many problems with this post.

It's on Medium (not sure if Medium was broken but I wish it was -- if you are posting on Medium everybody knows you are a dog.)

Scatological language: there are better words than "shitty" to describe your experience.

Missing the point: to many users the value of satellite imagery is that they have it and that 'competitors' do not. In the case of the US Govt they don't want unfriendly military organizations to have it, if it is somebody like the Bridgewater hedge fund they might want to know the occupancy of the parking lot at every Wal-Mart in America, but it's only valuable to them if nobody else knows it.

Thanks for your feedback, Paul! To your points:

1. Medium is crappy, agreed. I would prefer to use Ghost and might do that in the future. They say on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, but I guess you are the exception to the rule.

2. Use of scatological language is kind of my specialty. I mean, shit!

3. You say I'm missing the point and then go on to make two points that don't really address the argument I made. Maybe you are the the one that missed the point. But what do I know, I'm just a dog that likes shit.

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