Launch HN: Albedo (YC W21) – Highest resolution satellite imagery

[topherhaddad]

Hey HN! I’m Topher, here with Winston and AJ, and we’re the co-founders of Albedo (https://albedo.space). We’re building satellites that will capture both visible and thermal imagery - at a resolution 9x higher than what is available today (see comparison: https://photos.app.goo.gl/gwokp4WT8JPvyue98).

My technical background is primarily in optics/imaging science related to remote sensing. I previously worked for Lockheed Martin, where I met AJ, who is an expert in satellite architecture and systems engineering. We’ve spent most of our career working on classified space systems, and while the missions we were involved with are super cool, that world is slower to adopt the latest new space technologies. We started Albedo in order to create a new type of satellite architecture that captures high resolution imagery at a fraction of the cost historically required. Winston was previously a software engineer at Facebook, where he frequently used satellite imagery and realized the huge potential of higher resolution datasets.

While the use cases for satellite imagery are endless, adoption has been underwhelming - even for obvious and larger applications like agriculture, insurance, energy, and mapping. The main limitations that have prevented widespread use are high cost, inaccessibility, and low resolution.

Today, buying commercial satellite imagery involves a back-and-forth with a salesperson in a sometimes months-long process, with high prices that exclude all but the biggest companies. This process needs to be simplified with transparent, commodity pricing and an automated process, where all you need to buy imagery is a credit card. On the accessibility front, it’s surprising how few providers have nailed down a streamlined, fully cloud-based delivery mechanism. While working at Facebook, Winston sometimes dealt with imagery delivered through FTP servers or physical hard drives. Another thing users are looking for is more transparency when tasking a new satellite image, such as an immediate assessment of when it will be collected. These are all problems we are working on solving at Albedo.

On the space side, we’re able to achieve the substantial cost savings by taking advantage of emerging space technologies, two of which are electric propulsion and on-orbit refueling. Our satellites will fly super close to the earth, essentially in the atmosphere, enabling 10cm resolution without having to build a school bus sized satellite.

Electric propulsion makes the fuel on our satellites way more efficient, at the expense of low thrust. Think about it like your car gasoline going from 30 to 300 mpg, but you could only drive 5 mph. Our propulsion only needs to maintain a steady offset to the atmospheric drag, so low thrust and high efficiency is perfect. By the time our first few satellites run out of fuel, on-orbit refueling will be a reality, and we can just refill our tanks. We’re still in the architecture and design phase, but we expect to have our first few satellites flying in 2024 and the full constellation up in 2027.

The current climate crisis requires a diverse set of sensors in space to support emissions monitoring, ESG initiatives/investments, and infrastructure sustainability. Thermal sensors are a key component for this, and very few are currently in orbit. Since our satellites are larger than normal, they are uniquely suited to capture the long wavelengths of thermal energy at a resolution of 2 meters. We’ll also be taking advantage of advances in microbolometer technology, to eliminate the crazy cooling requirements that have made thermal satellites so expensive in the past. The current state-of-the-art for thermal resolution is 70 meters, which is only marginally useful for most applications.

We’re aiming to adopt the stance of being a pure data provider (i.e. not doing analytics). We think the best way to facilitate overall market growth is to do one thing incredibly well: sell imagery better, cheaper, and faster than what users have available today. While this allows us to be vertical agnostic, some of our more well-suited applications include: crop health monitoring, pipeline inspection, property insurance underwriting/weather damage evaluation, and wildfire/vegetation management around power lines. By making high-res imagery a commodity, we are also betting on it unlocking new applications in a similar fashion to GPS (e.g. Tinder, Pokemon Go, and Uber).

One last thing - new remote sensing regulations were released by NOAA last May, removing the previous limit on resolution. So between the technology side and regulatory side, the timing is kind of perfect for us.

All thoughts and questions are appreciated - and we’d love to hear if you know of any companies that could benefit from our imagery. Thanks for reading!

[enriquto]

Looks really cool! I love when new sensors appear!

Some (minor) questions:

> both visible and thermal imagery - at a resolution 9x higher than what is available today

This sentence is infuriatingly ambiguous. Does the 9x refer to only thermal, or also to visible? And what does 9x even mean? Today I can buy worldview3 data which is 30cm/pixel. Are you offering 3.33cm/pixel? I don't think that this is possible without a major, Nobel-prize deserving, breakthrough in optical imaging.

> Today, buying commercial satellite imagery involves a back-and-forth with a salesperson in a sometimes months-long process, with high prices that exclude all but the biggest companies.

This does not match with my personal experience. For many satellites, I can just click a region of interest on a map, and pay the satellite data using a credit card. It is much cheaper to get images from the archive than tasking, but apart from web-UX shenanigans the process is quite streamlined.

> The current climate crisis requires a diverse set of sensors in space to support emissions monitoring

What wavelengths are you aiming for? What spectral resolution? I'd say that most emissions detection happens at the near and short-wave infrared bands, far from the thermal. What climate-relevant emissions are you thinking about, specifically?

I love the contents of this message, but I would like to see it much more specific. This first paragraph it's ok but reads like marketing-speak, not a scientific language.

> While the use cases for satellite imagery are endless, adoption has been underwhelming

This sentence is comically false.

[topherhaddad]

It is rather ambiguous, apologies. Imaging is a 2-dimensional measurement, so spatial resolution improvements follow a squared nature. Our GSD will be 10cm, so we arrive at 9x by (30^2/10^2). Said another way, nine 10cm pixels will fit in one 30cm pixel. The 9x refers to the visible imagery, whereas our thermal (LWIR) GSD will be 2m, and the best available today is 70m.

For thermal, we're only doing broadband 7.5um - 13.5um. You're correct in that direct emissions measurements is best made with SWIR. However, there are applications where heat signatures can be used to calculate emissions. For example, if you know the surface material and fuel type of a power plant, you can calculate carbon emission from the heat signature in the thermal image. Climate Trace will use our data for this.

[woodgrainz]

Presumably the "9X higher" imagery is due to the fact that this company's satellites will fly much lower than the current commercial fleet. OP says as much in his post -- they'll fly "in the atmosphere."

So no Nobel-prize level achievements needed in optical breakthroughs.

[simonebrunozzi]

> and pay the satellite data using a credit card.

I've never done it. Can you provide a few links I can try?

[pedalpete]

As the founder of https://ayvri.com, I've got some experience with this space as a customer or large amounts of satellite imagery. We expected the price of imagery to decrease, but what we've found is that as the resolution increases, the value of the imagery is higher for a larger number of businesses, and therefore, imagery providers like Bing (now Azure) have 10x'd the price, focusing on customers with lower demands, but more dollars to spend.

The question I have is regarding diminishing returns of satellite vs aerial at high resolutions. We're one example of a service that needs large areas of high resolution imagery, but most use cases as we understand them, are focused on areas in the sub-kilometer range, and therefore can likely be well serviced by drones in the near future.

Planet Labs, as an example, seem to now be focusing less on the source of the imagery, and mixing satellite with aerial in order to get the best result, using the right tool for the job.

I'm sure you've thought deeply about this, and I'd be keen to understand why you think theirs is the wrong appraoch.

[dr_orpheus]

> Today, buying commercial satellite imagery involves a back-and-forth with a salesperson in a sometimes months-long process, with high prices that exclude all but the biggest companies.

When I read statements like this, I tend to read it as "We are not Maxar (Digital Globe)". They are definitely the "legacy" in the commercial satellite imagery market. But what do you see as the discriminator of your company to newer companies providing commercial imagery like Planet and BlackSky? High resolution and thermal imagery are certainly discriminators but other companies are driving that direction too (higher resolution, larger spectral coverage).

[topherhaddad]

It's a good question, and I while I obviously have no definitive information on other satellite companies, I will say that spatial resolution isn't everything. The higher you go, you give up temporal resolution and area coverage, which is key for Planet's monitoring mission. There's also plenty of other phenomenologies to go after - for example Blacksky announced their next-gen constellation will have SWIR. And for us, the thermal is really only possible since we are already capturing such high resolution visible (due to the long wavelength of LWIR).

[jl2718]

So... the easy part of this is the resolution of the focal plane array. Gigapixel CMOS is easy/cheap. Then there’s the diffraction limit of the optics. They’ll have to be huge to get a small GSD. But the biggest physical limitation is always getting the data back down to earth. How have you grown a link budget to match your resolution?

[topherhaddad]

Great observation! One of the biggest challenges for high resolution satellite imaging, even beyond the optics, is getting all those pixels down. Fortunately, the ground station infrastructure has blown up recently with Big Tech offerings like AWS Ground Station and Azure Orbital, plus legacy providers like KSAT, so there is plenty of access to get data down through Ka-band.

[Nightlifer]

This is really interesting and I have no doubt the applications are gigantic across a whole suite of industries. I do however have a question about your final statement around creating a commoditised market for high-res imagery. How do you see this evolving over time on what is essentially privatised satellite infrastructure?

You note the parallel with GPS - but this is a 'free spinoff' developed by and for the US govt (and still bankrolled by the US taxpayer) rather than something owned and run by private enterprise. GPS was never developed explicitly with profit in mind. In GPS, the end user also 'owns' their gps traces, in that they can choose to share them with 3rd parties freely. Additionally, there is no value discrimination in gps - all traces are treated the same by the infrastructure owners regardless of how valuable they are (no one is charged more if they use the gps on their phone to enable lots of apps vs someone who only uses it for a single thing). Imagery data on the other hand is much more likely to have different value depending on what is being imaged (there is more value in an image of a busy port than there is of a random patch of empty ocean).

My feeling is that the high res imagery market right now feels more like the market for satellite automatic identification system (AIS) data used in maritime. AIS data is expensive because it is gate-kept by a relatively small number of satellite companies who charge a premium for access and carefully guard how that data is used by onward parties - completely unlike GPS.

As in AIS, because a small number of imagery companies will not only own the infrastructure, but also the images produced by that infrastructure, I'm not sure how it can be commoditised in the same way GPS has been - unless you plan to charge a low flat fee for essentially all images regardless of what they depict and what they are used for?

[topherhaddad]

Great points! The GPS analogy is definitely not 1-to-1. Our main point with the analogy is this: when GPS technology was developed, there was no foresight of applications like Tinder, Uber, Pokemon Go, which all would not be possible without GPS. So in that sense, we expect that if we are able to push satellite imagery in the direction of becoming a commodity, this will unlock applications we have no foresight of today. SVB & Space Capital released a great report on this idea called The GPS Playbook

[Alasater]

While it’s definitely true GPS is a “free spinoff” of a government service (ie not really free), it is accessed by developers through a platform you purchase that translate that GPS signal into useable data (ie your phone, your car, other things you purchase of which GPS is “available”). In that lens, we foresee a similar use for satellite imagery data, gathered through a platform, ours or other satellite service providers, and made available to other users. The cost of entry for utilizing GPS is hidden under these platforms and service taxes, and we look to develop a low cost of entry for utilizing satellite imagery for platforms to use and burgeon; hence the example of things the engineers building GPS never expected their data would be used for! I’ve spotted a few commenters on here who are hoping to use low-cost imagery for just that.

[sandworm101]

>> (there is more value in an image of a busy port than there is of a random patch of empty ocean)

Tell that to the military. There are people who will pay serious money for a particular patch of ocean if it can be done reliably at an exact time.

[scrappyjoe]

This sounds awesome! There are lots of applications in places like local government. One potential problem with offering _only_ commodified whip-out-your-credit card pricing is that innovative business units inside large orgs can’t make use of your product, since they need to motivate for budget and generally procure for specific deliverables.

AWS has addressed this by making it possible to buy a 3 year compute ‘asset’ which you can record as a capital expense rather than an operating expense.

Pay attention to pricing your product in a way that enables your customers to buy it!

[winstontri]

Fantastic point! We're emphasizing the whip-out-your-credit-card-to-pay model as a departure from the existing industry sales cycle, but we don't expect this to be the only pricing mechanism customers would like.

On the AWS topic, we've similarly seen a good amount of reception around a credits-based system.

> Pay attention to pricing your product in a way that enables your customers to buy it!

You're absolutely correct and thank you for the feedback!

[neurotech1]

Here is an article about the regulation change allowed Albedo to deploy such high resolution commercial satellites.

[0] https://spacenews.com/commerce-department-releases-streamlin...

[burnte]

As someone who has to manage sites across the country, sometimes it behooves us to draw out own layout maps for various reasons. Finding decent overhead imagery is insanely difficult. This sounds ideal. Just give me a decent resolution overhead image and call it a day. Too many companies want to get deeply involved in the process.

[thebeardisred]

I'm assuming (as a US based company) that you're still required to feed all data to the National Reconnaissance Office (https://www.nro.gov). Has that policy changed as well?

Edit: apparently NRO doesn't host their website on the bare domain.

[sandworm101]

I want. There is some imagery that I want to look at very regularly, weekly/daily if possible, but cannot get ahold of easily. (Land use issues near family property). At a 15$ minimum, I will put in several personal orders on day one.

[evil-olive]

> By the time our first few satellites run out of fuel, on-orbit refueling will be a reality, and we can just refill our tanks.

Are there any companies you're aware of that are working on this currently?

If this doesn't materialize in the timeframe you expect, how would that affect your business model? Would you need to raise prices to cover the additional cost of launching new spacecraft to replace old ones that run out of fuel and de-orbit after X years?

This seems like a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem - even if on-orbit refueling becomes commercialized by the time your spacecraft runs out of fuel, you'll need to launch with whatever hardware is necessary to allow the "tanker" spacecraft to dock and transfer propellant. Defining that interface in such a way that spacecraft from multiple companies can all be refueled by a single "tanker" spacecraft seems tricky both from a technical angle as well as from a political/social one.

[topherhaddad]

There is a ton of effort currently being put into the on-orbit servicing world. Orbit Fab is leading the way on providing the fuel depots, and a number of other companies are developing the robotics required to send servicing satellites in between Orbit Fab depots and the satellites they are filling up. Worst case, if the refueling is still a few years out by the time we need it, we would increase our orbit to extend our satellite lifetime (at the cost of lower spatial resolution).

[tullianus]

I'm a spacecraft thermal engineer (not in remote sensing), and this sentence leapt out at me. Do you have any example papers on microbolometer advances you could share?

> We’ll also be taking advantage of advances in microbolometer technology, to eliminate the crazy cooling requirements that have made thermal satellites so expensive in the past.

[topherhaddad]

I don't have any papers offhand, but the wikipedia page on microbolometers is great. Traditional sensors for thermal imaging are made of materials like InSb and HgCdTe, which require cooling to cryogenic temperatures in order to limit dark noise. These types of sensors are similar to visible sensors where an electron is generated for each incident photon. Microbolometers operate fundamentally differently, where electrical resistance in response to temperature changes. While most space thermal sensors today still use traditional materials, most terrestrial thermal cameras (night-vision, thermal drones) use microbolometers when imaging in LWIR.

[Brajeshwar]

This is cool. We have been working with Satellite imagery (and some SAR) since mid-2020. Though costly, it is not so difficult, these days, to just task or buy archives of high-resolution imagery (~50cm). However, we are always on the look-out for more economical and multiple sources of imagery for use in Agriculture.

What is the best possible way to email you so I can have it and searchable in future to refer back to you (when you are ready for commercial release)?

Here is something I learnt recently. High-Resolution imagery are sleek and nice. This, actually, turns out to be a victim-of-success scenario where potential customers expects such imagery for the sake of it but they won't pay and, honestly, don't need it to be so clear (especially in Agriculture). We realized that the data from a 3-meter resampled is good enough for most needs.

[topherhaddad]

Yeah great point, there are a number of agriculture applications that have no need for this level of spatial resolution. Certain high value crops only use drones today due to the resolution, so we'll be able to support those applications. Additionally, there's ways to combine visible + thermal to evaluate water crop stress to detect potential irrigation issues or improvements.

Feel free to fill out the Contact Us form on the website and we'll keep you updated as we get closer towards commercial release!

[rasen58]

Are there any use cases of satellite imagery that you think will emerge but haven't yet due to current costs?

[winstontri]

I think wedn3sday hit some of the key use cases we're personally excited about!

Agriculture is an interesting use case we're also excited about! While it's one of the most obvious applications, adoption has been curbed through historically high minimum order sizes, where cost is an implicit factor. Some providers require up to a 250 sq. km minimum order area, which already prices out a lot of small time farmers. We're hoping to reduce our minimum order area to 1 sq. km. and help enable this semi-neglected portion of the market. One company we're excited about in this space is Enveritas, a company looking using geospatial data to push for sustainability within the global coffee industry.

That's just one I can think of from the top of my head!

[omneity]

At Monitoro[0] we've been asked for satellite imagery monitoring (geographic change detection). Supplier prices were prohibitive but I'm glad to see activity in this space (pun non intended) and we're considering pursuing it at some point.

[0]: https://monitoro.xyz

[wedn3sday]

- Environmental activists holding large corps responsible for illegal dumping. - Tracking illegal fishing operations. - Tracking migrant animal flocks. - All sorts of litigation surrounding land-use.

[oleh]

That sounds amazing, thanks for sharing!

I was thinking about building a low-code SaaS to make analyzing such imagery simpler and more accessible. Think of LabView in a browser. A graphical programming environment that compiles to Python, so that the whole Pandas and AI universe was available and simple analysis and data presentation workflows could be built by anyone. Input daily imagery, automatically output time-series graphs, curve fits, augmentation by other data sources (stocks, weather, AIS, etc), ... seems like a natural combination to me, but maybe I’m too excited over my own idea?

I have to admit though, having earned a physics PhD in a laser lab, I would much prefer to work on optics and satellite tech than software ;-)

[winstontri]

Like a Jupyter notebook but for satellite imagery? I think a good number of people may have taken your idea and ran with it :)

Google Earth Engine, Astraea, Descartes Labs, and a whole host of other companies have demonstrated a ton of value in this space, so you're absolutely correct. There's definitely work to be done fusing in other data sources like AIS, but I think the foundation is set.

Let us know if you end up building it - we'd be more than happy to float you some test data!

[davorb]

Satellite imaging is used by a lot of researchers and non-profits to analyze concentration camps in North Korea[0] and it's one of the few sources that we have access to. Would you consider offering free-of-charge images of these camps to researchers and human rights organisations?

[0] https://www.aaas.org/resources/geospatial-technologies-and-h...

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/12000/asa24010201...

[topherhaddad]

100p! Human rights issues is an area where we think higher resolution will be super helpful, and we are planning to make our archive data freely available for these types of applications as well as large discounts on tasking.

[mam2]

oh come one.. if you can't even pay 20 euros for working on defending freedom, why would you expect other people do give their life for it.

[byefruit]

This looks really cool and congrats on the launch.

A few questions.

How big do you foresee your constellation being?

How fair is the comparison in your Google Photos link? The image on the right seems to have significant artifacting that looks more a side effect of compression.

[topherhaddad]

Thanks! Our initial constellation will be 24 satellites, which will enable 2-3 revisits per day to areas of interest.

We used a drone to capture this image at our representative resolution (10cm), but it only captures in JPEG so there could be compression artifacts from that. The image on the right is a 1/3 downsampled version to show 30cm resolution.

[ricksunny]

Signaling encouragement.

Since much of the tech stack you describe seems to be offered by Planet, (and having experienced the delays and sticker-shock associated with the salesperson-driven enterprise sales process with such companies firsthand), might the industry evolve in such a way that Albedo act as a priceline.com / overstock 'off-brand' reseller of Planet's existing data pipelines? Does developing your own tech-stack basically give you 'table stakes' i.e. signaling a viable alternative to sales channel conversations with existing satellite imagery providers?

[winstontri]

Thanks for the encouragement!

I would say that the industry is already trending towards more of a third-party reseller model with companies like Arlula, UP42, Astraea, and numerous others. While we do see the benefits of being able to offer multiple sources of satellite data (virtual constellations combining high-res, low-res, SAR, hyperspectral, etc.) we want to limit our attention to doing one thing extremely well: providing high-res visible imagery.

To your point of developing our own tech-stack for "table stakes" - we certainly hope so. Planet has done a lot of fantastic work here as far as developing robust imagery pipelines but stopped short of removing salespeople from the process. We're hoping to take their approach a step further and remove that manual (human) component from both the sales process and delivery pipelines.

Hope that helps!

[epaga]

One area to look into would be flight simulators such as Infinite Flight https://infiniteflight.com and others, that need global satellite data for their flight sim world.

Microsoft entered the flight sim space with MS Flight Simulator last year, and was able to leverage their massive set of Bing data, so any smaller flight sim out there that uses ortho textures would very possibly be interested in "better, cheaper, and faster" imagery.

[winstontri]

Great idea! This is the first time I've heard of Infinite Flight, so I'll definitely reach out. We've actually spoken with the company responsible for turning Bing data into the 3D renderings in MS Flight Simulator. We think they're excited!

[mNovak]

Sounds very cool. Curious to know your thoughts on offloading data from the satellites - 9x resolution sounds a whole lot like 9x the data. Is this challenging, or also easier since you're low altitude?

Are you building up your own ground network for collection, or planning to use a third party service?

Likewise as a SATCOM antenna designer, I'm curious to know what constellation designers such as yourselves think of the current 'big dish' gateway infrastructure.

[Alasater]

Indeed a 9x in resolution is a big ol chunk of data, and primarily, increases in the bands collected (PAN vs RGB vs NIIR vs LWIR vs hyperspectral/multispectral) data is one piece of a complicated puzzle of how to get data to the ground. Previous entrants have spent a lot of money building out their own networks and infrastructure, helping contribute to high costs of imagery. We look to leverage the ground-station-as-a-service industries such as AWS, KSAT, and Azure Orbital to help downlink our data. Add to that a switch over to Ka band (higher bandwidth) with inter-satellite links in the tradespace, you start to help the data problem. As well, every image provider does some amount of lossless compression (compressing the non-informative data) to help manage some of that. But the overall data to manage is also a factor of how much tasking you anticipate per rev, if the image you collected is actually useful (ie clouds), if the customer is interested in all those bands for their task, and many more variables.

In terms of the 'big dish' gateway infrastructure, it eases link budgets and opens bigger pipes, but if you're limited in your output power and your access, having smaller dishes and more proliferated networks may make more sense (sounds similar to your Big satellite vs many small satellite trades :) )