At SkyWatch, we believe that Earth Observation should be simple for everyone.
If you're a satellite operator, you have unique needs to serve a market of high-value customers. TerraStream is a platform you can leverage to manage, process and deliver your data to a wider market.
In addition, we have an aggregation platform called EarthCache that allows different users to commit and access various different data sources.
The two of those products work really well together.
You can think of TerraStream as a "Shopify for satellite data."
If you were going to build your own website now to sell a product, you wouldn't build your own checkout experience and shopping cart. You would use something like Shopify to do that for you.
That's what TerraStream does.
Similarly, when you buy coffee filters and go to Amazon.com, you really don't care where that coffee filter comes from.
You will search and find the product that suits you based on your needs.
With SkyWatch, EarthCache and TerraStream provide the best of both worlds.
TerraStream allows you to sell directly to your high-value customers and effectively outsource the lower volume sales to our EarthCache platform.
Plus, with both, you get the full power of our sales team working for you and an immediate marketplace of Earth Observation data buyers.
Many satellite companies that we talk to, especially the seed-funded early-stage ones, are very entrepreneurial, very smart engineers.
They believe they can build anything, and they probably can. The question is, what should they build?
When you're building a platform for a satellite constellation, there are many things to worry about.
Data infrastructure is normally not at the top of the list. In fact, it's something that many companies don't consider until they're already in space. It's a last-minute thing to decide how you will monetize your data.
But with TerraStream, you can take care of that distribution, data management, and processing commercialization component - without ever having to hire an engineering team.
The biggest satellite companies out there have spent many millions of dollars, from $60-$100 million is not uncommon, to build a data distribution platform. With TerraStream, you get the power of a $60 million or a $100 million data platform for a fraction of the price.
Satellite operators have a real challenge getting their data into the hands of the end-users TerraStream solves this exact problem and helps them access an audience of buyers.
Back in the days before Cloud computing, you had to build your own data centers. There was a tremendous amount of cost involved in that.
You had to build up the infrastructure, and there was a cost in operating, maintaining it, and applying security patches.
When you buy a Software as a Service product like TerraStream, it enables you to manage and distribute your data while also getting you the power of the entire SkyWatch platform to sell your data and content.
We have an outstanding team of data engineers, machine learning engineers, and image processing specialists. It would be extremely expensive to acquire these skills - and time-consuming - if you wanted to do this on your own.
And these kinds of activities are really undifferentiated for you. You need them to generate, distribute and sell your content and data - but they are not your core business.
You should be looking at things like how you improve your optics and your sensors. And we then help with those undifferentiated items like delivering your data to the market, things that every satellite company needs to do but isn’t core business.
It's one thing to build a platform; it's another to be able to sell the data.
With TerraStream, you can monetize your data on a Whitelabel boutique e-commerce front end. Think of it as “Shopify for Earth observation data.”
Specifically:
In addition, TerraStream also allows you access to our aggregation platform, EarthCache, where we have many customers who are demanding different types of data all the time. With over 500,000 API calls per month and a sales team that is actively out-selling data, when you are a TerraStream customer, you can distribute your data on our EarthCache platform.
A ground station is a physical location with an antenna that allows a satellite operator to downlink the imagery from their satellite after it's been collected.
When launching, most companies don't build their own ground stations. Instead, they look for partners who already have large networks of ground stations.
These can be located anywhere in the world, but there are some advantages to having them in certain locations.
For example, if your satellites are in sun-synchronous orbit, then having the ground station close to the north or south poles allows you to have more passes per day for your satellites and, therefore, more down-linking capabilities.
Mission planning is an often overlooked aspect by many satellite operators.
As you can imagine, as orders come into a satellite company to be scheduled and collected, it’s sometimes a challenge to understand how you will orchestrate those orders based on the satellites in your constellation.
There are a number of variables that are at play:
So mission planning software takes that order pool, that available order pool, and optimizes it for collection within your satellite constellation.
Command and control software allows a satellite company to send information to the satellite to perform different manoeuvres, capture certain imagery, or deal with other situations in space.
That software is complicated and needs to work with multiple different ground stations.
Depending on your configuration, you'll need to understand
When data is collected on a satellite and downlinked, it comes in a very raw format. It's not Georeferenced. It’s not Orthorectified.
There are a number of different controls that need to be put on data to make sure it's accurate for customers who are receiving it.
This is known as raw data processing or level zero to level one processing.
It's something that's very challenging and requires a detailed understanding of each satellite in the constellation and specific adjustments required to correct the data on those satellites.
When you're launching a satellite constellation, there are many things to worry about.
Not only do you need to figure out your payload, your optics, some of the other sensors on the satellite, and how you're going to get launched.
But you also need to figure out how you're going to monetize your data, how you're going to operate your satellite, and how you're going to get that data down on a day-to-day basis.
We've had a chance to speak to a lot of companies in the Earth Observation business.
There is number of challenges that they have when they're launching satellites.
At SkyWatch we've built a product that solves the problems of:
But there are also other problems that satellite operators have.
It became apparent to us that we needed to partner with the leaders in the industry who are capable of solving these problems.
So why wouldn't you just go forge these relationships yourself?
Well, we've been fortunate enough to work with the leaders in the industry.
We've gone through an extensive vetting process with all of them.
We understand their technology, we understand our interfaces with them.
We're looking to save you time by showing you the best that's available out there.
We work with the top companies in each of these areas, so you don't have to go through an extensive vetting process to determine which ones are the best for you.
This is what you get with TerraStream.
Included in the service you get all the partners you need - industry leading partners for the essentials like:
To find out more about TerraStream, contact us directly on skywatch.com/contact/
