9 ms·

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants i

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. Take Ukraine as an example. Leaving aside the moral question of whether a satellite imagery company should be profiting off the Ukrainian war, Ukraine appears to be using commercial orbital imagery providers to figure out Russian troop movements. That use case is not one any commercial provider anywhere is going to build an ML model for. But analysts working on behalf of Ukraine can absolutely either use raw pixels or develop their own ML algorithms that run on top of the raw pixels to find Russian tanks. And almost every other potential user is similar. They're all looking for something different. Oil companies want to pre-screen drilling locations. NGOs want to look at deforestation in Brazil or methane leaks in Saudi Arabia. You could even go all the way down to individuals -- at the right price, individual farms might want to look at relative growth rates of corn in their fields, or soil moisture levels, etc. Or they might want to count heads of cattle or sheep, or... or... or. The point being, outside of weather, which we already know how to get to end users without having them subscribe to an orbital imagery provider service, every customer is different, and what they want from the pixels is different. It's basically the long-tail problem. In order to be profitable you have to fill an enormous number of niche use cases.

jlarocco 4y ago
> Ukraine appears to be using commercial orbital imagery providers to figure out Russian troop movements. Is this really true? I guess I can believe it, but it seems strange that the United States is sending over $800 million in weaponry, but won't send over satellite imagery.
- grog454 4y ago
  > it seems strange that the United States is sending over $800 million in weaponry, but won't send over satellite imagery. I'd guess this is because you can't publish satellite imagery without revealing a lot about your intelligence gathering capabilities.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  I believe USA is sending over intelligence reports from that satellite imagery, however, the raw images may easily be considered too sensitive to release to others because they reveal both the exact capabilities and potential countermeasures. I recall the (IMHO justified) uproar back when Trump tweeted a photo of a single recon satellite image of Iran, they definitely would not just send over all the raw data.
campchase 4y ago
Thanks for the perspective, Glen. I've often heard this referred to as the "long tail" problem for satellite imagery providers. The area under the curve is enormous, but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience. Another analogy I use a lot: satellite imagery is like salt. The dish can have lots of ingredients (in a military context: HUMINT, OSINT, SIGINT, etc.) And the satellite imagery can make the whole dish. But you never want to consume it in isolation, that would be disgusting.
- GlenTheMachine 4y ago
  That’s a good point: often the data product isn’t generated solely (or even mainly) from orbital imagery. Often it’s provided mainly from data the end user already has, and for which orbital imagery serves either as a cueing system (providing candidate locations which the end user will verify) or a verification system (providing final verification of locations the end user has already cued). Certainly that’s true with eg the petroleum industry, and big ag.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  >> but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience. Forget the algorithm. They need to fix their customer service, their sales process. Customers want pixels, but they need basic services: simple and a predictable price. I want to give a location (pix+radius, four corners or whatever) and a delivery schedule (once a week etc). But when I try to buy that stuff I get package deals, "ask for a quote", and vague statements about times. That doesn't work. Normal customers, ie not intelligence agencies, don't want a drawn-out negotiation process. The first company that can provide a basic web interface for purchasing imagery quickly and piecemeal will win the market. Top of the list for small customers are probably high-end real estate agents. They want to monitor their neighborhoods for houses that are under delayed construction or backyards/pools that are being neglected (sure signs of someone ready to sell). Civil litigation attorneys: I want everything you have about this particular intersection. Cops: I want any images you have of this house between these dates. News agencies: There is a Russian ship on fire at X location. When can you get us an image? And a great many other small customers I cannot think of at the moment.
hammock 4y ago
I see a similar thing in the consumer data industry. Everyone has their own niche case that they want to find (diaper buyers with 2-2.5 year olds, or Etsy merchants, or flavored whisky early adopters, or new movers in houses 20-40 years old, or whatever) and you end up building umpteen custom models with the raw data that instantly get outdated the moment you use them.
- campchase 4y ago
  That's very interesting, I don't know anything about the consumer data industry.
soniman 4y ago
You don't think the US military is providing for all of Ukraine's satellite intelligence needs?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lmc 4y ago
  https://breakingdefense.com/2022/04/how-us-intel-worked-with-commercial-satellite-firms-to-reveal-ukraine-info/ https://breakingdefense.com/2022/04/how-us-intel-worked-with...
- GlenTheMachine 4y ago
  I think it’s very, very unlikely. It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets. Which is classified literally as highly as it is possible to classify. We don’t even let the Five Eyes know that stuff, much less hand it to non-aligned militaries who we can’t vet. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be needed. The Russian military is proving to be god-awful at even basic field ops like camouflaging their vehicles.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Too late. President Trump already publicly gave away information on the capabilities of US spy satellites in 2019. https://news.yahoo.com/trump-tweeted-classified-satellite-image-of-iran-former-officials-fallout-100003879.html https://news.yahoo.com/trump-tweeted-classified-satellite-im...
    - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
      "gave away" old tech that just confirmed what everyone assumed. Your article even states it's not our best and most of the security agencies cared more about the process of how he did it then the image itself.
      - emteycz 4y ago
enriquto 4y ago
> The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for biologists are different to those for chemists, engineers, medical doctors, physicists, etc. The concept of "space imagery" is extremely wide. It is natural that earth observation satellites become specialized. I wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some "CH4" or "CO2" satellites that acquire light in a handful of extremely narrow particular bands on the short wave infrared spectrum that are useful only for observing plumes of these gases. Right now, people use hyperspectral imagers (which have a dense sampling of some parts of the spectrum) and throw away most of the image data.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- GlenTheMachine 4y ago
  Absolutely. And what you do in that case is to sell motors to people who want them. If they give you feedback on how to make better motors, take it and make better motors. What you don't do is presume that you know everything about how people want to use motors, and offer a subscription to a design service that does all of their engineering design for them, as a way to sell your motors.
- Frost1x 4y ago
  It's only a good problem when your niche customers have deep pockets to pay for their varied needs and high risk tolerance. Most variations can't be protyped out by some engineer on the weekends where they just spin out a startup with minimal risk to address the gap. The false assumption I deal with that drives me insane with so many individuals is that everyone thinks their specialized use case is a small variation on the major use case that already benefits from economies of scale. That often isn't the case and a significant R&D effort needs to go underway on just how one can leverage existing technology for their use case. There's very often at least one, if not many, mission critical functional requirements from existing tech that require significant effort to make the jump from the existing tech to the desired use case. And guess what, all the non-niche users don't want to pay for that, so you need to be prepared to pony up the capital, accept risk of failure, and be ready to take the plunge. I tell people with this mentality that they need to work in reverse, first understand the technology they think is close and find the problem sets that have the best match up and focus on those. These efforts can costs hundreds of thousands very easily if not millions to tens of millions if you just play it by ear that "...this thing is sorta like what we want so it can't possibly be that difficult to adapt." (Basically what I hear with technology management, many business people, and clients) Many people pretend software and tech are just Lego blocks and since it's virtual, there's no capital needed. Good luck, because the skills needed to deal with this tech isn't cheap and the complexity often isn't low meaning expensive and difficult to find labor for long periods of time, often with a fairly good chance of failure.
avip 4y ago
One company trying to address that is Up42, a subsidiary (hope that's the appropriate term) of Airbus, building some marketplace for SAT imaging analysis. Interested to hear Mr. glen's opinion about that approach.
- sanguy 4y ago
  Up42 only exist due to discounting pricing below commercial rates with some loss-leader pre-purchase discounting model. History has shown that when you sell something for less then you pay for it; hoping that users don’t fully use their credits to cover that loss; that time is not on your side. They are already the walking dead.
moralestapia 4y ago
The problem I have experienced first-hand is basically that >individual farms might want to look at relative growth rates of corn in their fields, or soil moisture levels, etc. a LOT of people want this, but they would never pay $x,xxx/month for that, ever.
- n8cpdx 4y ago
  The imagery is often already captured, so if I want to give Maxar $250 I don’t see why they wouldn’t take it. Eos (iirc it’s been a while) actually let me buy some imagery, but they would only give me pictures, not actual georeferenced rasters. The actual manipulation and use of the data, even for machine learning, is pretty straightforward these days with ArcGIS. So yes, I want pixels.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Usually corporate culture reasons prevent a business like that from just taking your money. They don't want to undercut their giant custom contracts and don't know how to handle customer support for cheaper people. And I can imagine the cheaper customers are a lot less educated and don't have the right expectations, like how often their target area is covered in clouds.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Drones exist, and cost a lot less then thousands to buy. Plus a drone can be used when you want to, the satellite goes overhead every few weeks and if it is a cloudy day too bad. For farms the information from images is only valuable on a few specifc days, too early and you don't learn anything, a few days later and it is too late to do anything about it. I work for John Deere. I can't speak for the company. I'll confirm we are intersted in imagining, but I won't comment on our plans to deal with the above issues.
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    Some providers could give you daily updates but yes, drones are much cheaper and much more flexible. You need a custom sensor? Drones can do it, on satellites don't even think about it unless your budget is >$100M.
tomc1985 4y ago
> That use case is not one any commercial provider anywhere is going to build an ML model for. Why not? It's been a while since the west has had a war where the moral details are so clear. If I had a company like this I'd be jumping on the opportunity.
- dplavery92 4y ago
  https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/121.1#:~:text=Category%20XV%20%2D%20Spacecraft%20and%20Related%20Articles https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/121.1#:~:text=Catego... https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/121.1#:~:text=(3)%20Electro%2Doptical%20reconnaissance%2C%20surveillance%2C%20target%20detection%2C%20or%20target%20acquisition%20systems%2C%20specially%20designed%20for%20articles%20in%20this%20subchapter%20or%20specially%20designed%20for%20a%20military%20end%20user https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/121.1#:~:text=(3)%20...
  - GlenTheMachine 4y ago
    Beforehand, I mean. There are market opportunities out there, but the problem is they're impossible to see coming. Nobody thought Russia would invade Ukraine, until it did. Nobody thought Ukraine would survive for a week after Russia invaded, until it did. So there was absolutely no possibility anyone would have seen a potential market for tracking Russian tanks in Ukraine and selling that data to the Ukrainian military.
spockz 4y ago
But then it almost sounds extremely simple: provide as much raw data as you can (spectrum, resolution, surface coverage) and the users will come. Of course, this is outrageously expensive to do unguided.
paganel 4y ago
I've not worked in the industry per se but I'm quite passionate about maps and online maps generally speaking, and I'm curious to find out if the good old way of identifying stuff on maps directly through human interaction (so, not using any ML-stuff) shouldn't be given a second (or a third) thought. Of course, all backed by better tools for said humans, so that they can annotate/label/identify the data better. I've realised that that might still be a viable option once I started to map the forrest cover in my geographic area based on 150-years-old maps (these excellent maps [1] drawn by the Austrians in the 1860s). Some JS-code for the front-end that helped me "draw out" the forests, then send that data to a Django/Python backend and call it a day. It took me a while to draw those forests out but the job was very easily scalable in terms of human-power, i.e. 10 more me would have probably finished it 10 times faster with a little coordination (for anyone curious the data is in here [2], I'd say it was almost 90% done when I passed on to my next project, as I often do). I was first looking at using some heuristics in order to "automate" some part of the job, but both the false-positives and the false-negatives were just too high, the outputs would have been horrible in terms of accuracy. [1] https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/secondsurvey-wallachia/?layers=59&bbox=2859410.850112104%2C5526674.657922648%2C2932217.1195537345%2C5552433.936454752 https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/secondsurvey-wallachia/?laye... [2] https://github.com/mihaitc/forrests/tree/master/counties https://github.com/mihaitc/forrests/tree/master/counties
nicbou 4y ago
Even laymen might end up creating wonderful little niche products if given access to things. OpenStreetMap needs good imagery for mapping trails and buildings. Off-roaders and overlanders need good imagery to verify the existence and state of trails. That's just me, so I'm sure that there are tons of similar low key use cases.

jlarocco 4y ago

> Ukraine appears to be using commercial orbital imagery providers to figure out Russian troop movements. Is this really true? I guess I can believe it, but it seems strange that the United States is sending over $800 million in weaponry, but won't send over satellite imagery.

grog454 4y ago
> it seems strange that the United States is sending over $800 million in weaponry, but won't send over satellite imagery. I'd guess this is because you can't publish satellite imagery without revealing a lot about your intelligence gathering capabilities.
PeterisP 4y ago
I believe USA is sending over intelligence reports from that satellite imagery, however, the raw images may easily be considered too sensitive to release to others because they reveal both the exact capabilities and potential countermeasures. I recall the (IMHO justified) uproar back when Trump tweeted a photo of a single recon satellite image of Iran, they definitely would not just send over all the raw data.

campchase 4y ago

Thanks for the perspective, Glen. I've often heard this referred to as the "long tail" problem for satellite imagery providers. The area under the curve is enormous, but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience. Another analogy I use a lot: satellite imagery is like salt. The dish can have lots of ingredients (in a military context: HUMINT, OSINT, SIGINT, etc.) And the satellite imagery can make the whole dish. But you never want to consume it in isolation, that would be disgusting.

GlenTheMachine 4y ago
That’s a good point: often the data product isn’t generated solely (or even mainly) from orbital imagery. Often it’s provided mainly from data the end user already has, and for which orbital imagery serves either as a cueing system (providing candidate locations which the end user will verify) or a verification system (providing final verification of locations the end user has already cued). Certainly that’s true with eg the petroleum industry, and big ag.
sandworm101 4y ago
>> but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience. Forget the algorithm. They need to fix their customer service, their sales process. Customers want pixels, but they need basic services: simple and a predictable price. I want to give a location (pix+radius, four corners or whatever) and a delivery schedule (once a week etc). But when I try to buy that stuff I get package deals, "ask for a quote", and vague statements about times. That doesn't work. Normal customers, ie not intelligence agencies, don't want a drawn-out negotiation process. The first company that can provide a basic web interface for purchasing imagery quickly and piecemeal will win the market. Top of the list for small customers are probably high-end real estate agents. They want to monitor their neighborhoods for houses that are under delayed construction or backyards/pools that are being neglected (sure signs of someone ready to sell). Civil litigation attorneys: I want everything you have about this particular intersection. Cops: I want any images you have of this house between these dates. News agencies: There is a Russian ship on fire at X location. When can you get us an image? And a great many other small customers I cannot think of at the moment.

hammock 4y ago

I see a similar thing in the consumer data industry. Everyone has their own niche case that they want to find (diaper buyers with 2-2.5 year olds, or Etsy merchants, or flavored whisky early adopters, or new movers in houses 20-40 years old, or whatever) and you end up building umpteen custom models with the raw data that instantly get outdated the moment you use them.

campchase 4y ago
That's very interesting, I don't know anything about the consumer data industry.

soniman 4y ago

You don't think the US military is providing for all of Ukraine's satellite intelligence needs?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lmc 4y ago
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/04/how-us-intel-worked-with-commercial-satellite-firms-to-reveal-ukraine-info/ https://breakingdefense.com/2022/04/how-us-intel-worked-with...
GlenTheMachine 4y ago
I think it’s very, very unlikely. It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets. Which is classified literally as highly as it is possible to classify. We don’t even let the Five Eyes know that stuff, much less hand it to non-aligned militaries who we can’t vet. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be needed. The Russian military is proving to be god-awful at even basic field ops like camouflaging their vehicles.
- nradov 4y ago
  Too late. President Trump already publicly gave away information on the capabilities of US spy satellites in 2019. https://news.yahoo.com/trump-tweeted-classified-satellite-image-of-iran-former-officials-fallout-100003879.html https://news.yahoo.com/trump-tweeted-classified-satellite-im...
  - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    "gave away" old tech that just confirmed what everyone assumed. Your article even states it's not our best and most of the security agencies cared more about the process of how he did it then the image itself.
    - emteycz 4y ago

enriquto 4y ago

> The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for biologists are different to those for chemists, engineers, medical doctors, physicists, etc. The concept of "space imagery" is extremely wide. It is natural that earth observation satellites become specialized. I wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some "CH4" or "CO2" satellites that acquire light in a handful of extremely narrow particular bands on the short wave infrared spectrum that are useful only for observing plumes of these gases. Right now, people use hyperspectral imagers (which have a dense sampling of some parts of the spectrum) and throw away most of the image data.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
GlenTheMachine 4y ago
Absolutely. And what you do in that case is to sell motors to people who want them. If they give you feedback on how to make better motors, take it and make better motors. What you don't do is presume that you know everything about how people want to use motors, and offer a subscription to a design service that does all of their engineering design for them, as a way to sell your motors.
Frost1x 4y ago
It's only a good problem when your niche customers have deep pockets to pay for their varied needs and high risk tolerance. Most variations can't be protyped out by some engineer on the weekends where they just spin out a startup with minimal risk to address the gap. The false assumption I deal with that drives me insane with so many individuals is that everyone thinks their specialized use case is a small variation on the major use case that already benefits from economies of scale. That often isn't the case and a significant R&D effort needs to go underway on just how one can leverage existing technology for their use case. There's very often at least one, if not many, mission critical functional requirements from existing tech that require significant effort to make the jump from the existing tech to the desired use case. And guess what, all the non-niche users don't want to pay for that, so you need to be prepared to pony up the capital, accept risk of failure, and be ready to take the plunge. I tell people with this mentality that they need to work in reverse, first understand the technology they think is close and find the problem sets that have the best match up and focus on those. These efforts can costs hundreds of thousands very easily if not millions to tens of millions if you just play it by ear that "...this thing is sorta like what we want so it can't possibly be that difficult to adapt." (Basically what I hear with technology management, many business people, and clients) Many people pretend software and tech are just Lego blocks and since it's virtual, there's no capital needed. Good luck, because the skills needed to deal with this tech isn't cheap and the complexity often isn't low meaning expensive and difficult to find labor for long periods of time, often with a fairly good chance of failure.

avip 4y ago

One company trying to address that is Up42, a subsidiary (hope that's the appropriate term) of Airbus, building some marketplace for SAT imaging analysis. Interested to hear Mr. glen's opinion about that approach.

sanguy 4y ago
Up42 only exist due to discounting pricing below commercial rates with some loss-leader pre-purchase discounting model. History has shown that when you sell something for less then you pay for it; hoping that users don’t fully use their credits to cover that loss; that time is not on your side. They are already the walking dead.

moralestapia 4y ago

The problem I have experienced first-hand is basically that >individual farms might want to look at relative growth rates of corn in their fields, or soil moisture levels, etc. a LOT of people want this, but they would never pay $x,xxx/month for that, ever.

n8cpdx 4y ago
The imagery is often already captured, so if I want to give Maxar $250 I don’t see why they wouldn’t take it. Eos (iirc it’s been a while) actually let me buy some imagery, but they would only give me pictures, not actual georeferenced rasters. The actual manipulation and use of the data, even for machine learning, is pretty straightforward these days with ArcGIS. So yes, I want pixels.
- astrange 4y ago
  Usually corporate culture reasons prevent a business like that from just taking your money. They don't want to undercut their giant custom contracts and don't know how to handle customer support for cheaper people. And I can imagine the cheaper customers are a lot less educated and don't have the right expectations, like how often their target area is covered in clouds.
bluGill 4y ago
Drones exist, and cost a lot less then thousands to buy. Plus a drone can be used when you want to, the satellite goes overhead every few weeks and if it is a cloudy day too bad. For farms the information from images is only valuable on a few specifc days, too early and you don't learn anything, a few days later and it is too late to do anything about it. I work for John Deere. I can't speak for the company. I'll confirm we are intersted in imagining, but I won't comment on our plans to deal with the above issues.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  Some providers could give you daily updates but yes, drones are much cheaper and much more flexible. You need a custom sensor? Drones can do it, on satellites don't even think about it unless your budget is >$100M.

tomc1985 4y ago

> That use case is not one any commercial provider anywhere is going to build an ML model for. Why not? It's been a while since the west has had a war where the moral details are so clear. If I had a company like this I'd be jumping on the opportunity.

dplavery92 4y ago
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/121.1#:~:text=Category%20XV%20%2D%20Spacecraft%20and%20Related%20Articles https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/121.1#:~:text=Catego... https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/121.1#:~:text=(3)%20Electro%2Doptical%20reconnaissance%2C%20surveillance%2C%20target%20detection%2C%20or%20target%20acquisition%20systems%2C%20specially%20designed%20for%20articles%20in%20this%20subchapter%20or%20specially%20designed%20for%20a%20military%20end%20user https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/121.1#:~:text=(3)%20...
- GlenTheMachine 4y ago
  Beforehand, I mean. There are market opportunities out there, but the problem is they're impossible to see coming. Nobody thought Russia would invade Ukraine, until it did. Nobody thought Ukraine would survive for a week after Russia invaded, until it did. So there was absolutely no possibility anyone would have seen a potential market for tracking Russian tanks in Ukraine and selling that data to the Ukrainian military.

spockz 4y ago

But then it almost sounds extremely simple: provide as much raw data as you can (spectrum, resolution, surface coverage) and the users will come. Of course, this is outrageously expensive to do unguided.

paganel 4y ago

I've not worked in the industry per se but I'm quite passionate about maps and online maps generally speaking, and I'm curious to find out if the good old way of identifying stuff on maps directly through human interaction (so, not using any ML-stuff) shouldn't be given a second (or a third) thought. Of course, all backed by better tools for said humans, so that they can annotate/label/identify the data better. I've realised that that might still be a viable option once I started to map the forrest cover in my geographic area based on 150-years-old maps (these excellent maps [1] drawn by the Austrians in the 1860s). Some JS-code for the front-end that helped me "draw out" the forests, then send that data to a Django/Python backend and call it a day. It took me a while to draw those forests out but the job was very easily scalable in terms of human-power, i.e. 10 more me would have probably finished it 10 times faster with a little coordination (for anyone curious the data is in here [2], I'd say it was almost 90% done when I passed on to my next project, as I often do). I was first looking at using some heuristics in order to "automate" some part of the job, but both the false-positives and the false-negatives were just too high, the outputs would have been horrible in terms of accuracy. [1] https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/secondsurvey-wallachia/?layers=59&bbox=2859410.850112104%2C5526674.657922648%2C2932217.1195537345%2C5552433.936454752 https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/secondsurvey-wallachia/?laye... [2] https://github.com/mihaitc/forrests/tree/master/counties https://github.com/mihaitc/forrests/tree/master/counties

nicbou 4y ago

Even laymen might end up creating wonderful little niche products if given access to things. OpenStreetMap needs good imagery for mapping trails and buildings. Off-roaders and overlanders need good imagery to verify the existence and state of trails. That's just me, so I'm sure that there are tons of similar low key use cases.