How Space Aye is putting Scottish space tech on the map

Company merges real-time satellite imagery with data from billions of IoT devices

The space sector is growing faster in Scotland than any other part of the UK, thanks to geographically advantageous satellite launch sites and a plethora of local engineering skills. This has spawned a number of hardware and software startups, among them the geographically rooted and affirmatively named Space Aye.

Glasgow-based Space Aye is building a data platform that merges real-time satellite imagery with data from billions of IoT devices to provide insights about what's happening in the world.

Effectively, this will be something like Google Earth or Zoom Earth, but using current rather than historical data, customisable by overlaying the images with information from the user's sensors, and better able to serve remote locations.

Use cases include real-time mapping of forest fires by combining footage from space with data from weather stations, emergency response optimisation by feeding traffic data into maps, disaster management, pollution control, tackling human trafficking, climate monitoring and virtually any activity that can combine geospatial data with sensor data on the ground.

It's about contextualising the IoT data by adding a geographical setting, CEO Chris Newlands told Computing. In the case of wildfires, "it's not just the ability to identify where something is on a map. If you can see the line of the fire and you can see where your assets and responders are in real time you can put the fire out more quickly."

Earlier iterations of Space Aye were involved in tracking plastic pollution in Bali and comparing the emissions associated with various tourism options, and Newlands is keen to see satellite imagery used to address urgent problems including climate change.

The company has a methodology-based patent for "compositing remote sensing images (such as satellite images in visible light) with user generated content" granted in the US and Japan and pending in Europe, China and South Korea. The platform, currently under development, will resell geospatial data from satellite operators and allow developers to combine that with other data via an API.

Opportunities in orbit

A confluence of factors have put a rocket under the space sector in the past five years.

The cost of satellite technology has dropped dramatically. NASA's Landsat 8 cost $885 million to put into orbit 10 years ago, while an equivalent launch today could be done for as little as $300,000 - almost three thousand times less.

This has enabled more satellites to be launched. In 2017 there were about 600 Earth observation satellites in orbit, currently there are around 1,200, while by 2027 there could be as many as 12,000 launches by SpaceX alone.

As a result, satellite imagery is becoming much less expensive and will soon be ubiquitous. "You're looking at satellites with imaging capabilities passing overhead every few seconds," said Newlands.

Plummeting prices and increasing coverage will allow many more applications that use geospatial satellite data to become feasible, physically and commercially. So, we can expect to see many more companies moving into this area. But while combining satellite imagery and real-time data may seem like an obvious use case, it has really only become viable very recently, said Newlands.

"It's obvious now, but it wasn't in 2018. So in 2018 there was no talk of mass penetration of a commercial satellites. You are looking at a very different world from where we are today, and that's going to change dramatically over the coming months. We're not talking about decades here we're talking about this decade."

Back down to Earth

Not that harnessing this potential will be straightforward. As ever, the tech is the easy bit. Just as standards such like GSM allow people to communicate across continents, data sharing protocols will need to be agreed in this new area, Newlands said, mentioning discussions with unnamed government agencies about how Space Aye's patent could form the basis of such international cooperation.

There's also the question of data protection; the risks from data from multiple sources ending up on one platform are already obvious. Plus, a great deal of satellite data is covered by national security and confidentiality laws.

"Space is complicated, space is hard," said Newlands. "But what's coming will change the rules significantly, so we need to be ahead of that, and the good thing is we're part of that conversation."