UrtheCast is a company created to provide the first live high-definition video feed of Earth from space. Working jointly with Russian aerospace giant RSC Energia, the company is building, launching, installing, and operating two cameras on the Russian module of the International Space Station. Starting next year, video data of the Earth collected by these cameras will be down-linked to ground stations and then displayed in near-real time on UrtheCast’s Web site or distributed directly to the company’s partners and customers. Special correspondent Matteo Luccio spoke with Wade Larson, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) and Dr. George Tyc, chief technology advisor, UrtheCast about the company’s technology, business model and applications.
ML: What motivated you to launch this project?
WL: George and I have been in the remote sensing sector for a very long time — 17 years for me, both in government and industry, and around 25 years for George — mostly on the space side, but certainly with a lot of interest and insight into the downstream side as well. Both of us used to work at MacDonald, Dettwiler, and Associates (MDA). A couple of years ago, we were in Moscow and had a meeting with RSC Energia. They raised the possibility that MDA could put an advanced technology synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payload on the International Space Station (ISS), as a kind of technology demonstration. At the time, MDA was working on some pretty interesting next-generation SAR payloads. But we knew that that idea was too expensive, that the non-recurring engineering was too high, and that politically there were other reasons why it wouldn’t work. So, instead, we proposed that we put a video camera on the space station and broadcast the feed over the Web. We proposed the idea to MDA and it just wasn’t a fit. Now fast forward two years. Both George and I have left MDA and we ventured out, in conjunction with some other people, to build this company. It is fundamentally an Internet company.