9 Comments

So good to hear, Joe! Love the thought that went into this decision. I have a colleague that joined Capella Space last year. Having also touched the optical imagery space, SAR is almost certainly the most viable of the bunch. Best wishes on your next adventure!

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Thanks so much John! Capella is an awesome company, and a rising tide will hopefully lift all boats. What role SAR plays compared to optical remains to be seen--I think of it like this: optical is data for humans, SAR is data for machines.

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All the best on your new journey and keep writing! I want to know more about SAR in energy and planning applications. Whose work do you suggest I follow?

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Thank you so much! I will keep writing, although there may be a blip while I get settled. I don't know of great resources for SAR and planning applications, but I expect to learn all about it soon, haha. Wish I had a better answer for you.

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Thanks for the post! I really like what Azavea has accomplished and your thoughts about Earth Observation Data. Congrats on the move! Excited for what all the new and not so new challenges you will encounter in your new saga.

I suspect one of the key business uses of an ability to infer changing soil, water or other "non-naked-eye" environmental conditions would be Wall Street and the whole universe of "Alternative Data" that so-called phisticated Hedge Funds are increasingly using to gain the information edge.

Large Corps needing better quality and more real-time data than what the government provides to help them decide where to site their generating stations, warehouses and data centers is another use case for this data?

Outside of that, the uses of such data appear more useful to government sponsored conservation efforts.

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Excellent overview of the the satellite imagery market, thanks for the explanation!

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This is by far the most cogent change of job notice that I've ever read. You lay out a great case and tell us clearly why this will be important. I'd not heard much of SAR imagery before this but have been interested since the very early Garmin/TomTom days. Best of luck to you and look forward to integrating your data sets in a few years.

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Love it. Super informative and well thought out post. The space industry still has lots of maturing to do to fully live up to its potential to contribute to society / economy, beyond supporting Defense and Civil space. While optical has an important role to play still, SAR has great promise and Umbra is doing some truly exciting things. To touch on your other post, the enterprise sales approach for Earth imagery needs to change for the price of imagery to come down, and for real-time Earth Imagery to be adopted by the economy at large. Congratulations on your new position, and well done on your due diligence in making this move.

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Thanks so much for the kind words, Guy!

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