{"id":59473,"date":"2020-07-01T20:45:02","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T12:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/predasar-looks-to-corner-sar-data-market-with-purpose-built-constellation\/"},"modified":"2020-07-01T20:45:02","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T12:45:02","slug":"predasar-looks-to-corner-sar-data-market-with-purpose-built-constellation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/predasar-looks-to-corner-sar-data-market-with-purpose-built-constellation\/","title":{"rendered":"PredaSAR Looks to Corner SAR Data\u00a0Market with Purpose-Built Constellation"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n
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PredaSAR Executive Chairman and Co-Founder Marc Bell. Photo via The Tag Experience<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

PredaSAR<\/b> is working to build a constellation of 48 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, and the company\u2019s Executive Chairman and Co-Founder Marc Bell said the Earth Observation (EO) startup will start commercial operations with satellites on-orbit as early as next year. <\/p>\n

In a recent conversation with Via Satellite<\/i>, Bell said PredaSAR\u2019s satellites were in production with Tyvak<\/b> before the company was founded. PredaSAR was founded in 2019, and announced its $25 million seed financing round, led by Rokk3r Fuel<\/strong>, in early March. Both PredaSAR and Tyvak are Terran Orbital<\/b> corporations, and Bell is also a Terran Orbital co-founder. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve all been working on this for a long time.\u201d Bell said. \u201cTyvak has put over 220 satellites in orbit already. So, we\u2019re not really a startup, we\u2019ve been doing this a long time. And so we have a lot of experience and we manufacture most of our components in house. It was very cost-effective for us to go and build this.\u201d <\/p>\n

Bell, an investor who produces Broadway shows, was previously a majority stakeholder in Penthouse magazine. His portfolio at Marc Bell Capital <\/b>includes space startups Nanoracks<\/strong> and Made in Space<\/strong>. But PredaSAR\u2019s team is stacked with retired U.S. Air Force<\/b> personnel. The CEO is retired U.S. Air Force Major General Roger Teague, and it\u2019s Board of Directors includes three retired Air Force generals \u2014 General William Shelton, General Richard Newton, and General Douglas Raaberg.<\/p>\n

Bell said PredaSAR\u2019s first priority is to serve the national security interests of the U.S. military, and the company\u2019s in-house military expertise is key to understanding the needs of the warfighter. <\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of building satellites, and looking for customers, we went to the customer first and said \u2014 \u2018What do you need, and what do you want?\u2019 Then we built the satellite, so they are purpose built,\u201d Bell said. \u201cA lot of people build these large optical satellites and hope people will come. We found our customers first.\u201d <\/p>\n

Bell said that mindset has paid off, and PredaSAR has already signed its first contracts. The constellation will have both government and commercial customers the day it is operational. In addition, the satellites which are built for military needs will have added benefits for commercial customers. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe beauty of building it with the U.S. military and government in mind is we\u2019re building things to a much higher specification, much higher quality, much more redundancy than you would for a commercial customer. And so commercial people benefit from everything that we\u2019ve done,\u201d Bell said. <\/p>\n

PredaSAR is keeping some aspects of the company\u2019s plans close to the vest, such as the revisit rate it hopes to achieve with 48 satellites. But Bell said PredaSAR will focus on filling the need for raw SAR data, compared to competitors like Capella Space<\/b> and Iceye<\/b>, which offer solutions platforms with their data. PredaSAR plans to sell raw data to customers that have the capability to process it themselves. <\/p>\n

\u201cOur target customers could do their own processing. And they do it much faster than we can. All they care about is high resolution data. We want to spend virtually all our energies on providing the highest resolution data, with the quickest revisit rates,\u201d Bell said. \u201cWe are going to own the Big Data side of the world, and the rest of the world process data.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PredaSAR Executive Chairman and Co-Founder Marc Bell. Photo via The Tag Experience PredaSAR is working to build a constellation of 48 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, and the company\u2019s Executive Chairman and Co-Founder Marc Bell said the Earth Observation (EO) startup will start commercial operations with satellites on-orbit as early as next year.  In a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}