LEADERS' OUTLOOK
Analysts Don’t Want Oceans of Data BY ALEX FOX
Executive Vice President of Global Growth, HawkEye 360
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ommercial innovators across the New Space industry have worked around COVID-related economic challenges to raise incredible capital and advance the industry. Like many businesses, we have had to adapt our rhythms of working, traveling and interacting with customers and investors. Our team did an incredible job and much of our company’s most transformative growth and investment milestones have taken place during the pandemic.
ANNUAL EDITION / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022
It’s good to see policymakers understand the urgency, importance and value of commercial Space innovation. We will increasingly see the government leverage commercial Space capabilities by altering their strategic planning, budgeting and acquisition processes to better integrate fastfielding technology.
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We will also see the US government spurring commercial Space capabilities for uses beyond US satellite communications, defense and national security. The value proposition is multifold: commercial providers like us offer fast-fielding technology and services that scale to support the exponential demand for global insights and add a layer of resiliency, all while remaining affordable.
Top technology trends
The top trends are the rapid advancements in data science, machine learning and artificial
intelligence (AI), and Cloud capabilities. Our constellation of satellites collects an enormous amount of RF (radio frequency) data, and we need to be able to understand and extract insights from that data in an efficient, timely manner. By fusing new analytics capabilities with our RF data and data from other sources, we are able to unlock actionable insights automatically. Another trend is a shift towards the seamless orchestration of multiple modalities, each of which provides an important perspective to understand the environment. This multi-intelligence integration allows us to see an activity from different dimensions to discover patterns in human behavior or anomalies. For example, our satellites can scan millions of sq km on a single pass — more area than visual imagery or SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar). This enables us to precisely cue other modalities to collect data on activities we need to understand, finding the unknown and fleeting important activities. The commercial Space industry is eager to apply its innovations to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges, and we have seen many successes or proofsof-concept in the field. One of the major benefits of commercial
It’s good to see policymakers understand the urgency, importance and value of commercial Space innovation.
Space insights is their shareability, allowing clients to use high-resolution sources where classified systems have previously been unable to help. For example, our RF insights have supported governments and environmental organizations looking to address illegal or unregulated fishing activities, such as the encroachment by Chinese fishing fleets on protected waters near the Galapagos Islands. We have also supported terrestrial activities such as a trial providing RF signal geolocation data to park rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Garamba National Park to help identify illegal poaching activities.
The business outlook
The field of AI can lead to leapahead capabilities for the remote sensing industry. For instance, HawkEye 360 leveraged the AI capabilities of AWS to develop maritime security and vessel monitoring capabilities that incorporate our RF data, as well as underlying vessel characteristics and behavior data, to anticipate whether a given vessel is likely to engage in nefarious activity. Analysts don’t want oceans of data; they desire actionable insights so they can focus their attention on information that is of value.
