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Building a Real-Time, On-Demand Solution for the 21st Century In a world where business is conducted through emails and text messages within seconds, waiting eight hours to receive a satellite image just seems archaic and impractical, says Capella Space Founder & CEO Payam Banazadeh, as he explains how he plans to change that
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efore founding Capella Space, you were employed at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, where your work on two missions got you the Mariner Award. How and when did you decide to move, and how was the idea of Capella Space conceived? I started my career as a Systems Engineer at JPL after having interned there four times in a variety of capacities. I was lucky to have been part of the founding team for a few very innovative and exciting small-satellite projects, including the Lunar Flashlight — a micro-satellite flying to the moon using a solar sail that mapped ice-water deposits in the permanently shadowed craters, and NEA Scout — a micro-satellite flying to a near Earth asteroid for imaging and reconnaissance. After a few years, I decided to go back to school and completed a business degree from Stanford University. Immediately after I arrived on the campus, the Malaysian flight MH370 tragically went missing and was never found. I was shocked and disappointed, that with all the resources and technology at our disposal, we could not locate or determine what happened to a plane! Capella was born out of that frustration. I spent the next two years of my graduate degree asking myself why we are not able to monitor our planet much more frequently and work on 6
www.geospatialworld.net | July-August 2019
a plan to ensure that an unexplained tragedy like MH370 never happens again. As I understood more about the challenges of timely and reliable remote sensing, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) emerged as an all-weather, all-condition imaging technology for increasing the coverage and frequency with which we could observe change on Earth. If you look across the market, there actually aren’t that many SAR providers. Majority of small satellite players are focused on traditional sensors such as optical. Capella is uniquely positioned as the only commercial American SAR company and we will play a key role in shaping the next generation of geospatial information from space. We intend to be the gamechanger by being the most frequent, flexible and timely in delivering satellite imagery.
Which are the sectors that you are serving primarily and new areas you plan to tap into? Defense and Intelligence is a critical vertical for our company as governments are the traditional
