The story
Urthecast was founded in 2010 by Wade Larson and Scott Larson, with the vision of providing live video streaming of the Earth from space. The company partnered with the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) to install two cameras on the ISS: a medium-resolution camera (MRC) and a high-resolution camera (HRC). The MRC could capture objects about 6 meters across or larger, while the HRC could capture objects of 1 meter across. The cameras were launched in 2013 and became operational in 2014.
In 2015, Urthecast acquired Deimos Imaging, a Spanish-based earth observation company, and its two satellites: Deimos-1 and Deimos-2. Deimos-1 had a resolution of 22 meters per pixel and could cover 650,000 square kilometers per day. Deimos-2 had a resolution of 75 centimeters per pixel and could cover 150,000 square kilometers per day. Urthecast also announced plans to launch a 16-satellite constellation called OptiSAR, which would combine synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical sensors to provide all-weather and day-night imaging capabilities.
In 2016, Urthecast announced another satellite constellation project called UrtheDaily, which would consist of eight satellites equipped with multispectral sensors to capture images of the entire Earth’s landmass every day at a resolution of 5 meters per pixel. The company contracted Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) to manufacture the satellites. Urthecast received funding from the Canadian government’s Strategic Aerospace & Defense Initiative (SADI) program for the development of OptiSAR.
In 2018, Urthecast acquired Geosys, an agricultural data analytics company, from Land O’Lakes, Inc. Geosys provided crop monitoring and yield forecasting services using satellite imagery and weather data.
From Wikipedia’s article on Urthecast, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5