Space
A weather bird for dispatchers gets a ride off the east coast
Lumen’s Indian partner has booked a small imaging satellite on a rideshare from the Bay of Bengal range. Airline desks want the pictures more than the ceremony.
Hanae Sato
Space correspondent
Sriharikota5 min
A Hyderabad firm called Monsoon Glass has taken a slot on an east-coast rideshare for a small imaging satellite aimed at the Bay of Bengal’s convective season. The customer is not a space agency. It is a pool of airline dispatch desks that currently buy cyclone imagery from farther away and later than they would like.
The satellite is modest: a refrigerator with a camera and a power budget that will not impress anyone who builds the large birds. Its orbit is chosen so that a morning pass covers the bay before the first westbound long-haul commits to the oceanic track. That is the entire product. Monsoon Glass is selling a timestamp, not a constellation.
“Dispatchers do not need a poster,” said Kavya Raman, the firm’s founder. “They need to know whether the bay is building before they release the aeroplane. If we are late, they already knew from the Americans. If we are early, we are a tool.”
The rideshare is the same class of vehicle Harbor Launch flies, on a different coast, with a manifest that includes two university payloads and a replacement for a maritime transmitter. Monsoon Glass can live with a drift of a few days. It cannot live with a slip into the season it is supposed to watch. The contract, Raman said, pays on the first useful image, not on the announcement that the satellite exists.
