Why we invested: Perceptive Space
February 7th 2022, those looking towards the stars above Puerto Rico would have seen a series of white streaks darting across the sky. Unlike the meteor showers that astronomers in the country can observe throughout the year, these ‘shooting stars’ were in fact 38 Starlink satellites, falling out of orbit due to a minor (G1-class) geomagnetic storm.
Of the 49 Starlink satellites that had been launched from Cape Canaveral just three days earlier, less than a quarter would survive - resulting in estimated losses of around $100 million - all from one minor geomagnetic event. The storm, which pumped almost 1,200 gigawatts of energy into Earth’s atmosphere, caused additional heating to the Earth’s upper atmosphere, which sharply increased aerodynamic drag on the satellites.
Unprotected by the earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere, and atmosphere, all satellites in orbit face substantial risks associated with space weather. High-energy particles, radiation, solar flares, and geomagnetic storms can cause systems errors, malfunctions and failures. They can also wreak havoc on GPS systems, power transmissions and satellite communications.
The European Space Agency has also said that its Swarm satellites, which monitor Earth's magnetic field, have been sinking 10 times faster since December 2021 than in other years since their 2013 launch, due to increasing solar activity as the sun moves toward the peak of its current solar cycle. These phenomena have also had impacts that have stretched as far as earth - as far back as September 2, 1859 - when the so-called Carrington Event - a massive solar flare - caused electric shocks to telegraph operators, and blackouts across the world. If that happened today, it could cause over $41.5 billion in economic loss per day in the US alone, and would likely last several days.
Such risks have been manageable while we’ve hosted minimal infrastructure in space, and while governments have been able to justify any failures as an inherent part of our ‘pursuit into the beyond,’ but the human race’s reliance on space is now critical. Nearly 10,000 satellites are currently orbiting the earth, representing a 10-fold increase over the past 10 years. With $15billion of assets in operation, the space industry can no longer afford to ignore this and call such incidents the “cost of doing business.”
Existing space weather forecasts do not support optimal decisions for those operating in space. Space weather data, distributed by governments, often lacks accuracy with no decision intelligence.
We’re delighted to have backed Perceptive Space, as they develop the platform for Space Weather Decision Intelligence. Leveraging sensor fusion and machine learning, its hyper-local approach can facilitate a 10x improvement in the accuracy of space weather forecasting, providing near real time updates, as well as an analysis of effects, impacts, and risk. By forecasting anomalies, the platform will predict failures and service disruption before they happen, and will facilitate autonomous preventative measures to be executed.
Since the company started in 2023, the team has secured a range of commitments across government and commercial operators, as well as early partners for the deployment of a pilot system, which will initially target satellite operators in low earth orbit (LEO).
Founder Padmashri Suresh is also uniquely qualified to execute in this market, with operational and academic experience as a space weather scientist and also in space policy. She has delivered projects for NASA and Los Alamos National Lab, leveraging a range of public domain data, while also having the crucial relationships to secure more sensitive data in this sector.
By 2030, the global space weather market is expected to reach a value of $15 billion, with space weather decision intelligence across the US and its allies, representing a $9 billion segment of this. The company’s initial focus will be placed on mission safety, before product offerings expand to mission health, terrestrial markets, and edge-based operation. Primary downstream verticals will span across exploration, defence, aviation, power, oil field services, and insurance, with Perceptive Space offering its platform through B2B Subscriptions and through B2G licences.