Spaceflight Industries today announced the availability of its BlackSky global intelligence platform, as well as its Early Adopter Program (EAP) participants, and the diverse partner ecosystem fueling the platform. The highly scalable, cloud-based platform enables organizations to observe, analyze and act on global events as they happen.

Unparalleled in the industry, the BlackSky platform integrates diverse sensors and data - including satellite imagery, social media and other data feeds - to reveal timely and relevant insights around specific topics or locations.

Currently, the platform is in early adoption with a select group of customers, including the World Bank, RS Metrics, United Nations, and others. Organizations interested in accessing the BlackSky platform should contact [email protected].

"Our business plan has always been to look at the planet in real time, in every spectrum, to solve real-world problems," said Jason Andrews, chief executive officer of Spaceflight Industries. "Today we are announcing significant progress on that journey. For the first time, organizations can fuse satellite imagery with a wide array of data services contextualized in time and space to better understand the most critical issues of our time."

The BlackSky platform offers two major capabilities:

+ Imagery: Customers can discover, purchase and download imagery via the BlackSky platform, which currently provides access to more than 10 high-resolution imaging spacecraft including those from 21AT's TripleSat, SIIS's KOMPSAT, and UrtheCast's Deimos-2. The platform will incorporate data from BlackSky's 60-satellite constellation as it enters commercial operation in 2017. Additionally, customers can acquire real-time images by tasking partner satellite systems and soon the BlackSky constellation.

+ Insights: The platform fuses the satellite imagery with information from other sources including news outlets and social media to create curated data feeds by location (ex: port, pipeline, border) or theme (ex: geopolitical conflict, natural disasters, energy, or health/outbreak). Through machine learning, predictive algorithms and natural language processing techniques, the platform triangulates these relevant global events in time and space. Customers then receive customized results that are prioritized based on their preferences.

With this multi-source analysis, the platform can alert the customer of critical events related to their area of interest - enabling them to take immediate action. For example, an organization can opt to have BlackSky monitor its manufacturing facility and send an alert if a natural disaster or conflict is detected within 50 kilometers. With this information at their fingertips, the organization can make well-informed decisions about their global assets.

"We're excited to expand the community that can take advantage of having relevant and timely information readily available - whether they're monitoring illegal maritime activity, providing humanitarian relief, securing troops and borders, or tracking economic assets," added Rakesh Narasimhan, executive vice president at BlackSky. "Having the support of these high-caliber partners and customers at this early stage is very encouraging, and we intend to use their feedback to ensure the platform is poised to provide actionable and tangible value to our global society."

Key features of the BlackSky global intelligence platform include:

+ Ease of use: BlackSky's easy-to-use web-based interface speeds and simplifies the viewing, purchasing and downloading of geospatial products. Users can securely log on, search the archive of images, task or request a new image (complete with "add to shopping cart" functionality), analyze and store data via the secure Web portal.

+ Rapid revisit: Through its vast partner satellite systems, the platform provides access to the largest virtual commercial constellation with industry-leading revisit abilities. The deployment of the 60-satellite BlackSky satellite constellation will provide a rapid revisit rate with the ability to pass over key zones hourly, making images fresher to provide a more comprehensive story. In addition to the successful launch of BlackSky's Pathfinder-1 in September 2016, four more satellites are expected to launch in 2017, and the complete constellation will be on orbit by 2020.

+ Affordability: BlackSky holds a unique market position as a product offering of Spaceflight Industries, which develops launch capabilities, innovative spacecraft, communications networks and cloud-based software services. By leveraging this vertical integration, BlackSky is able to pass the savings along to its customers.