Commercial communications satellites are old news, and commercial remote-sensing satellites make imagery from Cold War reconnaissance satellites look quaint. Commercial cargo vehicles are arriving at the International Space Station, and commercial crew vehicles are on the way. Now a Las Vegas-based startup is taking another step in the direction of expanding human commerce into low Earth orbit-in the form of commercial weather satellites. But as a commercial venture, GeoMetWatch Corp. isn't following the government paradigm of orbiting dedicated weather satellites with a handful of infrared and visible light-imaging channels. Instead, it is building on a government development that has gone unused to build hosted payloads that will fly piggyback on commercial geosynchronous communications satellites, sending back hyper-spectral data in a continuous stream.
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