When you board a plane, the pilot already knows the weather on the flight path and can steer clear, or at least warn you it’s coming. The same can’t be said of “space weather” from solar events, which can seriously affect satellites and even passenger planes.
Mission Space is about to launch a constellation to provide near-real-time monitoring of this increasingly important phenomenon.
Space weather is a general term for the radiation in the near-Earth environment; outside the planet’s protective aura, satellites and spacecraft feel the full brunt of the sun’s rays, and a solar storm can interfere with or disable them. The type and intensity of this radiation shifts and flows just like atmospheric weather, but being invisible and moving at the speed of light, it’s considerably more difficult to observe and predict.
There are numerous satellites and deep-space missions that monitor solar radiation, but they are necessarily limited; imagine trying to predict the path of a storm using only a handful of wind and rain sensors scattered across the ocean. And while historically this has been sufficient, the growth of the new space economy has transformed space weather from an occasional inconvenience to a constant and quantifiable threat.
“More and more companies are putting space weather on their agenda,” said Alex Pospekhov, CEO and founder of Mission Space. “We have 7,000 satellites in space, but in 10 years it’ll be 50,000; that means space weather events will be the same as now, but they will have 10 times the impact.”
A serious solar storm is dangerous not only to electronics, but also to unprepared astronauts. If someone happens to be doing a spacewalk, they could get a face full of radiation — and if we want to establish a permanent presence on the moon, where there’s similarly little protection, we’ll want to know exactly when it’s safe to go outside.
Nearer the surface, airlines are concerned about passengers getting large doses of radiation during a long flight over the poles, and some have even canceled flights because of it. And there are numerous secondary effects on services that rely on satellites, including precision agriculture.
Pospekhov’s startup, originally founded in Europe but now based in Israel and the U.S., is about to launch the first two of a planned 24-satellite constellation that will monitor space weather and provide reports and predictions in near real time.
It’s not intended to replace the scientific instruments currently in space, but augment their data (much of which is public) with a voluminous, proprietary stream that enables more precise, timely monitoring.
Pospekhov explained that while many companies and governments are increasingly aware of the need for better space weather prediction, the satellites are aging and the data is difficult to share.
“The infrastructure for space weather monitoring was developed in the late 90s, and many of the scientific models were developed 50 years ago,” Pospekhov said. Information sharing agreements between organizations like NASA, NOAA, and ESA are complex, and the data itself is not trivial to integrate and harmonize.
“There are no people in the companies who need this data who can understand it. What’s needed is, say, alerts for different alert levels for launch, or for airlines. Everyone uses weather data but no one thinks about how it is generated: you just want to know if it’s going to rain or not. It’s the same here,” he continued.
Mission Space currently uses public sources, doing the work of normalizing it to create something of a unified data stream. But they are launching the first two of their own satellites in the first quarter of 2025, with more planned for later that year. Pospekhov said they could probably launch faster, but that it’s more beneficial to learn from the first set and improve as they go. “Engineers…” he said, “There are always more changes.”
The satellites themselves are specialized but not exotic, he noted, leading to a lower cost for a constellation of 24 than you might expect. The important part is the sensor payload (which they call “Zohar,”) still collects 15 parameters, a thousand times a second.
“Space weather is a data monopoly game: the first to launch the constellation and build the infrastructure will win,” he predicted. “Even with half a constellation, in two years we will generate a thousand times more space weather data than humans have generated in the last 60. And the real-time data will let us develop machine learning models based on it.”
They are not in competition with governments and scientific organizations, he claimed, or really even startups looking to serve those customers — collaboration is a necessity for a number of reasons.
Their customers are “aerospace in general; satellite operators and space tourism companies; anyone doing private space stations. They’re all very aware of the problem,” said Pospekhov. “It was common knowledge in the aviation industry but now the companies are actually paying attention to solutions. And of course for defense, they’ve been developing the domain, and you must be sure you will not have issues in critical space operations. With the current level of precision, that’s hard for them.”
While the real-time readings and predictions will have to wait for the full constellation, the pair going up in a few months should offer a marked improvement over the existing offerings. No exact date is set for launch.