SATELLITE CO. HEADS TO BOULDER
BUSINESS
Spire Global Inc., which will be opening its fifth office, provides data on weather, climate and the location of ships around the world.
A company on the cutting edge of using small satellites to provide data on weather, climate and even the location of ships around the world, is expanding its Boulder office to make it a key hub of its operations.
Spire Global Inc. will show off its new 25,000squarefoot custom weather satellite center in Boulder on Wednesday. It will be the largest of Spire’s five offices. The other offices are in San Francisco, where the company is based, Singapore, Glasgow and Seattle.
“Growth in Spire’s business, fueled by the need for more satellitebased data in the weather world, is driving this large expansion of our local footprint,” Spire CEO Peter Platzer said in a statement.
The hightech and meteorological communities of Colorado make the area an excellent place to do business, Platzer added.
The location of Spaceport Colorado at the Colorado Air and Space Port, formerly Front Range Airport near Watkins, is another big factor, said Alexander MacDonald, director of Spire’s global validation model.
In August, federal regulators granted Spaceport Colorado its operator license, making it one of 11 facilities in the country designated to handle the next generation of flight — space planes. Aerospace companies like Airbus and Virgin Atlantic are working on developing vehicles that would take off from runways under jet power and then ignite a rocket engine for suborbital spaceflight.
“The expansion in Boulder is indicative
of how strongly the company feels about Colorado as a place for the space business,” MacDonald said.
The move also speaks to Colorado’s high quality of universities and their graduates, research centers and other members of the industry, added MacDonald, who retired two years ago as head of the Earth System Research Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder.
About 35 people work for Spire Global in Boulder. The new office building will hold more than 100 employees and include space to build satellites. The company now manufactures satellites at its Glasgow site.
As its workforce grows, so will its network of satel lites that collects data worldwide for various companies and government agencies, MacDonald said. Spire has roughly 60 satellites operating and could increase the fleet to 200 as early as next year.
These aren’t your father’s or your mother’s satellites. They are about the size of a wine box, weigh 5 to 10 pounds and have many of the same capabilities of much larger satellites for less than a hundredth of the cost, MacDonald said. He likened the advances in the technology to the kind of revolutionary changes computers have gone through.
“When I was going to school in computer science, everybody said mini computers are going to be very important. Turns out they are, and now everybody has one in their pocket,” MacDonald said.
However, he acknowledged, the smaller satellites can’t do everything the larger ones — some the size of a car or school bus — do.
But the small satellites can do more and more, including track the locations of ships around the world. That information and increasingly accurate facts and figures about weather and climate are among the data Spire satellites collect.
MacDonald said he’s proud “of our entire profession” for the advances, including the ability to predict three days out where a hurricane will hit land within a margin of error of fewer than 100 miles, an improvement from about 400 miles in years past.
He’s also pleased that there’s now a Spire satellite in orbit with his name on it. The company names satellites set for launch after employees, in the order they joined the company.
“There’s a satellite up there called Alexander,” he said.