Satellites in Bollywood

Today Scroll.in, an Indian new media company, ran a great article entitled, "A Silicon Valley Startup wants to Launch 20 Satellites to Keep India Safe," about the partnership between Silicon Valley startups, such as Spire, and the Indian Space Agency (ISRO). Over the coming year, Spire will launch a constellation of nearly 20 satellites into Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) to improve maritime domain awareness (MDA) around India, help stem piracy and illegal fishing, and provide better GPS-RO weather data to help protect nations from food and agricultural shocks by having better weather and climate information. It's an amazing world when commercial off-the-shelf products can be constructed into nano-satellites that can piggyback up into LEO on board rockets from Japan to Russia to India to SpaceX in the United States.