Satellites in Singapore

The Strait of Malacca is one of the busiest passages in the world. While Malacca is a coastal city in Malaysia, the straight is often associated with Singapore. Today Spire announced the opening of its new Singapore office from which it will manage and launch nano-satellites. As much of the world is covered by ocean, these satellites in near-polar orbits will, once fully deployed in a constellation, allow for asset tracking on the open oceans at as a high a frequency as every five minutes. Whereas today automatic identification systems (AIS) allow for tracking roughly each six hours, this will dramatically improve data and information about ships in passage. 

Today Singapore's largest newspaper, The Straits Times announced that Spire will launch six satellites in the coming year from India, managed from Singapore. And Asia's largest tech platform, Tech in Asia, published this article entitled, "Spire to Fight Sea Pirates from Space - Using Nanosatellites."