It’s frustrating for environmental scientists to watch politicians mangle and regurgitate climate change data into stump campaign speeches. When Capella Space CEO Payam Banazadeh co-founded the San Francisco-based satellite constellation company in 2016, he set out on a mission to tell a clear, visual story about how our planet is changing, directly to the people who would be most impacted by those changes. Images are a universal language.

In this episode, we caught up with Payam, a National Science Foundation fellow, NASA Mariner Award winner and entrepreneur recently named to Forbes “30 Under 30” list, about the unique capabilities of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, specifically when used for environmental monitoring. 

By using SAR data operating in the X-band, Capella’s constellation can see through clouds and in the dark, monitor stress points in physical infrastructure, extract critical soil and crop data for precision agriculture, prevent illegal fishing, and save lives. Once fully deployed, the Capella constellation will be able to monitor the entire planet, and provide a searchable data archive based on an in-house platform. We also spoke about Capella’s recent partnership with AddValue and Inmarsat and what new opportunities the constellation’s full deployment will bring to its global end-users.