Background

Near Space Labs is a high-resolution aerial imagery and earth observation company. With high-frequency, high-resolution, low-cost stratospheric balloon imagery, they support citizens, businesses, and municipalities for improved mobility, leisure, and urban planning. Through an API, they give immediate access to the largest, up-to-date, city-scale imagery dataset ever generated. Every day, Near Space Labs flies their platforms, capturing city-wide imagery repeatedly. They automatically process and upload all this imagery so it can be accessed 24 hours after it was taken. This means changes can be tracked over time as they happen.

Project

Near Space Labs is based in New York, but they launched their first commercial flights in Austin, Texas in 2019. The project goal and mission is to capture repeated high-resolution imagery of the top 100 most populous cities in the US and take tasking requests for custom captures. Updated imagery of this kind can help with monitoring vegetation encroachment for utilities, trails monitoring for conservation groups, infrastructure and construction site surveying, easement monitoring, car counting for retail, and tracking oil, gas and solar energy sources. Because they operate stratospheric balloons, there are zero carbon emissions and it’s unequivocally better for the environment than obtaining imagery with airplanes.

Community Impact

The applications of this type of high-resolution imagery reach far and wide. The geospatial data collected by Near Space Labs supports risk assessment by identifying risk exposure and assessing damage after a natural disaster. From damaged roofs after a hurricane to cracks in the roads after an earthquake, their nimble balloon technology captures detailed images frequently, which increases the efficiency of processing insurance claims.

Additionally, the high-resolution imagery at Near Space Labs can be used in real estate to help secure deals, optimize pricing, monitor construction progress and understand the competition. It allows continuous monitoring of assets and infrastructure to uncover and address issues like pipeline leaks, vegetation encroachment and weather-induced damage. It can also be used in wildlife management and conservation to check the heath of vegetation and forests. These are just a few of the ways that a community can benefit from the highly flexible and dependable geospatial dataset that Near Space Labs provides. There is really no limit of the uses for this data.