DigitalGlobe

If I want to talk with Iridium, it was a telecom analyst.

If I want to talk about DigitalGlobe, it was a special situations analyst.

If I want to talk orbital sciences, it was the defense analyst, right? There was no space analyst.

And I would say even with the number of public companies that have come public in recent years, I would say lacking SpaceX, it might still be a backwater.

This is Dan Jablonski.

He's president of one of the commercial space companies that you might not have heard of, DigitalGlobe.

They might not be as flashy as SpaceX or as exciting as Virgin Galactic, but they've been flying satellites since before Elon Musk even graduated college.

In fact, they were the very first American company to be granted a license to take high-resolution pictures from space, and that is essentially what they do.

They take pictures from space, but it's a lot more complicated than it sounds.

To take those images from space, you need satellites, and DigitalGlobe has five of them.

So the five satellites we have on orbit are GeoEye-1, uh, WorldView-1, WorldView-2, WorldView-3, and you're noticing a trend here, WorldView-4.

Um, the first of those was launched in 2007.

They really need imagery that's coming in much, much faster than that to deal with changes in traffic conditions, changes in roads, uh, crashes, et cetera.

Uber, which is developing autonomous cars, is already a customer of DigitalGlobe for navigation purposes and as more and more companies move into the autonomous vehicle race, the competition between earth observation companies for their business is likely to heat up.

There are plenty of other emerging uses as well which, as an ensemble, are growing the demand for earth imagery day by day.

It is a tremendously fast-growing industry.

It doesn't matter what the light and weather conditions are, it's all the same for RADARSAT-2.

Now, MDA is a Canadian company and it's no coincidence that a Canadian company operates this satellite.

Just like the US government is a major customer of DigitalGlobe, the Canadian government is a major customer of MDA.

And here's the thing about Canada, the weather is terrible and it's always dark.