The coming year marks 50 years since mankind’s greatest achievement. The space race of the 1960s catapulted Neil Armstrong and the U.S. to the surface of the moon.
The technological innovation that accomplished such a Herculean feat literally changed the world in ways still hard to comprehend. Jokingly, the space race’s two greatest contributions to mankind were the Dustbuster cordless vacuum and Tang orange powdered drink.
In all seriousness, if you have to point to an industry and an individual that probably benefited the most from man’s desire to explore and exploit space, then production agriculture and the farmer would be near the top of the list.
Think about it. Precision agriculture owes its existence to the technology that now orbits the Earth and pretty much runs everything down below. Autosteer, drones, imagery and don’t forget the iPhone in your pocket—in some small or large way, these technologies owe their very existence to those who labored on mankind’s greatest adventure to date.
Given that the advancement of agricultural technologies has been inherently joined at the hip to continued advancements in space, it may come as a surprise that the future of space tech didn’t look too good just a few years ago. Dwindling government budgets for out-of-this-world endeavors seriously handicapped NASA’s ability to do almost anything big in space. It is sobering to acknowledge the last U.S. manned spaceflight occurred in July 2011—the final mission of the space shuttle Atlantis. It is an even harder pill to swallow knowing the country that put a man on the moon in the 1960s cannot even get one off the ground in the 21st century. U.S. astronauts have had to hitch rides on Russian rockets for $75 million per ride.
When NASA mothballed the remaining space shuttle fleet, the ability to deliver military, research and commercial payloads into space was seriously compromised. That meant GPS, communication, weather and imagery satellites that needed to get into orbit had to get in a much longer and expensive line to get their shot into space. The problem was NASA was woefully behind in bringing a next-generation space launch delivery system to the table to pick up where the shuttle fleet left off.
NASA’s recent space delivery dilemma may just turn out in the long run to be the best thing to ever happen to the American space program and, in turn, American agriculture as well. That’s because the coolest thing you can do now if you’re a billionaire is build your own rockets and spaceships. Case in point—SpaceX founded by tech mogul Elon Musk is launching its reusable rockets with payloads at a rate and at an attractive price point the industry has never before seen. But Musk now has competition. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has also joined the fray with his Blue Origin company, which has rockets named New Shepard and New Glenn. Then, don’t forget English moneyman Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic company that’s set to commercialize civilian space travel. And finally, there’s a Turkish immigrant woman named Eren Ozmen who heads the Sierra Nevada Corporation, which has designed a super sleek space plane dubbed “Dream Chaser.”
Affordable ways to get “electronic eyes and ears” into orbit drive innovation and investments and directly benefit industries such as agriculture. A perfect example is a company such as Planet, a startup microsatellite company that is quickly becoming a key player in the ag imagery space. It regularly hitches rides for flocks of its satellites on SpaceX rockets. What Planet and its growing list of competitors have done for today’s farmer is provide detailed, insightful imagery on a much more timely basis. Images of fields are available nearly every other day. In the early days of NASA’s Landsat program, it may have been two to three weeks between images, and you hoped it wasn’t cloudy on that day.
There is a tremendous amount of venture capital money flowing into bleeding edge imagery, weather, ag analytics and artificial intelligence companies. Companies such as Spire merge vast amounts of data from satellites and weather sensors with the power of analytics to bring the power of space tech down to the online cloud for real-time, real-world insights. Satellogic, another microsatellite company, touts its high-flying birds as “spectroscopic satellites,” which pick up signals from light to understand the health of environmental organisms at the molecular level.
That’s a mouthful, but the point is you haven’t seen anything yet, and corn fields are about to be the most probed, prodded and observed square blocks on the planet. The hopeful upside is a more proactive—rather than reactive—agronomy protocol. Buckle up because these billionaire space cowboys are about to take agriculture for one wild ride.
