Constellation Economics: What a Square Kilometre Costs to Produce
What does it cost an operator to collect a square kilometre of imagery, and how much of its capacity must it sell to cover costs?
Chapter summary
A constellation's cost is mostly fixed (satellites, launch, operations), so its cost per square kilometre sold depends on how much of its collection it can sell.
Key takeaways
- 1
Setcoin's constellation cost model shows that a 30-satellite very-high-resolution fleet (about $10 million per satellite including launch, five-year life, $40 million a year of operations, 2,000 km² collected per satellite per day) costs about $4.60 per square kilometre collected, but about $23 per square kilometre sold if it sells a fifth of what it collects.
- 2
That is roughly the reseller price of 30 cm archive imagery.
- 3
A 60-satellite SAR fleet comes to about $4.90 per square kilometre sold at 15%, and a 200-satellite monitoring fleet to about $0.23 at 2%.
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