On August 16, 2024, Hydrosat launched into space what may be the most cutting-edge thermal infrared (TIR) satellite in existence. The satellite, called Van Zyl-1 (VZ-1), is at the forefront not because it is a billion dollar complex large instrument, but rather the opposite: it is one of the smallest, least energy-intensive, and lowest cost instruments ever built for high resolution TIR Earth Observation. Additionally, the Longwave Infrared (LIRI) instrument has a Visible-to-Near-Infrared (VIRI) counterpart alongside as part of the VZ-1 package. What this enables is the ability to launch a whole bunch of these with wide flexibility in launch, platform, and orbits ultimately bringing us towards a long-sought-after constellation for global, daily, high resolution TIR (Figure 1).
Hydrosat’s engineering enables a constellation of TIR and VNIR satellites that provides daily high resolution data globally.
VZ-1 was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket — Transporter-11 — out of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Loft Orbital’s Yet Another Mission (YAM-7). The rocket itself was a bit of a carpool — over a hundred other mostly commercial satellites were on board. We were joined by good friends at Carbon Mapper, Planet, and Capella, among others. A photo from SpaceX of all the satellites ready to go puts the world on notice that the commercial space industry is leading a revolution coming together to save the planet.
The launch marked a monumental engineering milestone for us as we had been building towards this moment for years. It also highlighted commercial success in that through investments, grants, and early customers that showcased we could develop, build, and launch a cutting-edge satellite (with more to come) without full support by direct government funding. And, while we fully celebrate the engineering and commercial parts of the company with this launch, we want to take a moment to reflect on the human component of what makes us – Hydrosat.
The Hydrosat VZ-1 satellite was named after one of our founders, Dr. Jakob Van Zyl, who’s originally from Namibia. Jakob’s career took him to Caltech for a Ph.D. then on to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). At JPL, he worked on Earth Science radar for soil moisture and quickly rose to Associate Director of JPL for Strategy and Director of Solar System Exploration, transitioning to launching missions to other planets while publishing over 220 papers cited over 13K times along the way. Our Science Lead, Josh Fisher, overlapped with Dr. Van Zyl at JPL for almost a decade, though Josh says that Jakob “was so high up the ladder” that he never directly worked with him, but does fondly remember him. It was to Josh’s surprise in 2019 that after 33 years at the top of the JPL career ladder, Dr. Van Zyl left JPL. Josh wondered what could have been so much better than the top of JPL to inspire Jakob, especially as he was still early in his ascending career at JPL. It was to co-found Hydrosat. Jakob’s vision was to accelerate Earth science missions cutting through governmental funding and bureaucratic limitations, and to strengthen the connection between data and applications. He wouldn’t know it then, but his vision succeeded.
Tragically, just a year after co-founding Hydrosat, Dr. Van Zyl passed away on August 26, 2020 (the VZ-1 launch was almost exactly 4 years later). His legacy remained strong in Hydrosat, and our co-founders Pieter Fossel and Royce Dalby, among many others, regrouped and forged ahead, picking up our CTO Scott Soenen to lead the engineering charge. It was they who thought to honor Dr. Van Zyl through the naming of the satellites.
We are rapidly growing with team members distributed throughout the world. With our early growth during the pandemic, the majority of us work remotely. Yet, every single person at Hydrosat is driven and inspired by the mission, technology, and applications, so it is very easy to find motivation daily. In-person hubs, like in Luxembourg, are buzzing with activity. There is an emphasis on work-life balance. Thanks to our mission and values we’ve been able to attract a high level of talent across the engineering and data pipelines to the commercial outreach and user training, from the interns to the leadership. Hydrosat makes or breaks on its ability to help people — the ultimate applied sciences — and we have been thriving as evidenced by our growth. This is a system that works.
Josh, Hydrosat Science Lead was particularly attracted to the technology for getting us to daily high-resolution TIR globally. He had previously been the founding Science Lead for ECOSTRESS while at JPL, and contributed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Decadal Survey that recommended the Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission. As he started exploring his role within Hydrosat, he realized there was a void we were filling with Dr. Van Zyl’s death just 1 year prior. He absorbed everything he could from what Jakob left behind in papers, presentations, and other documentation, trying to get a feel for what he had been thinking, and how he had been thinking.
Hydrosat CEO Pieter Fossel thanking family and friends at the launch event outside of Vandenberg Space Force Base.
We commemorate the launch of Hydrosat’s VZ-1, marking significant achievements, milestones, and an exciting future from the engineering and commercial legs that comprise the company. But, more importantly, Hydrosat has accomplished an incredible milestone of humanity, within the team and its extended family — its heart — which is just a microcosm of the overall mission of engaging and helping the humanity of the planet overall. We are here to help the world carry the torch forward.
This article, originally written by Hydrosat’s Science Lead, Josh Fisher, can be found at the link here.
