by
KEVIN MANEY •
Image by
BEN FEARNLEY
IN 2013, James “Jimi” Crawford founded a company called Orbital Insight, barely noticed at the time amid the Silicon Valley froth. Crawford had worked at NASA for 15 years and wrote software for Mars rovers. He left NASA to run engineering for Google Books, and while there he noticed that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other new companies were driving down the cost of building and launching satellites. Crawford saw an opportunity to collect and analyze what he anticipated would be a deluge of images from a surfeit of new satellites that would circle the Earth, taking readings and pictures. Orbital Insight’s first product looked at images of cornfields all over the world, analyzing the health of plants to predict yields for traders who bet on future price swings.