Where in Xinjiang is the cotton woven into your t-shirt hand-harvested? Which bridges in North Rhine-Westphalia are in danger of collapsing? Where in western India do children risk their lives for your lipstick by digging for mica in illegal mines? Where in Argentina does the ground dry up so Tesla has enough lithium for your car? Where in Ukraine is Russia stealing the grain? Hundreds of stories can be told and forensically proven using data from space. Vertical52 brings them back to earth. For this we are developing a platform for searching, evaluating and visualizing satellite data.
There are now more than 6,300 satellites orbiting the earth, more than four times as many as six years ago. These include public satellite programs such as ESA's Sentinel Mission, but also commercial providers, most notably Maxar and Planet from the USA or Airbus from Europe. In the past, access and evaluation of satellite data was reserved for intelligence services and the military. Today, they offer more and more civilian and commercial uses that also enrich the work of media companies and NGOs. At the latest with the images from Ukraine - of the Russian convoy that announced Putin's invasion in real time or of the corpses from Bucha - it has also reached the mainstream that research from space can be proven.
But because very few journalists have either access to high-resolution, commercial satellite images or the knowledge to derive complex analyzes from them and also no tool to be able to produce spatial stories, we build Vertical52. Available soon as a convenient subscription - for journalists, scientists, publishers and NGOs.
So if you are looking for images, want to observe the earth or want to test our beta version, then contact us: marcus@vertical52.org or subscribe to our newsletter.