Capella Space Synthentic Aperture Radar (SAR) cubesat, artistic rendering. Photo: Capella Space

Capella Space added senior business and engineering leaders to its team. Scott Soenen was added as vice president of product engineering; Matt Wood as vice president of go-to-market and business strategy, and Dan Brophy as vice president of U.S. government services. This is in addition to Christian Lenz, who joined as vice president of engineering in July 2018. Off the heels of the successful launch of its first smallsat, Denali, in December of 2018, these hires add domain expertise and market experience as the company progresses toward the launch of Sequoia, a commercial imaging satellite set to deploy mid-2019.

“We are building Capella because problems of tomorrow require solutions with a new perspective that didn’t exist yesterday. It is critical for us to attract experienced, out of box thinkers in our industry,” said Capella Space Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Payam Banazadeh. “The expertise these new executives bring will be crucial as we grow our constellation and prove the value of high revisit, high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) products and services to government and early adopters in commercial markets.”

Capella is building a constellation of 36 satellites for continuous global monitoring. According to the release, each 40 kilogram satellite is a fraction of the time and cost to deployment of traditional SAR systems, enabling the company to rapidly put on-orbit a, redundant, low-latency space infrastructure for high resolution, high revisit Earth observation. The full constellation is expected to be deployed in 2022.