Artist rendition of Spire’s Lemur-2 satellite. Photo: Spire

Spire Global has signed GHGSat as a new customer for its space services segment, and will launch three 16U satellites in 2023 that to GHGSat’s greenhouse gas-monitoring payload.

GHGSat currently operates six satellites, and Spire said this deal will help the company meet growing demand for its  measurements of methane emissions from industrial sites worldwide. GHGSat will use Spire’s API to receive its data and operate its payloads.

Stephane Germain, CEO of GHGSat said hosting its payloads on Spire satellites allows the company to focus on its business of monitoring instead of satellite manufacturing and operations. “Having successfully completed and launched our initial satellite assets, GHGSat plans to add hosted payload solutions to complement our full satellite solutions to accelerate monitoring. We expect to seamlessly manage these three hosted payloads as part of our growing constellation of satellites and payloads in orbit, providing more facility-level emissions measurements for our customers at the lowest detection threshold available in the world today,” Germain said.

Spire’s space as a service is a business line in which it sells access to its space operations for customers to operate their own space business. It has similar space service deals with Myriota, North Star Earth and Space, and Sierra Nevada Corporation.