DELIVERING THE VISION: DR. MALCOLM LECOMPTE SEES DECADE-LONG DREAM NEAR REALITY WITH ASTROVISION

STENNIS, Mississippi – It’s not every day that an astrophysicist delivers your newspaper. But if you’d lived in a certain Boston suburb in 1996, your morning Boston Globe may well have been brought to you courtesy of Dr. Malcolm LeCompte, who holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysical, Planetary, and Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Colorado.

For LeCompte, the paper route was just one more way to keep his dream alive. That dream – using imaging technologies developed for interplanetary exploration to provide real-time, true color satellite images of the earth – had been with him then for more than five years. Having recently left his job at a local defense contractor, LeCompte took over his son’s early morning route as a way to earn a little extra income while researching his project. "At the time, no one had really looked at the Earth with the kind of wide-eyed innocence we were using to view our neighbors in the solar system," says LeCompte. "It struck me as ironic that in some ways, we were actually accumulating better information from space probes about other planets than we were about our own."

The idea that was to become AstroVision (www.astrovis.com) first occurred to LeCompte around 1991, as he was researching remote sensing electro-optical systems for a Massachusetts-based military contractor. "It seemed to me that we should be applying the same technology that we used on interplanetary probes to observe what ’s happening with our own planet more closely," he says. LeCompte worked out an arrangement with his employer that allowed him to pursue his dream one day a week in return for a 20 percent cut in pay. He began conducting basic market and technical research, looking at the options for placing a camera in space, and identifying customers that would pay for the live satellite images. He talked to Hughes about piggybacking a TV-type camera on that company’s telecom-munications satellites, but the idea was rejected as too risky. LeCompte then concluded that if his idea was going to fly, he would have to take matters into his own hands.

Fortunately, LeCompte was well versed in the technologies used to probe the solar system. He had earned his doctorate while working at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space and Physics at the University of Colorado in the early 1980s, where he analyzed Mars data from NASA’s Mariner 9 and Venus data from the NASA Pioneer Venus orbiter. When a drop in funding for planetary exploration in the early 1980s left LeCompte without portfolio at the lab, he applied for astronaut training (LeCompte is a Naval Reserve Flight Officer), only to be cut in the final selection round. He then went to Harvard, where he did post-doctorate work on the "shuttle glow" problem before jumping to private industry.

Pointing Interplanetary Technology at the Earth

Throughout this period, planetary exploration technology was being advanced in the nation’s labs. From LeCompte’s point of view, perhaps the most important development during this time was the introduction of charged couple devices (CCDs) into cameras in the late 1970s. CCD arrays allowed engineers to design cameras that operate similarly to the human eye, and that are able to capture and deliver nearly instantaneous, full-color images of distant planets. LeCompte believed that these cameras, mounted on satellites and launched into geostationary orbit, could also provide a wealth of new information about the earth. LeCompte spent the next five years refining his concept and looking for backers. In late 1995, he entered into a joint agreement with NASA’s Commercial Remote Sensing Office at Stennis Space Center, wherein the agency would help develop the prototype AstroVision product marketing demonstrations. In 1996, he left his job – and salary – to work on AstroVision full time. With one child in college, another about to start, and no money coming in, this was a difficult period for the AstroVision founder. "While the demonstrations we created at Stennis generated increased interest from companies on the media side, no one was willing to put up the money to get the project started," LeCompte says.

Not everyone greeted his ideas with enthusiasm. "There was definitely some skepticism out there, especially among meteorologists," LeCompte recalls. "One question we kept hearing was, ‘Why would anyone want a satellite image delivered every five minutes?’ The suggestion was that it would be sort of like watching grass grow."

Convinced that his critics were wrong, and that there was a market for real-time, full motion video of the earth, LeCompte persevered. In fact, what he proposed to do was radically different from anything then available. "The views of the earth we typically see are from weather satellites which use an older, scanning technology to create images," says LeCompte. "Those systems can give you a fairly high resolution image but it takes over 20 minutes to get a full disc of the earth at one kilometer and that’s in gray scale, without color and no ability to record what our eyes would see at night. With CCDs, you get color, night time coverage, and the ability to deliver images as fast as you want."

As LeCompte relates it, the scanning systems are missing any events that occur between images. "Lightning, volcanic eruptions, and meteorites, for example, or the launch of the space shuttle, are events that you can see in real-time with our system that existing weather satellites probably won’t pick up at the moment they happen," he says. These missing images are both highly visual and potentially useful. "In turns out that lightning, in some circumstances, has a high predictive capability for tornado formation," LeCompte relates. In late 1998, that insight alone was sufficient to land AstroVision a two-year $9.4 million contract with NASA to research early detection of tornadoes.

LeCompte’s first big break with AstroVision came in 1997 when the University of Southern Mississippi agreed to fund some research in the field enabling LeCompte to move to Mississippi. Also in 1997, NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth program accepted a proposal to buy and evaluate a simulated sample of AstroVision’s color coverage of a hurricane. By 1998, however, money was running out and LeCompte’s idea for real-time video from space was still stuck on the drawing board. It was then that he was introduced to Michael Hewins, an investor with a background in satellite insurance. Hewins joined the company as president and chief executive officer and set out to find financing for AstroVision, leaving LeCompte to concentrate on finalizing the designs.

LeCompte developed a system that will deploy five satellites 22,000 miles up in geostationary orbit, providing real-time, true color global coverage. Using commercially available CCD technology, the AstroVision system will initially deliver images at a rate of one frame every second (compared to one frame every 15-26 minutes for the current generation of weather satellites known as GOES, or Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites). Each satellite will carry both wide- and narrow-field cameras and operate as its own revenue center. The first satellite will provide coverage of North and South America, with subsequent satellites expanding coverage to Europe, the Mideast, Asia, and the mid-Pacific.

Demand for Content Ramps Up

As the technical picture came into tighter focus, developments in the broader communications market were suddenly generating intense interest in AstroVision’s product from a number of major media companies. "The explosion in media – principally the Internet but also cable and direct broadcast satellite systems – created an extraordinary demand for content," says Hewins. "You have cable systems out there with 500 channels, and hundreds of Internet sites all competing for traffic, all interested in unique content. For example, the Weather Channel alone received 600 million hits in two days when Hurricane Floyd moved up the East Coast in 1999. All of a sudden we looked around and saw that with all these new distribution platforms, there was going to be tremendous interest in our content, which will be totally proprietary to AstroVision."

It quickly became apparent that there were other substantial markets beyond weather-related information. Among those identified by the company to date are education, environmental, transportation, risk mitigation for the insurance industry, and remote sensing. "The more we looked at this, the more potential applications we’ve found," says LeCompte. These new market opportunities did not pass unnoticed in the investment community. On June 6, 2000 the company announced that it had received $5 million in funding from SpaceVest, a Virginia-based venture capital firm dedicated to supporting the commercial growth of space and related high tech industries, and Sofinov, an investor in innovative technology companies and a subsidiary of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDP). Since that time SpaceVest has acquired all of CDP's interests in AstroVision.

With the funding starting to fall into place, AstroVision is currently on track to launch its first satellite in 2008. If all goes well, LeCompte, who once delivered newspapers to make ends meet, will soon be delivering satellite images to a worldwide audience.