By now you have probably heard the news that Planet Labs be acquire BlackBridge, the operator of the 5-satellite, 5-meter, 5-band constellation referred to as RapidEye. It is not the intent of this article to comment on the financial or “corporate” side of the pending acquisition, we will leave that to the experts. Rather, as we are the sole provider of satellite imagery for many of our readers, the intent of this article is to provide our perspective on the combination of BlackBridge and Planet Labs. Little Will Change With Regards to RapidEye Imagery From our conversations with RapidEye, little to nothing will change when it comes to pricing of archive and tasking orders, minimum order sizes and corridor widths nor tasking timelines. We think this is the single most important piece of news we can provide to our Geospatial Times readers. If you have any active or pending orders for 5-meter RapidEye imagery, your quotes are still valid as are your tasking timelines. Change Happens No industry is immune to corporate mergers and acquisitions, and this is also true for our industry, take for example the merger of DigitalGlobe and GeoEye in 2013 that we commented on here. The … testContinue reading →