When you board a plane, the pilot already knows the weather on the runway and can steer clear, or at least warn you it’s coming. The same cannot be said for “space weather” from solar events, which can seriously affect satellites and even passenger planes.

Mission Space is about to launch a constellation that will provide near-real-time monitoring of this increasingly important phenomenon.

Space weather is a general term for the radiation in the near-Earth environment; outside the planet’s protective aura, satellites and spacecraft feel the full brunt of the sun’s rays, and a solar storm can disrupt or disable them. The type and intensity of this radiation shifts and flows just like atmospheric weather, but because it is invisible and moves at the speed of light, it is much more difficult to observe and predict.

There are many satellites and deep space missions that monitor solar radiation, but they are necessarily limited; imagine trying to predict a storm’s path with just a handful of wind and rain sensors scattered over the ocean. And while this has historically been sufficient, the growth of the new space economy has transformed space weather from an occasional nuisance into a constant and quantifiable threat.

“More and more companies are putting space weather on their agenda,” said Alex Po, CEO and founder of Mission Space. “We have 7,000 satellites in space, but in ten years there will be 50,000; it means that space weather events will be the same as now, but they will have ten times the impact.”

A severe solar storm is not only dangerous for electronics, but also for unprepared astronauts. If someone happens to do a spacewalk, they could get a face full of radiation – and if we want to establish a permanent presence on the moon, where there is just as little protection, we want to know exactly when it’s safe to go out.

Closer to the surface, airlines are concerned about passengers receiving large doses of radiation during a long flight across the poles, and some have even canceled flights because of it. And there are many secondary effects on services that depend on satellites, including precision agriculture.

Po’s startup, originally founded in Europe but now based in Israel and the US, is about to launch the first two of a planned 24-satellite constellation that will monitor space weather and provide near-real-time reports and predictions.

It is not intended to replace the scientific instruments currently in space, but to augment their data (much of which is public) with a comprehensive, proprietary stream that enables more precise, rapid monitoring.

Po explained that while many companies and governments are increasingly aware of the need for better space weather predictions, satellites are aging and data is difficult to share.

“The space weather monitoring infrastructure was developed in the late 90s, and many of the scientific models were developed 50 years ago,” Po said. Information sharing agreements between organizations such as NASA, NOAA and ESA are complex, and the data itself is not trivial to integrate and harmonize.

“There are no people in the companies who need this data who can understand it. What is needed are, for example, warnings for different warning levels for launch or for airlines. Everyone uses weather data but no one thinks about how it is generated: you just want to know if it will rain or not. It’s the same here,” he continued.

Mission Space currently uses public sources and is doing the work of normalizing it to create something of a unified data stream. But they are launching the first two of their own satellites in the first quarter of 2025, with more planned for later that year. Po said they could probably start faster, but it’s more beneficial to learn from the first set and improve as you go. “Engineers…” he said, “there are always more changes.”

The satellites themselves (called Zohar) are specialized but not exotic, he noted, leading to a lower cost for a constellation of 24 than you might expect. The important part is that they still collect 15 parameters a thousand times a second.

“Space weather is a data monopoly game: the first to launch the constellation and build the infrastructure will win,” he predicted. “Even with half a constellation, in two years we will generate a thousand times more space weather data than humans have generated in the last 60. And the real-time data will allow us to develop machine learning models based on that.”

They are not competing with governments and scientific organizations, he argued, or indeed even startups that want to serve these customers—collaboration is a necessity for several reasons.

Their customers are “aviation in general; satellite operators and space tourism companies; anyone who makes private space stations. They are all very aware of the problem,” says Po. “It was common knowledge in the aerospace industry but now companies are actually paying attention to solutions. And of course for defense, they have developed the domain, and you have to be sure that you will not have problems in critical space operations. With the current level of precision, it is difficult for them.”

While the real-time readings and predictions will have to wait for the full constellation, the pair rising in a few months should offer a marked improvement over the existing offerings. No exact date has been set for launch.