Welcome to the main page for the Spiral Blue LiDAR for forest carbon white paper!
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Starship-class 2000kg satellite
Is climate change the greatest long term threat to the survival of the human race? Bigger than AI, nuclear war, or global pandemic? It might not be, but it does make every other threat worse.
It is critical that we limit the global temperature rise to less than 2°C to ensure we do not fly past any irreversible tipping points that could throw all of our natural systems out of balance. But to ensure we stay within 2°C, we need to do more than reduce emissions. We need to capture emissions.
Growing and maintaining forests is the most well understood method for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. However, measurements of change in forest carbon (flux) suffers from significant uncertainty rates of 20% to 60%. Using LiDAR cuts uncertainty rates to as little as 10%.
So if we could use LiDAR to measure the Earth’s forests every year, what would that do for us? Even conservatively, using LiDAR could help us avoid mistakenly putting 76 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere by 2080.
This could prevent up to ~0.03°C in warming, an impact of up to $14 trillion by 2080. Given the potential for forest carbon to capture up to 7 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, this results in a market size for forest carbon measurements alone in excess of $70 billion annually.
We expect 1m resolution LiDAR data will be needed to reduce forest carbon uncertainty below 10%. Currently, a single global scan using aircraft at this resolution is likely to cost in excess of $50 billion, with drones likely more costly. Can a LiDAR Earth observation satellite capable of collecting 1m resolution data be feasibly built and launched despite the inherent technical challenges?
We explore two satellite architectures: a 250kg satellite able to be built and launched today on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare; and another 2000kg satellite to be launched on a future Starship rideshare mission.
The 250kg satellite is found to require a 5.1mJ in laser pulse energy, given reasonable estimates on available power, orbit altitude, required return energy, size of optics, and geophysical parameters. This is comparable to NASA’s GEDI.
Such a satellite could only capture around 362,000 sqkm per year, with an revenue potential per satellite of more than $36 million per year. Given reasonable satellite manufacturing, launch, and operations costs, this leads to a payback period of 6.7 months. Quite a large constellation of 461 such satellites would be needed to map Earth’s forests every year.
The 2000kg satellite is found to need only 0.6mJ of laser pulse energy, given much higher available power from 300sqm of solar, reduced altitude due to flying in very low Earth orbit, and slightly upsized optics.
This satellite can achieve a coverage of 78.8 million sqkm per year, earning up to $8 billion per year. The satellite can pay for itself within 7 days of becoming operational. We would only need 2 satellites to cover the Earth’s forests every year.