Orbital Sidekick

Orbital Sidekick (OSK) is a space-based hyperspectral intelligence company that builds and operates its own satellites to deliver chemical-level insight into Earth's surface. The company's core product is the GHOSt (Global Hyperspectral Observation Satellite) constellation, a fleet of small satellites that capture roughly 512 spectral bands from the visible through shortwave infrared range, enabling detection of gas leaks, oil spills, and other subsurface or trace-level phenomena invisible to conventional imaging.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, OSK originated from work with pipeline operators seeking earlier detection of hydrocarbon leaks and has since expanded into broader environmental and defense monitoring. The first GHOSt satellites launched in April 2023, each weighing about 100 kilograms and operating in low Earth orbit at roughly 535 kilometers altitude, delivering some of the highest-resolution commercial hyperspectral imagery available, with a ground sampling distance around eight meters.

Data collected by the GHOSt constellation is delivered through OSK's Spectral Intelligence Global Monitoring Application (SIGMA), a platform that provides tasking, analytics, and alerting so that oil and gas operators, government agencies, and other customers can monitor infrastructure integrity, methane and other gas emissions, water quality, and land-use change at scale.

OSK's customer base spans commercial energy operators seeking regulatory compliance and leak detection, as well as U.S. government and defense customers using the same hyperspectral data for broader situational awareness and environmental monitoring applications.