EarthDaily Brand Guidelines: A Vancouver Constellation Built From UrtheCast’s Assets

A new company from an insolvent one.

EarthDaily grew out of a failure. Its predecessor, UrtheCast, was a Canadian satellite-imaging company founded in 2010 by Wade Larson and Scott Larson, according to English Wikipedia. It began by placing two cameras on the International Space Station — a medium-resolution and a high-resolution camera — in partnership with the Russian space agency Roscosmos; the cameras were launched in 2013 and began working in 2014.

UrtheCast expanded quickly. English Wikipedia says it bought the Spanish Earth-observation company Deimos Imaging and its two satellites in 2015, and in 2016 announced UrtheDaily, a planned constellation meant to image the Earth’s land every day, for which it contracted the British satellite builder Surrey Satellite Technology. In 2018 it bought Geosys, an agricultural data business, from Land O’Lakes.

The money ran out. In September 2020 UrtheCast sought creditor protection under Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, with matching protection in the United States, English Wikipedia says, citing the company’s statement that it had been unable to raise enough financing or find a buyer during the Covid-19 pandemic. In February 2021 it agreed to sell assets to a consortium led by the private-equity firm Antarctica Capital, a sale approved by the Canadian court overseeing the proceedings.

From that sale came EarthDaily Analytics, headquartered in Vancouver. English Wikipedia describes it as a new start-up that emerged from UrtheCast’s insolvency in 2021 and took on the UrtheDaily satellite project; the company’s own timeline says EarthDaily was “created in partnership with Antarctica Capital” in 2021. Its chief executive is Don Osborne, SpaceQ reported in 2025.

Ten satellites, launched in three waves.

The company’s timeline says contracts for a ten-satellite EarthDaily Constellation were awarded in 2022. Each spacecraft uses a Longbow satellite bus from Loft Orbital and multispectral imagers from ABB, SpaceQ reported in August 2025, when it also reported new financing from Trinity Capital intended to finish building and launching the constellation in 2026. The company’s engineers told SpaceQ that they had designed the satellites to be larger and more complex than a standard CubeSat.

The launches came in three waves. The first satellite, EDC-01, went up on SpaceX’s Transporter-14 rideshare mission in late June 2025, SpaceQ reported; English Wikipedia gives the date as 23 June. Six more, EDC-02 to EDC-07, were launched together on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare on 3 May 2026, The Debrief reported, with Loft Orbital handling integration, launch and operations. Osborne called the arrangement a “new model” for building constellations, one that let EarthDaily concentrate on delivering calibrated data, the publication reported. The eighth, EDC-08, launched on Transporter-17 on 7 July 2026, Military & Aerospace Electronics reported.

The company called that July flight “Launch III” and said it brought the system to the satellite count needed for commercial operations, which it expected to begin later in 2026. Its website in November 2026 showed eight satellites launched and two more listed as upcoming. According to the company, each satellite carries 16 imagers covering 22 spectral bands across visible, near-infrared, shortwave-infrared and thermal light; English Wikipedia gives a spatial resolution of 5 metres.

The constellation is built around one idea, which the company calls broad-area change detection: imaging the same places at the same time of day from the same angle, so that differences between images reflect real change on the ground. EarthDaily says it aligns its measurements with the public Landsat and Sentinel archives so that its data can be compared with them.

Design and documentation.

Earth-observation companies sell something most customers never see being made. Their satellites are small, distant and short-lived, so the brand has to be carried by what comes back: the picture, the signal and the map. The companies in this guide build or operate satellites that take optical photographs, record radar echoes, or listen for radio signals from ships, aircraft and the atmosphere, and most of them now describe themselves as data or intelligence businesses rather than satellite makers.

Their public image leans on a few recurring scenes. Crisp overhead views of ports, farmland and city grids show what optical satellites can see from orbit. Radar companies favour grainy, false-colour textures in which water turns dark and buildings glow, because radar images look nothing like photographs. Small satellites appear on clean-room benches under bright light, handled by staff in gowns and gloves, as proof that the hardware is real and made in-house.

On their websites the satellite often gives way to the screen. Maps, dashboards, map layers and charts present the data as something a customer can open and use, and product names tend to describe a platform, a feed or a service rather than a spacecraft. Many of these firms sell to governments and defence ministries as well as to farming, shipping, insurance and mapping businesses, so their language swings between mission and market.

The trade meets at shows such as the GEOINT Symposium in the United States and the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium in Europe, where launches, contracts and new image products are announced. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it now, where its satellites are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Satellites, processing and analytics in one company.

EarthDaily presents itself as more than a satellite operator. Its website divides the business into three parts: the constellation, a processing platform called EarthOne, and analytics products for agriculture, insurance, mining, forestry, civil government and defence. The company’s timeline says it bought Descartes Labs, a geospatial analytics company, in 2024 and SkyForest in 2025.

Its customers are spread across those markets. In May 2026 The Debrief reported, from the company’s announcement, that EarthDaily had recently signed a commercial observation contract with the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office and a data-subscription agreement with an unnamed U.S. defence and intelligence technology company. Its website lists agricultural products for crop identification and parametric insurance, and wildfire and flood models for insurers.

The company also built a list of early users before its constellation was complete. Its timeline says that in 2025 it signed more than 500 agreements for its Pioneer Program, an early-access scheme for constellation data, in the same year that its first satellite reached orbit. Its website describes the constellation’s orbit as sun-synchronous, so that each place is passed at the same local time, and names its full operation as the goal for 2026.

For a design guide, EarthDaily shows how a company can rebuild a brand around one plain promise, stated in its own name. Compare Planet, another company imaging the Earth every day, and SSTL, the builder first contracted for UrtheDaily. For this guide we use a deep green, a pale haze and an ochre accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep EarthDaily’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.