As smoke from hundreds of wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites of the Google-backed FireSat program were successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of detecting even small fires in the United States, Australia and Europe before the end of the year.
The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 7, 2026 marks a transition to the “initial operational capability” of the FireSat constellation managed by the Non-profit Tierra Fuego Alliance. After a three-month trial period, the three satellites will begin actively providing data to fire agencies while covering all of Earth’s fire-prone regions at least twice a day.
FireSat represents the first satellite constellation designed specifically to detect wildfires, including detecting smaller fires that other satellites may miss. The satellites were designed by California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space and have received more than 15 million dollars from Google to support initial deployment. Other notable financial backers include the Bezos Earth Fund which committed 26 million dollars.
Each satellite is equipped with multispectral images that can look through smoke and clouds and detect fires as small as five by five meters (about 16 by 16 feet). This ability was demonstrated by a FireSat Protflight Satellite which launched in March 2025 and collected more than a million images, while demonstrating that it could detect low-intensity fires invisible to existing satellites.
The future of forest fire detection
He “Early Adopter” Organizations Those that will begin using FireSat data this year include fire agencies in California, Colorado, Australia and Portugal. As more satellites are launched, the FireSat program aims to provide the latest images anywhere in the world every hour by 2029. Such images will eventually be available every 20 minutes once the full constellation of more than 50 satellites is launched in the early 2030s.
