A satellite can take a photograph of Earth and still leave everyone on Earth waiting. The camera has done its job. The picture exists. Somewhere below, a person might have a use for it. Between the two sits the awkward business of getting the information delivered. Justin Oliveira built a company around that interval. It is an unusually practical place to begin a space venture: with the queue.
In 2016, Oliveira and Daniel Nevius founded Analytical Space, the company later called Hedron. Oliveira was its founding chief executive. Their proposition was to give remote-sensing satellites more opportunities to send their data home. They would put communications relays in orbit, receiving information by radio and moving it onward through a network designed to use optical links. The spacecraft taking the pictures could keep their existing equipment. The new infrastructure would do the connecting.
Oliveira now leads Boston Geospatial, which helps organizations assess natural threats to critical infrastructure. The subject has moved from satellite communications to ground movement, terrain and risk. Read across those two ventures and a particular question comes into focus: what has to happen between collecting a measurement and making it useful? The answer involves rather more than buying a better camera.
Before the laser, the fuel tank
Oliveira trained as an aerospace engineer at Florida Institute of Technology, earning his bachelor’s degree in 2006 and his master’s in 2007. His early research concerned cryogenic propellants and thermal stratification. One 2007 presentation examined how an isogrid, the reinforcing pattern inside a tank, affects propellant behavior. Another addressed modeling fuel in a rotating, reduced-gravity environment. These were questions about the physical behavior of a spacecraft’s contents, down to the surface against which a fluid moves.
The names on those presentations include Sunil Chintalapati, who would later work alongside Oliveira at Boston Geospatial. Long before the two appeared together on a pipeline geohazards paper, they shared a research credit involving rocket propellant. There is a pleasing change of scenery here: from the inside of a fuel tank to the ground beneath an energy network. The collaboration survived the change in scale.
Oliveira began his NASA career in 2007, working on the Space Shuttle and lunar programs. He subsequently moved into research and development management, working with small businesses on space technology, and then into strategy work at NASA headquarters. By 2014, he had moved to the White House Office of Management and Budget, where his responsibilities included NASA programs. His career had carried him from engineering calculations into the institutions that decide which engineering gets funded.
An orbit is a rather inconvenient office
Harvard Business School came next. Oliveira attended from 2015 to 2017, earning an MBA. There he joined forces with Nevius, another member of the MBA class of 2017. Both had experience around space technology and government. Analytical Space took shape during their time at the school, with a commercial question attached to a technical one: could a separate communications service help satellite operators get more value from equipment they already owned?
In September 2017, the company raised $3.5 million in seed funding. It was among the early investments of The Engine, the venture firm founded by MIT to support technology businesses with substantial development work ahead of them. A communications network in orbit was a suitable test of that patience. Software can be revised at a desk. Space hardware also has to acquire a ride.
The appeal of the relay design lay partly in its accommodation of customers’ existing radios. A satellite already in space cannot be summoned to a workshop for an upgrade. Analytical Space planned to receive data from those radios and provide another route down. It addressed a constraint that better sensors alone could not remove: the opportunity to communicate with a suitable receiving station.
Explaining the problem in 2017, Oliveira said satellites “only get a few hours a day of connectivity.” It was a compact way to describe the commercial frustration. A machine can spend its working day producing valuable material and have only a limited window in which to deliver it. Even in orbit, distribution has a habit of making itself everyone’s problem.
A shoebox leaves the station
In 2018, the idea acquired a physical representative: Radix. The roughly shoebox-sized satellite traveled to the International Space Station aboard a Cygnus resupply spacecraft and was subsequently deployed through the NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer. Its job was to test the components of a hybrid radio-frequency and optical relay service in low Earth orbit.
Beta-test partners were to send data from their satellites to Radix. The demonstrator would store it for downlink through its high-speed radio and optical systems. The prospective partners spanned commercial remote sensing, academic research and civil government. The test was intended to inform future satellites and the eventual network. A demonstrator is a specific achievement, with a specific remit; the network remained the larger undertaking.
By late 2018, Analytical Space had one satellite aloft and was beta testing. Oliveira and Nevius also faced the decidedly terrestrial questions that accompany a new service: whom to sell to first, how to validate demand and how to charge. Those decisions became the subject of a Harvard Business School case published in January 2019. An orbital experiment and a pricing discussion belonged to the same business. Both had to work.
The founders’ approach to learning the business had a hands-on streak. In a January 2018 podcast, they discussed making sure they had each done the tasks required at Analytical Space at least once, including reviewing and negotiating the legal documents for their first major financing. A company sending technology into space still needed someone to read the paperwork. The paperwork, regrettably, could not be downlinked to somebody else’s judgment.
The name changed. His work moved on.
Oliveira’s operating tenure at Analytical Space ran from 2016 to 2019. He then founded Boston Geospatial. In October 2021, Analytical Space announced its new name, Hedron, alongside a $17.8 million Series A round. By that announcement, Nevius was chief executive. The distinction matters to Oliveira’s story: he co-founded the enterprise and led its early development, while the later financing and rebrand occurred under his co-founder’s leadership.
Hedron’s name shortened “polyhedron,” referring to its network topology and optical communications design. Boston Geospatial’s vocabulary is more earthbound: screening, monitoring, alerts. Its clients are concerned with infrastructure and the environmental conditions around it. Where is an asset exposed? Is the terrain changing? Which location deserves attention first?
The company describes services that combine satellite radar, optical imagery and other information to assess threats and track change. Its offerings extend from initial risk screening to monitoring campaigns and alerts. That sequence gives Oliveira a different position in the journey of a measurement. At Analytical Space, the immediate concern was getting information delivered. At Boston Geospatial, the work includes interpreting what a changing landscape means for the organization responsible for an asset within it.
“only get a few hours a day of connectivity.”
Justin Oliveira, on satellites’ limited contact time, 2017
The ground does not read the inspection schedule
In a conversation about pipeline safety with Irth’s Jason Adams and Matthew Abbitt, Oliveira discussed why satellite radar is useful for observing terrain. Among its advantages, he explained, “it can operate at night and through clouds and poor weather conditions.” Repeated measurements can reveal changes in the ground around infrastructure. The practical question is how to connect those changes to engineering risk and the decisions an operator has to make.
Oliveira and Chintalapati have also presented work on a GIS-based assessment of case studies from a federal pipeline geohazard advisory. Their abstract emphasizes the variety of threats, from landslides to subsidence and seismicity, and the need to combine different methods. It is a useful restraint on any temptation to treat one sensor as an answer to everything. A satellite measurement enters a larger process of assessment.
Federal research records give this chapter concrete dates. Oliveira was principal investigator on Boston Geospatial’s 2022 National Science Foundation SBIR Phase I project, “Operational Monitoring of Large-Area Critical Infrastructure.” A separate 2023 Air Force Phase I award supported work on near real-time geospatial intelligence for critical infrastructure. These projects put the company’s proposition into research programs with defined technical goals.
In January 2025, a $2,054,388 Phase II award began for “Enhanced Soil State Monitoring in Arctic Environments,” again naming Oliveira as principal investigator. Scheduled through January 2027, the project proposes improvements in soil monitoring using satellite radar, including work on the thickness of the seasonally thawing layer in permafrost regions. Its objectives include checking subsidence measurements against ground observations and demonstrating the resulting software over an Arctic test area. The award describes work to be done, rather than a finished capability.
A useful answer has somewhere to go
Another Arctic collaboration brings Oliveira together with Hillary Palmer of Dewberry and Manoochehr Shirzaei of Virginia Tech. The project combines satellite radar analysis and digital twin modeling to study land subsidence associated with permafrost degradation. Oliveira serves as a co-principal investigator. Once again, the work sits between a measurement of the landscape and the needs of people responsible for infrastructure on it.
There is continuity in the partnerships as well as the subject matter. Nevius shared the venture-building chapter at Harvard. Chintalapati appears in the early aerospace research and the later geospatial work. The current Arctic project adds engineering and academic collaborators. Oliveira’s career has repeatedly required other specialties to meet his own, whether the job involved an orbital relay, a funding decision or interpreting ground motion.
The shift from Radix to Arctic soil makes his story more interesting than a straight march toward ever more spacecraft. The important destination has become increasingly specific: an operator with an asset to look after and a decision to make. Getting the observation there is one problem. Giving that person a reason to act is another. Oliveira has made businesses on both sides of that journey. The view may begin in space; the work keeps bringing him back to Earth.
Phase II award for enhanced soil state monitoring in Arctic environments.