Two space startups have now merged and formed the next generation of telescopes

He was excited to see what its telescope partner PlaneWave Instruments could accomplish after leading a $9.5 million seed round for OurSky, a software platform for space observational data.
However, he was forced to wait while the telescopes were set up at PlaneWave’s production site that evening.
Kim said
“It took them quite a long time to get the first image. I’m talking like, multiple hours. And these are the people who make the telescopes! They were using all this, like, off-the-shelf, open source software that they kind of cobbled together,”.
Kim wasn’t upset, though. He was excited. “This is why OurSky needed to exist, right? This is the problem,” he remembered thinking. “What a perfect match.”
Because of how well they matched, OurSky and PlaneWave are now joining forces to form a new business called Observable Space.
This will make the telescopes easier to operate, according to Richard Hedrick, founder of PlaneWave, and Dan Roelker, founder of OurSky. Additionally, they think that the closer integration will lead to new markets, particularly as they capitalize on their status as the sole telescope maker based in the United States. The Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy at Georgia State University, the U.S. Space Force, and NASA are already among their clients.
Hedrick said in an interview
“My dream was to integrate all the components on the telescope, even the parts we don’t sell, and then integrate the control of the telescope,”. “It was very obvious for us to be working together.”
According to Roelker, who served as vice president of software engineering for SpaceX from 2015 to 2019, telescope users must contend with a “mash of integration bullsh–.” He said that those headaches would be eliminated by combining OurSky’s software with PlaneWave’s vertical strategy.
The Observable Space has a chance to expand its market share by resolving that integration issue. (The telescopes will still be marketed under the PlaneWave moniker, and the platform that OurSky has created will remain under that identity.)
Hedrick said one of those organizations has recently designed some one-meter telescopes and also had them custom-built by someone else. He also said “And they were like, ‘God, if you had existed, we never would have done that,’”.