Bordeaux Remote Imaging CubeSat
A proof of concept exploring what it would take to monitor Bordeaux vineyards from a dedicated CubeSat. The visualization includes real orbital mechanics, ground station coverage, and pass prediction. It took a weekend to build.
This is the kind of project that makes AI tooling dangerous. Anyone can now reproduce something like this, including orbital physics and 3D globe rendering, with no physics or coding background. But being able to build it does not make it a viable business project worth pursuing. A single-region CubeSat for vineyard monitoring makes no financial sense. The climate problem it addresses, however, is very real.
Built as a fork of the open-source satvis project using CesiumJS, Satellite.js, and Vue.js.
Built with
The takeaway
AI makes it trivially easy to build impressive-looking technical projects. That does not make them worth funding. Know the difference.
Interactive visualization
Two orbital reference frames showing the hypothetical CubeSat. The fixed frame is centered on Bordeaux with a sensor cone showing ground coverage. The inertial frame shows the full orbit path from a space-based perspective.
Why climate monitoring matters for wine regions
Bordeaux is not the only region under pressure. Across the global wine industry, growing seasons are getting warmer, harvest dates are advancing, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. Regions that built their identity on specific climatic conditions (Burgundy, Barossa, Napa, Mosel) face a version of the same problem: the climate they planned for is no longer the climate they have.
Satellite-based monitoring at the appellation scale could provide something individual vineyards cannot: a regional baseline. Vegetation stress, water availability, canopy density, and thermal patterns across thousands of hectares, tracked consistently over years, would give growers and appellations the data they need to make collective decisions about varietal selection, irrigation policy, and long-term land use.
Today, this kind of data is available piecemeal from commercial satellite providers like Sentinel-2 and Planet Labs, but it requires significant technical expertise to process and interpret. The gap is not in the satellites. It is in making the data accessible and actionable for the people who actually manage the vines.