Planet Labs has built about 700 satellites in 15 years, more than any company except SpaceX.
Its AI interface links an LLM to satellite imagery and searches the entire Earth in under a second.
Planet Labs builds satellites in about eight hours versus eight years at NASA, at a thousandth of NASA's cost.
Planet Labs Shrinks Satellites to Photograph Earth Daily
Planet Labs has built about 700 satellites in fifteen years, more than any company except SpaceX, by mass-producing small spacecraft for a fraction of NASA's cost. Its factory builds spacecraft in eight hours, launches four or five times a year, and images the whole planet daily with machines that sift 100 terapixels daily. The bet is that capability per satellite, not the number of satellites, will keep its fleet ahead as AI search spans a decade of imagery.
Takeaways
Planet mass-produces satellites for less than NASA. Miniaturization took spacecraft from double-decker-bus size and billion-dollar price tags to cheap commercial electronics. NASA spent a billion dollars on a satellite while a phone with similar capabilities costs $500, and Planet launches four or five times a year .
Planet images the Earth daily with machine-scale data. Its satellites photograph from 500 kilometres, seeing individual trees and houses, and capture about 100 terapixels a day, roughly four million 47-megapixel images. Visual language models can now identify buildings, ships, planes and trains in that imagery .
Planet builds each satellite in about eight hours. At NASA a satellite can take about eight years. Planet builds each satellite in about eight hours, and bigger satellites take longer, so it is ramping production to make many dozens at once .
AI interface searches ten years of imagery instantly. Planet tied an LLM to the back end of its satellite imagery interface, so it can search the entire Earth in under a second. Visual language models can recognise buildings, ships, planes and trains in the imagery .
Satellites survive launch and extreme thermal swings. A vibration table simulates launch, and the telescope must stay in focus to within a fraction of a wavelength, less than a micron. Planet first flew a phone on a suborbital rocket. The launch failed but the electronics survived .
Space debris dwarfs the operating satellite fleet. About 10,000 satellites operate in space alongside on the order of 100m pieces of debris from breakups and crashes, including anti-satellite weapons. Planet also tells a gas company when methane tracking finds a large pipeline leak .
Planet's constellation shifts to capability over count. The guest expects the number of satellites to stay about the same or fall with the Owls. Planet is in a replenishing phase, where capability on each satellite matters more than the number of satellites .
Inside the AI demo
The interface holds 3,000 layers of imagery going back ten years, pretty much every day for ten years .
It produced a visualisation of deforestation .
Molly O'Shea asked for Area 51 over five years, and the comparison showed a structural change and two planes that are no longer there .
The interface is in beta and accessible to anyone as a testing version, and Planet Labs hopes to launch it soon .
