Sourcery
00:18:14 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:18:14] S1: Amazing. Okay. [00:18:15] S0: Let's Okay. Get We'll put some hair nets on. Suited up. Yeah. Alright. So we're going into the clean room to see some of the bigger satellites. You're hair netted up. You look cool. We look cool. Let's go. Alright. So, yeah. So in here, we actually build the satellites, the bigger satellites. That's a stand for one of the satellites here. Can You actually see these are the solar panels that will be attached to these bigger satellites. This is a bus of one of the bigger satellites. So that's the, core spacecraft components. That does the attitude determination and control. It does the propulsion. It does the radio communications. The propulsion, I think, is on the bottom. And so basically, all of that harness held... Holds the payload, which is a huge telescope that looks down. Mhmm. So most of the volume is taken up with that. Then somewhere around here, we have one of the actual satellites. Oh, actually, this is a bit of fun. You can see there the optics, the primary optics [00:19:15] S1: Oh, yeah.
00:19:15 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:19:15] S1: Oh, yeah. [00:19:16] S0: There. That is the big telescope looking down. So that gives you a sense of the scale. But here's the spacecraft that we're gonna look at. So this is Pelican-ten. So it's one of our highest resolution satellites. So this this is now integrated. It has the telescope inside of it. So here you can see at the back, this is the propulsion system. You can see this is the feeder. These are the two main tanks. This is the pressurant tank, of that propulsion system. So that's the back end. The telescope is that this is the connection that goes to the rocket here and then and then these are star cameras that are actually hidden enclosed so that they, we don't get dust in them. And, the telescope is inside of here. You can't really see it. So it's all wrapped up in this main section. Wow. Any questions? [00:20:15] S1: Yeah. A lot. [00:20:16] S0: Go on then. [00:20:17] S1: Okay. So Planet Labs is vertically integrated. So how many of these components are you building in house versus which parts are not as Yeah. Kind of
00:20:17 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:20:17] S1: Okay. So Planet Labs is vertically integrated. So how many of these components are you building in house versus which parts are not as Yeah. Kind of [00:20:28] S0: a... It's a little bit nuanced because at the chip level, we buy almost everything externally. Yeah. But at the system level, we build almost everything internally. So the telescope, we get the blanks from a a company, but we integrate the telescope as you saw over there here. And so we build up the framing and the and the structure. Similar for almost everything else, the radios, we don't build our own chips. You know, we get the same chips from other people, WiMAX components, other things, but we integrate them into special circuits that... And with special antenna that enable us to get the radio frequency sort of, output that we need. So it really depends. I would say the way to think about it simplistically is the chips we buy, the systems we build. [00:21:14] S1: And so how many Pelicans do you produce a year? How many Doves? How many Tanagers? [00:21:20] S0: Great question. [00:21:21] S1: Through all these.
00:21:21 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:21:21] S1: Through all these. [00:21:22] S0: So we're ramping up on the Pelicans. The the Doves, we build hundreds. We've built about over 650 of those Doves here in this lab. We can build up to, 40 a week. So we can... We don't do that every week, but we can build really fast. So I think each satellite custom takes about eight hours to build Okay. To give you a sense. Yeah. And to give you a sense, when I was at NASA, it was, like, eight years. Okay. Not eight days. So it was, like, completely changing. These bigger ones take a bit longer, and we're ramping up the production so we can do many dozens of those. In fact, we just announced a new facility in Berlin where we're doubling again the manufacturing space that we have that we announced could do up to 60 of those these sort of per year. So that'll give you a sense of scale. And then the Tanagers is rather lower volume because they're sort of specialized instruments that we're working with NASA JPL Yeah. To on. And we just launched our second one literally last week, and we've got another one that's actually, I think, behind there. We can't go in because that one's more controlled. Yeah. So we can't go into that. You can see it's black. Top secret. That that that payload is a little bit more specialized. It takes a little bit more work, and so we're launching a couple more of those per year sort of rate. [00:22:47] S1: Is there a goal to how many you're gonna build in a constellation, or is some of this replenishing? Like, how do you...
00:22:54 · S0
[00:22:54] S0: It is replenishing now, and in fact, it's more about what capability do you have on each satellite than the number of satellites. We have the largest earth imaging fleet. It's about 10 times larger than anyone else. And most importantly, it images about a 100 times more area than any other commercial actor, at least Western one. The Chinese are trying to build similar systems. In fact, even copy our names. They called their... What do they call it? Pigeon or something. It was like a close to dove. Anyway, it was like... It looked eerily similar, and it... They even named it eerily similar. But but, no, roughly speaking, we're the only ones that cover the whole world every day. If you look at any other players, they might task to a few specific locations but cover less than 1% of the landmass of the Earth per day or maybe a couple of percent at most. Whereas we cover the whole of it, so, you know, a 100 times ish area collection. So that's what we really care about. The OWLs are the upgrade, to have the area, collection the same, but 10 times more data per unit area because we're going from three meter resolution to one meter resolution daily scan of the planet. And that's roughly three by three times more data, so 10 times more data almost. And also, we're getting it back 10 times faster because we're adding optical links and links to get that back really quickly. So, basically, you can get it with... Back within a few minutes. So we're getting 10 times faster back and 10 times more data. But, actually, the number of satellites will stay about the same, if not go down a little bit because of the nature of how we're building those. Mhmm. So it's it's not how many satellites you have. It's what you do with them or something.
00:24:30 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:24:30] S1: Okay. Is there anything else in here that we should see? Anything? Any technical specs? [00:24:35] S0: Well, we can see a few other things here. There's Okay. This is a propulsion system all laid out. You can see that on a bench. That's kind of fun. As I said, this is our telescope assembly here. So it's it's about 50 centimeters Yeah. In size, and that determines how small a object we can see on the ground [00:24:57] S1: Mhmm. [00:24:57] S0: Together with the altitude of the satellite. So that's it. [00:25:00] S1: What kind of fuel are you guys using? [00:25:03] S0: In this is Xenon. So it's a it's a it's an ion engine. So they're very efficient in space. They... The the gas comes out of the back extremely fast, much, much faster, like 10 times faster than a rocket engine, a classical rocket engine. It doesn't have as much thrust, so you can't take off using these engines off the planet. It's not nearly enough. But once you're in space, they're much, much more efficient. Like, as I said, almost 10 times more efficient than those big rocket engines. [00:25:29] S1: I think was SpaceX, Starlink that just put out... They wanna try to open source the data for anti collision avoidance?