Satellite operator Planet Labs: From space against climate change

WIf you’ve been following the news for the past few months, you’ve probably seen a picture of Planet Labs before, even if you’ve never heard of this California-based company.

Aerial photos of the steelworks in Mariupol, for example, of the North Korean nuclear weapons test site or of the effects of the heat wave in Pakistan. The Californians operate a network of satellites that photograph the earth with high-resolution cameras – several times a day. British physicist Will Marshall, one of the founders, has big plans for his fleet of satellites.

He believes that all the development goals defined by the United Nations can be achieved more easily with up-to-date satellite images. And images from space should also help in the fight against climate change. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” says Marshall. It is important to observe the earth at a higher frequency than humanity is changing it. Having new recordings only once a year is simply too slow.

What makes a satellite so expensive?

The idea behind Planet Labs originated in the Mecca of the “space geeks”, the space freaks, as Marshall calls himself and his like-minded people: at the American space agency NASA. He had been hired there after his doctorate. Today he speaks highly of the research there.

But one thing did not leave him alone. “The smartphones in our pockets have almost everything you need for a satellite: accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS. They have radios for making calls and cameras for taking pictures.” There is a 90 to 95 percent overlap with what is needed for a satellite. So Marshall asked, “This cell phone costs $500, and a satellite usually costs $500 million. What do the extra six zeros do for us?”

Marshall meant that quite literally. He and his NASA colleagues decided to conduct an experiment. They shot three cell phones (“Google Nexus Ones, we could program them better than iPhones”) into space, had them take pictures and send them back to earth. “And it worked!” Not everyone at NASA was enthusiastic about it, Marshall almost lost his job, he says. In 2010, he founded his own company with two colleagues and built his first satellite in a garage in Cupertino, in true Silicon Valley fashion.

Satellites the size of a shoe box

Today, Planet Labs has about 200 satellites in orbit, which photograph the entire earth several times a day from an altitude of 400 kilometers. The “Doves” (pigeons) have not become quite as cheap as a smartphone, the technology is a bit more complicated. A satellite from the current fleet costs between 200,000 and 300,000 dollars on average. Most of that goes towards the launch, which Planet Labs is partnering with Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX.

And where are the rest of the zeros? One factor is size. A “Dove” is no bigger than a shoe box and weighs about five kilograms. The “Skysat” models that Planet Labs bought from Google are a little larger. But their photos also offer a higher resolution of up to 50 centimeters per pixel compared to the three to five meters of the “Doves”. Next year, Planet Labs plans to launch a new fleet of “Pelicans” into orbit that will take up to 30 images a day and increase the resolution even further, to 30 centimeters per pixel.

According to Marshall, a significant part of the cost difference is NASA’s risk aversion. It’s about science, not about cost optimization. “When you’re spending hundreds of millions on the satellite, you want to make sure nothing goes wrong. You end up paying more for that instead of just throwing up more satellites and having redundancy.” Just throwing up more satellites is Marshall’s approach. The failure rate of the Planet Labs fleet is still less than five percent. Much too low, he thinks. This is a sign that the company is not taking enough risks. The price could be lower, the performance higher if it pushed the technology harder.