PLANET

You're in beta with your AI app.

So what are you doing in AI, and how does that change? Will Marshall, thank you for having us at Planet Labs.

No problem.

Welcome again.

Right.

So that's our mission on the security side.

And now it's got so big, especially because people have seen what's happened in Ukraine, seen what Admiral Papaya is doing in China and realize, wow, we at Planet are doing something really unique, imaging the whole world.

We give everyone a peripheral vision of what's going on to help them see threats earlier.

A company called HEO, you've seen a few posts from me about them.

They basically take photographs of satellites in orbit and they have announced that they are teaming up with Planet.

You know our Planet lads, I tend to call them.

They used to be Planet lads, now they're Planet.

And they're going to use Planet satellites to perform non-Earth imaging.

Now, It's interesting.

I sort of never had realized that HEO's model is that they actually use other people's satellites most of the time.

But they do actually own their own satellite as well.

So similar to PNT, it's RF, but in this case, it's for data relay services.

So SES ran a test with Planet Labs Pelican 12 to do data relay between SES's GEO and M-Power satellites in the MEO database.

orbit to demonstrate their ability to relay data.

In the same way, Rocket Lab's Maxwell satellite that was manufactured for Viasat also demonstrated this data relay capability.

I mean, we've talked about SES a lot.

They invest in a lot of technologies to keep improving communications technology.

And this test is to use a software-defined radio that they've been developing with Planet for the past four years to connect to their satellites that are already on orbit, demonstrate that they're able to relay data.

I believe in the one gigabit per second range, which is not that high for a space to ground station.

Both cases show the same 1917 law originally built to suppress wartime dissent still being used a century later against people who expose information contradicting official wartime narratives.

The US government pressured major satellite companies, Vanta and Planet, to delay or withhold imagery of the war zone, and NBC News later reported Iran caused far worse damage to US bases than was publicly disclosed as a direct result of this censorship.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke broadcast licenses if war coverage didn't operate in the public interest, a direct regulatory threat against critical press coverage.

The Pentagon barred photographers from briefings, denied an Atlantic reporter access entirely, and Defense Secretary Hegseth publicly reprimanded reporters for their coverage, while separately tightening control over the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes for being too focused on woke distractions.

Today, the agencies and governments responsible for protecting Australia from bushfires have a tool they didn't have before – the ability to see the entire Australian landmass from space every single day.

Joining me is Jake Ramsay from Planet, an NGIS partner whose satellite imagery is helping emergency management agencies get ahead of the bushfire season, respond faster when fires break out, and understand the damage once the fires are out.

Jake, welcome to Location Matters.

Before we get into the episode, though, tell us about yourself and the work you're doing at Planet.

What problems are you working on to solve?

Thanks for having me, Nick.

Look, I lead the defence and intelligence account for Planet here in Australia and New Zealand.

My background is in open source intelligence, including geospatial and earth observation.

The earth imagery business is growing, but so is the competition.

The best known earth imagery startup, Planet, is launching a constellation of small satellites.

While Digital Globe's satellites are the size of a bus, Planet's smallest are the size of a toaster.

With the smaller size-

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While in the past, starting a space imagery company required hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in funding, the emergence of small sats means that it's enormously easier to break into the satellite imagery business nowadays.

But there is a key difference between these two companies.

Digital Globe's satellites capture imagery with a pixel size of 12 inches, while Planet's primary satellite constellation captures imagery with a pixel size of 10 to 15 feet at a much lower cost.

And there weren't real, there weren't acquisitive companies out there that made for good exits.

And now you've got companies like Rocket Labs and Planet and SpaceX that have market caps and want to acquire these companies.

And so you've got those exits.

But the thing that I think people get hung up on the fact that it is sexy, right? Space is very sexy.

Speaking of a very different kind of experiment, Google's Project Suncatcher prototype is in orbit.

Google says the satellite was built with Planet and launched on a SpaceX rideshare, carrying TPUs to test how the hardware holds up to spaceflight, radiation, and temperature extremes.

The Wall Street Journal reported four chips on the prototype.

This is such a good rabbit hole image that I want to be annoyingly precise.

The earth imagery business is growing, but so is the competition.

The best known earth imagery startup, Planet, is launching a constellation of small satellites.

While DigitalGlobe's satellites are the size of a bus, Planet's smallest are the size of a toaster.

With the smaller size, development and launch costs are lower.

While in the past, starting a space imagery company required hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in funding, the emergence of small sats means that it's enormously easier to break into the satellite imagery business nowadays.

But there is a key difference between these two companies.

DigitalGlobe's satellites capture imagery with a pixel size of 12 inches, while Planet's primary satellite constellation captures imagery with a pixel size of 10 to 15 feet at a much lower cost.

There are certain uses for high-resolution imagery, and there are certain other uses for low-cost imagery, so in some ways, these two companies aren't even direct competitors.