Planet Labs aims for new frontier of image data; 100 small satellites will photograph entire globe every 24 hours

March 14, 2014 4:06 am

Planet Labs aims for new frontier of image data

By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco

Just a few years ago Ordnance Survey, Britain’s national mapping agency, boasted that its map of every corner of the country was updated at least once every 18 months. “That’s a lot of change,” it said in a 2011 blogpost.

A lot more change is coming soon to the earth-imaging world. Over the next 12 months, San Francisco start-up Planet Labs is set to launch 100 small satellites that will together be able to photograph the entire globe every 24 hours.

The frequency with which Planet Labs will be able to update its database of earth imagery sets a higher bar against much larger competitors such as Airbus’ Defense and Space unit or specialist satellite operator Digital Globe, who have typically focused on the resolution of their photographs rather than how often they are updated.

Planet Labs’ first “constellation” of 28 shoebox-sized satellites was launched from the International Space Station last month, giving it fully refreshed images of the world every week. Now it has contracted another four launch vehicles, enough for 100 more satellites, giving it daily frequency.

“By the end of the year it will be the largest constellation ever launched by humanity,” says Will Marshall, co-founder and chief executive of Planet Labs. “It’s more than all the other commercial companies of all satellite types launching this year put together. This will enable us to have absolutely unprecedented imagery coverage of the globe.”

Planet Labs, whose early investors include Founders Fund and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, raised $52m in December in a round let by Facebook and Twitter backer Yuri Milner, bringing its total funding to $65m. Six months after starting to offer its images to companies and organisations, it has already taken tens of millions of dollars’ worth of bookings, Mr Marshall says.

It is one of a growing band of so-called “cubesat” start-ups that are getting new ventures off the ground as the costs of making and launching satellites fall. These devices can take advantage of technological developments in other parts of the electronics industry, such as smartphones, and their compact size allows them to piggyback on other launches as secondary payloads. Commercial space flight start-ups such as SpaceX, which also counts Founders Fund and DFJ as investors, are helping to bring launch costs lower, too.

“By the end of the year it will be the largest constellation ever launched by humanity.”

– Will Marshall, co-founder, Planet Labs

Planet Labs’ rivals include Silicon Valley-based Skybox, which says its satellites are 20 times smaller than traditional ones. Skybox’s first launch, which went online in December, has sent back high-definition photos and videos that are accurate to less than a meter per pixel.

Planet Labs is sacrificing some picture quality in favour of the volume of satellites. It hopes the resulting high-frequency images will be used for both commercial and humanitarian purposes, from agricultural and transportation data to tracking flooding or deforestation.

“The difference between today and yesterday is half the world’s news,” says Mr Marshall. “You can detect the news and you can display the news . . . Our mission is to create information people need to help life on the planet.”

The industry’s established players such as Airbus and DigitalGlobe say their satellites offer higher resolution and accuracy than smaller start-ups, and can update their images near-daily. Earlier this week, Digital Globe opened up some of its images to volunteers helping to search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

But Jeff Foust, a space analyst with research firm Futron, says these larger companies typically have just a few satellites in orbit at once. This means they can only photograph specific areas on a regular basis, not the whole world.

“Planet Labs, with a large number of satellites at lower resolution, are grabbing as much imagery as they can and getting a much larger amount with all their satellites combined in any given day,” Mr Foust says.

A hundred units in a year counts as “mass production” in an industry that often takes years to launch a single satellite, giving Planet Labs and other cubesat companies economies of scale and the ability to take advantage of constant improvements in technology.

“The big commercial remote-sensing satellites cost hundreds of millions of dollars each to build and launch,” Mr Foust says, compared with an estimated single-digit millions for Planet Labs’ entire group.

“You can’t scale that to create a large constellation – the economics will just kill you. Planet Labs and Skybox are coming at this from a different level and saying, ‘What can we do with large numbers of small satellites?’ In some ways it’s a classic example of a disruptive innovation.”