Transcript

TEXT: Silicon Valley is invading space. Tech companies are racing to launch hundreds of very small satellites.

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “The exciting thing for me about nanosats is that you can build them with relatively little effort, it doesn’t take tens of millions of dollars, to come up with all the hardware, the software, the control systems. We’re looking at quadrupling, quintupling the number of satellites in orbit over the next few years” 

WILL MARSHALL: “We have figured out how to miniaturise satellites, so satellites that will typically have been the size of a bus, sometimes a double decker bus, and we have taken that technology and tried to shrink it into tiny packages. We don’t build the rockets ourselves, we just hitch rides on other people’s rockets”.

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “I think we’re just beginning to see the implications - not so much for the space industry, but for what everyone here on Earth is going to do with what’s coming back from the space industry”.

[Reaction from public watching a launch gone wrong – explosions]

ROB SIMMON: “We had twenty-six satellites on that rocket. I was actually in the process of writing a tweet about how awesome the lift-off has been and been like, you know, “Go Doves go!” and then it blows up and all of a sudden I need to start thinking about communicating about, “Oh hey, space is hard!” and “We’ll try again next time!” and “This really isn’t the huge disaster that it looks like!”.

WILL MARSHALL: “We didn’t put everything into one big satellite that costs a billion dollars- when those things blow up that’s really tragic but we spread our risk by putting our satellites on lots of different rockets and it’s, it’s not the end of the world if one blows up”.

TEXT: SAN FRANCISCO, USA

TEXT: Several start-ups are joining the small satellite revolution. Planet is the world’s largest commercial operator with 156 satellites.

WILL MARSHALL: [CEO & co-founder, Planet] “So this is what we call a Dove, it’s just a little satellite. It weighs about 4 kilograms. This is not a model of the Dove, this is a real thing, I mean it’s the real size. Inside there’s a telescope, so the main volume of the satellite is a telescope system. At the back is the camera that looks through that telescope to take images. So the satellite is flying along like this, taking images of the ground, as it goes, just every second or so it takes a new image, it’s about 15 by 20 kilometres in size. And they also have solar panels all round the outside that actually open out to give us more power. We also have some art, we have an artist in residence who puts art on the side of our satellites. We believe we’re one of the first people to put art in space. The key thing that we’ve built upon is things like this [pulls out smartphone] which, you know, an incredible amount of capability is stuffed into smartphones. The latest sensor systems, cameras, radios… they’ve got many radio systems, of course super-duper processors… hard drives.”

TEXT: 2010. Launch of a start-up… Will Marshall and a group of volunteers head into the Nevada desert. 

WILL MARSHALL: “When we were at NASA, me and my co-founders, we were thinking how could we leverage this cool technology that we’re finding in our pockets for space? The unique moment was really when we had launched some smartphones into space. We just started building satellites in our garage in our spare time down in the south bay here in California, and it’s a bit of a thing around here to just start building it in your garage. Build it and they will come”.

TEXT: 2015. Planet launches 14 nanosats from the International Space Station

WILL MARSHALL: “Our satellites get imagery about 3 to 5 metres – per pixel – so that means you can see a tree, you can just about see a vehicle, like a truck or a ship or something like this, but you can’t see individual people or you can’t read a numberplate or something like that. 

ROB SIMMON: [Head of Data Visualisation, Planet] “Google Earth, I think they update every six months to a year, but then that’s not a full new global map, that’ll only be updated in the regions where they have new high resolution data. And what we’ll be doing is providing basically a guarantee that your area will be covered as long as it’s not cloudy. Every single day.

WILL MARSHALL: “Democratising access to our information about the planet is really important in our mind. Satellite imagery has traditionally been the province of governments and large companies to date, but we’re trying to enable the smaller folks, if you like, the NGOs, the researchers in universities, the small companies, to get access to the data as well. 

So you can, if you’re trying to track deforestation, for example, if you take satellite images every two years you wake up at the end of a few years and there’s a bloody great hole in the Amazon, right? If you take images every day, well you can literally see any tree goes down when it goes down, and then stop illegal logging activity. That’s just one example - there’s many others, like tracking and stopping illegal fishing – helping with disaster response after floods or fires or earthquakes – quickly having data that helps responders go into those places.”

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: [Analyst, The Space Foundation] “Even though the imagery that Planet is collecting is not as detailed as what’s available from some other imagery satellites, they’ll be able to detect these changes and then pass that information along to say, hey, you should look over here, there’s something interesting happening. We maybe can’t see it as clearly as we would like, but it’s definitely worth checking out with a higher-powered camera.”

WILL MARSHALL: “Well I think it’s very open, collaborative, we see lots of people working together from different parts of the company and throwing in ideas to each other. 
Each individual here is contributing in a way that is pushing the envelope on some technology.”

AVANTI MANKAR: [Manager, Ground Stations, Planet] “We have people who have done the traditional space background obviously, people from all over NASA and then we have a lot of people that are coming out of school and they’re, they’ve studied design, they’ve studied all these really cool other things that we need.” 

My name’s Avanti Mankar and I am a project manager for the ground station team at Planet Labs. Prior to being at Planet I was at the San Francisco SPCA as a veterinary technician and basically that meant I was a nurse for puppies and kittens, is how I describe it. [laughs] 
Yeah, yeah it was a pretty big leap but I think for me, when I was thinking about leaving my job and looking for something new, I definitely knew that I wanted to be somewhere where they had a really strong mission and they wanted to do good. 

Our team manages the ground station network, which is basically the dishes that will downlink all of the imagery that we’re currently getting. We have stations all over the world - we have them on several different continents, some in Australia, some in the United Sates, some in the UK. It is definitely getting really busy. I really like to organise things and herd cats, that’s what it is [laughs]. 

So this is mission control, this is where we operate all of our satellites. So traditionally NASA mission control is very closed off, it’s a lot larger, but our team is pretty small because a lot of the things that we do are automated actually. We call them Doves because traditionally in aerospace they’ve always been very aggressive names, but since our satellites, we wanted to do good with the world, we had like a peaceful name for them, so we call them Doves. So each satellite is a Dove, each launch we call a Flock. So we have Flock 3P coming up and that’s going to be launching in about a week.”

ROB SIMMON: “I’m Robert Simmon and I’m the lead of the data visualisation team here at Planet. In college I was taking classes in synthesizers and electro music and computer music and I essentially ran out of classes that I was available to take. 
And so I started getting into computer graphics. That led to doing data visualisation at NASA.

We’re essentially building a time machine. So what that means is we’re building up an archive and so if something happens, you can go back and look at that place and see how it’s changing over time without just having to rely on taking a snapshot after something interesting happens. So this is near Jeddah in Saudi Arabia which is on the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula. And one of the other interesting things that we see fairly frequently is oil tanks, and if you look closely at this… you can see these shadows on the inside lip of the tank, and that’s where the lid of the tank is actually floating on the oil. 

So as the oil level rises and drops the size of that shadow will actually change, and so if you’re looking at this every day you can build up a map of the amount of oil that’s stored in a given tank farm.. And so you get a real-time picture of how much oil there is in the world and that will give you a method to basically predict future prices.

[viewing another image] Well, it’s one of these contested islands in the South China Sea where you have China, Philippines, Vietnam, all have a claim. And in July of 2016, you can see the reef pretty much intact, fairly healthy. You can actually see that there’s been a channel cut in the outside of the reef and that could allow easier access to the interior so this was, it’s what… the seventh, so two days ago. And so yeah, looks like we’ve got a boat there, boat there, another one here that has just gone right through”.

TEXT: The small satellite revolution is triggering a new space race.

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “Just for context, right now there are somewhere between 1,400 and 1,500 active satellites in orbit for the entire world, for all operators in all countries.”

TEXT: Airbus is now contracted to build 650 satellites for an internet network. While the SpaceX corporation plans a rival constellation of 4,425 satellites

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “I think it just goes to show how this Silicon Valley mentality is being applied to the space industry and it is a major shift. The larger impact that we’re seeing is in these traditional aerospace companies figuring out how to behave a little bit more like the upstarts”.

TEXT: The first satellite was launched in 1957. Since then 41,000 man-made objects have been tracked in Earth orbit. Currently less than 5% are active satellites. The rest is space junk.

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “There’s certainly some concern that the addition of all these satellites is going to cause some traffic control problems. When things collide in space it’s very bad not just for the two things that collide, but for everything around them, because each collision causes debris and each piece of debris then is moving so quickly that it can, in turn, destroy other satellites. It has the potential to linger for a very long time, possibly past the duration of humanity”.

TEXT: The US Air Force runs a global network tracking space junk. One facility is in Maui, Hawaii

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “There’s an outfit called the Joint Space Operation Centre that has radar systems and telescopes that are constantly scanning the sky, just trying to track everything that’s up there and how it’s moving”.

MAJOR ROBERT COPLEY: [Space Surveillance Network, USAF] “Well it’s an incredible opportunity for anybody to work up here. We’re approximately 10 thousand feet above sea level and we work on a volcano and we get to stare into space. Well, space debris is a growing problem. The Space Surveillance Network tracks about 16,000 objects in orbit. Of these, about 5% are actual functional payloads, about 8% are spent rocket bodies and 82% are inactive satellites or space debris The sensitivity of our system can detect objects that are 10 thousand times dimmer than the human eye can register and we can detect an object the size of a basketball more than 32,000 kilometres away. We find new objects every single night”.

TEXT: The big space industry companies derisively refer to nano-sats as debris-sats

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “It’s also challenging because these nanosatellites can be somewhat difficult to track, because of their size. People have discussed using lasers, to either burn up pieces of debris or, change their orbit in such a way that they do come back to Earth and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. So every once in a while, the International Space Station has to change its orbit slightly because there’s a piece of space debris coming up”.

TEXT: 2016. A microscopic fragment cracks a Space Station window

WILL MARSHALL: [CEO, co-founder, Planet] “That problem is in the 800 to 1200 kilometre altitude band, and there there’s so much stuff from previous satellite missions and rocket bodies and so forth that there’s, that it’s starting to collide with each other on a regular basis and cause collisions that then cause more pieces of debris that then causes more collisions, and so it’s a runaway spiral. And we have to do something about that, but we at Planet put our satellites very low, at about 400 or 500 kilometres, well below that whole mess if you like, and that makes sure that they don’t contribute to that problem. So we put them in orbits where they degrade and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere on that sort of timeframe of about three years. And so they won’t stay up there as junk for long term”.

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: [Analyst, The Space Foundation] “ A company like Planet understands that if they create a mess then it’s going to directly affect their own business, so they have every incentive if they wish to continue making money, to do whatever they can to preserve the space environment.”

TEXT: So how much does it cost to build and launch a Dove? 
Planet isn’t saying…

WILL MARSHALL: [laughs] “That’s about the only thing I’m not going answer. We don’t go into details about that, it’s some of our secret sauce”.

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “We’ll see if Planet has succeeded or not, and this is one of the questions that the incumbents and other people like to raise about these start-ups, are they truly profitable? Are they building a sustainable business or are they simply burning up venture capital money, trying to pull far enough ahead that they will then eventually develop a sustainable business model?”

WILL MARSHALL: “We have over a hundred customers around the world that are taking our data today and paying us for it, for various different reasons”

TEXT: Altruism doesn’t pay the bills. The hoodies and sneakers of Planet now do business with the suits of America’s spy community. One paying customer is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)

ROBERT CARDILLO: “The world is a complicated place. We like to believe it’s part of our responsibility to deliver the next generation of intelligence”. 

TEXT: The NGA has 14,500 staff … with an estimated annual budget of $US5 billion

ROBERT CARDILLO: [Director, NGA] “It is part of our responsibility to be aware of all of the ways that we can sense the planet. NGA is a combination of both combat support, helping the military deploy, employ etc. but also we’re an intelligence agency, we’re part of the United States intelligence community and that’s to understand not just what’s happening today, but anticipate what will happen tomorrow. 

Planet’s advantage, in our view, and the reason why we’ve contracted with them to begin to explore what we could learn, is the fact that they repeat their sensing of the planet in a way that no-one else does today, at least not at that magnitude. I have to tell you, for somebody in my profession that’s very exciting”.

ROB SIMMON: “They get basically what the strength of Planet is, and that is that frequency – that every single day. So presumably the US military has a relatively small number, say 5 to 10 very high resolution satellites. They can only look in one place at a time and so that’s a really big limit on what they can observe, and with Planet Labs you get this much coarser view, but you’re going to get it everywhere, every day.

TEXT: US intelligence is strengthening ties to Planet

In June 2017 the NGA confirms Planet will now target:
Iran
Syria
Iraq
South Sudan
and undisclosed South American countries

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “I think one of the concerns with Planet and this ability to image the entire Earth is to do with what people will do with the information”.

NEWS STORY: The US based monitoring service has released satellite images that it says show North Korea is primed and ready for its 6th and perhaps biggest nuclear test.

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “For better or for worse, it will change how people behave. There has long been an understanding that certain governments hide certain things that they may have out in the open when they know that spy satellites are going to be passing overhead”.

NEWS STORY: The White House says these satellite images of Syria’s most notorious prison Saydnaya are evidence that atrocities are being carried out inside the walls.

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “So it does make it harder for oppressive regimes to hide what they’re doing. So in that sense, I think it’s a very good thing.”

ROB SIMMON: “I think about the ethical side all the time. So our strategy is to… basically radical transparency, and make the access to the data as easy as possible and so hopefully that will basically prevent the powerful and the wealthy from monopolising this type of data.”

MICAH WALTER-RANGE: “What if someone is using that information for criminal purposes or to harm another person? And this is something that I think the industry is going to have to deal with at some point in the relatively near future.”

ROBERT CARDILLO: [Director, NGA] “The fact that you can go on the internet today, swipe a credit card or in some cases not, right, get a free application of satellite imagery anywhere on the world is a wonderful opportunity in the sense of connecting the planet and, commerce and all that. It also is a risk in the sense that it can expose activities that you’d rather not have exposed.

ROB SIMMON: “So, we’re only allowed to sell to the people that the US Government grants us a licence to. So there are some obvious countries that are not allowed to buy the data, if you have ties to a terrorist organisation you’d be on the forbidden list. So we actually count on the US Government to identify the bad actors and then we will abide by those rules one hundred per cent.”

TEXT: So what about privacy?

WILL MARSHALL: “It’s something we care about a lot. I mean we wouldn’t want to do it if it was doing, if you like, adverse things to our personal privacy”.

ROBERT CARDILLO: “Both of our democracies value privacy, right? And especially when they see some government official talking about, you know, persistent collection of the planet and constant imaging and whatnot, you could imagine people taking that to a dark corner and saying, ‘Oh my goodness’. Well first I want to either tell or remind you that, that I’m prohibited by our laws from using my capabilities, against my citizens, against our.. our allies etc.”

MICAH WALKER-RANGE: “I will say that I’m more careful about what I do outside, these days. It makes a person think but, at the same time, we’re facing this on multiple fronts. It’s not just from satellites, it’s also from drones whether they’re commercially operated or government operated”.

TEXT: Planet’s capabilities are growing. In 2017 the company buys Google’s Terra Bella fleet. 7 satellites that can record HD video from space

WILL MARSHALL: “Well we’re very excited about acquiring Terra Bella. They have slightly bigger satellites. They’re about the size of a fridge, a mini-fridge. They weigh about 120 kilograms a satellite. And what that enables is higher resolution imagery. And you still can’t see a person or identify a person, with this sort of imagery, but you can see more detailed things about buildings in urban areas.”

MICAH WALKER-RANGE: “Now, I don’t think they’re currently releasing that video in real time, but within another 5 years and I would say almost certainly within 10, we can expect live video or close to live video of many of the Earth’s major metropolitan areas.”

TEXT: Launch Day. Satish Dhawan Space Centre, India.

WILL MARSHALL: [addressing office party] “Woop! Woop! Everyone!. This is really quite a big day for us here. We’re launching 88 satellites on this rocket. If it succeeds, we’ll be operating the largest constellation of satellites in human history”. 

“We’ll launch on anyone that will… is going roughly the right direction [laughs] and, for a good price - and the Indians have a great rocket, the PSLV. And so, we chose them”. 

[in the party room watching the launch] “And take off”. 

ROB SIMMON: [at office party watching launch] “Can I curse? [laughs] It’s fantastic! there was a lot of stress building up to this, you know we’ve had a lot of rocky moments, but today it’s all good”.

AVANTI MANKAR: “I think that people here are attached to the Doves because so much goes into them, especially for people that have been here a really long time. It’s very, very, very emotional and we all really like a family, I guess.”

WILL MARSHALL: “So it’s about using satellites to advance the human condition. One of the things about being a space geek is that we always approach things from the big perspective. And if you step back and look at the Earth, you think about it as a spaceship we have with seven billion astronauts hurtling around the sun. Well, we need the data that enables us to take care of that spaceship and so we need to monitor those changes on a fast enough timescale to be able to stop our action where it’s being harmful”.