Planet Labs CEO: Why AI Data Centers Will Move to Space
- Planet reported 58% year-on-year growth last quarter, and Marshall thinks defense supplied the largest share. The company has doubled manufacturing capacity in San Francisco as countries seek satellite data, AI analysis and their own spacecraft. Its daily scan supplies “peripheral vision” beyond intelligence targets governments already know to watch.
- Sovereignty is turning imagery customers into buyers of nationally controlled satellite fleets. Marshall cites Japan, Germany and Sweden, with Sweden’s first launch four months after signing and a Germany-sponsored launch in two months, versus the industry’s usual five or 10 years. Customers’ demand was explicit: “We really want the satellites so that we have sovereign control of them.”
- Marshall expects AI to expand the audience for Planet’s data while leaving its core business largely intact. O’Shea suggests another business model; Marshall counters, “we were mainly selling data anyway.” The beta app lets people ask questions in ordinary language, opening imagery to farmers, firefighters and local governments without specialist analysis teams.
- Planet’s product stack combines daily coverage, targeted imaging and spectral detail. Doves scan about 200 million square kilometers of landmass at three-meter resolution, plus ocean territory; Pelican’s goal is a requested image returned and analyzed within 30 minutes anywhere on Earth; Tanager carries 420 spectral bands. Marshall’s methane example captures the value: “you can literally see the gas,” enabling an operator to stop a leak and save money.
- Planet’s orbital computing work already includes a Google test project and NVIDIA chips aboard Pelican spacecraft. Marshall says the Suncatcher test project launched “last week”; the spacecraft is commissioned, with TPU testing still to come. Processing images in orbit and sending down answers aims to replace hours of delay with minutes, potentially improving wildfire response.
- Marshall’s case for moving AI data centers into orbit rests on continuous solar power and simpler energy infrastructure. He claims “five times more power” per panel in a continuously sunlit orbit, removing the need for batteries or backup generation, with radiators cooling the chips. His economic prediction is categorical: “it’s all just going to be cheaper.”
1. Defense demand is scaling Planet’s information business
- Marshall calls Planet “an information business”: automated manufacturing and shrinking satellites from “the size of a double-decker bus” enabled more launches at lower cost. Planet says its fleet was the first to image the entire Earth every day and grew beyond 100 satellites, though Starlink is now larger. Planet doubled San Francisco manufacturing capacity as demand rose. It reported 58% year-on-year growth last quarter; “I think the biggest part of that was the defense growth,” he says.
- Ukraine illustrates the demand mechanism. Against Russia’s greater troop and equipment resources, Marshall says Ukraine has an “information advantage,” using satellites, drones and AI to monitor threats well before they reach its borders. Other countries see those applications and want similar capabilities. Planet supplies “peripheral vision”: finding emerging threats beyond facilities intelligence agencies already know to watch.
- The US Navy uses Planet to monitor 13 million square kilometers of the South China Sea, sharing information with regional allies. Admiral Paparo also monitors China for threats, including industrial facilities that might supply it. The objective is a week or months of warning rather than a day, creating room for preparation, deterrence and diplomacy. Marshall’s stated mission is to reduce the likelihood of war.
- Commercial customers include John Deere, Bayer and BASF improving crop yields, hedge funds seeking “alpha on stocks and commodities,” and hyperscalers monitoring both their own and competitors’ data center construction worldwide, including China. Civil uses include wildfire response, NASA science and Brazil’s deforestation monitoring. Those businesses are also growing, Marshall says, but defense is growing fastest.
2. AI makes a layered imaging system usable by more people
- Planet’s sensor stack separates the daily scan from customer-directed imaging. Doves cover all Earth’s landmass—about 200 million square kilometers—and some ocean territory, in eight spectral bands at three-meter resolution. Pelicans are its highest-resolution satellites, photographing requested locations. The fleet being built aims to accept a request and return an analyzed image anywhere on Earth within 30 minutes.
- Tanager’s 420 spectral bands provide a “fingerprint” of what is on Earth, helping distinguish tree and crop species, identify camouflage and detect methane. Marshall’s concrete example is a gas leak: although methane is colorless, “in this spectral band it sticks out like a sore thumb.” Operators can stop the leak, cutting pollution and saving money.
- The beta AI app addresses the gap between collecting imagery and using it. NASA has 1,000 people who know how to analyze satellite data; farmers and local journalists do not. Marshall’s analogy is a computer gaining an operating system: suddenly many more people can use it. Users can “ask any question in simple language,” and the tools “will have a go.”
- O’Shea’s suggestion that AI adds another business model gets a qualified rebuttal: “it’s not changing the business model that much because we were mainly selling data anyway.” Planet is adding analytical layers it calls “solutions,” while the more flexible tools widen access. Compute runs mainly on Google Cloud, with some AWS.
3. Space computing starts with faster answers and continuous power
- Asked whether orbital data centers are rational, Marshall says Planet launched Google’s first “Suncatcher” data center test project “last week,” after previously putting NVIDIA chips on Pelican spacecraft. The Google spacecraft is commissioned and doing well, he says. Testing how the TPU performs in space is still ahead; Planet will report more as that work proceeds.
- The immediate reason for onboard computing is speed: process imagery, recognize ships or run queries in orbit, then send down answers. During the LA fires, Planet captured imagery within a couple of hours, downlinked it a couple of hours later and needed perhaps another hour for processing. Getting information to responders in minutes instead could potentially help save lives.
- Marshall’s broader argument begins with data centers being “all about energy.” Ground solar offers the cheapest watts per dollar, but clouds and nighttime require other power sources; adding gas or nuclear brings permitting and delay. In a sun-synchronous orbit that always looks toward the sun, he says each panel gets “five times more power,” with no interruption from clouds or night and no need for batteries, gas or other power systems.
- Cooling requires radiators facing the darkness of space; commands and answers travel by radio, with a little latency. Marshall concludes orbital computing “is all just going to be cheaper” and expects it to ease community objections over electricity costs and water use. He sees compute as the “by far easiest” first step, preceding more ambitious ideas such as generating power in space and beaming it down.
4. Sovereign control turns data demand into spacecraft orders
- Marshall connects sovereignty demand to geopolitical fragmentation and US pressure for other countries to shoulder more defense responsibility. Their first need is understanding nearby threats: satellites are their “eyes and their ears.” He says satellites also underpin missile warning and civilian and economic systems. Planet initially offered countries data, but customers insisted on buying satellites for sovereign control. Japan is buying satellites, Germany is funding another fleet, and Planet is also supplying Sweden.
- Planet builds and launches the satellites, then “hand[s] over the keys” so customers control their operation and pointing. Sweden’s first satellite launched four months after contract signing; a Germany-sponsored satellite launched in two months. Marshall contrasts that with the five or 10 years such projects would normally take in aerospace.
- Access has limits. Marshall cites US-embargoed countries, equivalent EU lists and UN restrictions, and says Planet does not sell to terrorists or North Korea. An employee group also reviews deals for alignment with Planet’s values and likely positive outcomes. “We know our technology is very powerful,” he says, making stewardship part of the sales decision.
5. Protecting “spaceship Earth” anchors the long game
- Marshall describes the universe as “eerily silent” despite more than 6,300 discovered planets in the local galactic neighborhood, with no obvious signs of life found yet. He predicted life beyond Earth within 10 years a few years ago; now it is “probably more like six or seven.” Atmospheric signatures are the mechanism: Earth’s 20% oxygen is his example. Such evidence could suggest life without certainty or proof of technological civilization.
- The absence of technological signals raises one worrying possibility: civilizations might destroy themselves after developing powerful technologies. Marshall cites nuclear weapons and AI, including the possibility of misuse, hacking and unresolved control risks. That possibility makes protecting “spaceship Earth,” the only place where life is known to exist, “not just locally important, it’s cosmically important”—a “cosmic duty.”
- Marshall credits “persistence and endurance” above timing or the best idea, while conceding those matter. At NASA, Pete Worden shielded the team’s experiment to “throw some phones into space and see if they worked,” which led to Planet. For evidence of commitment, Marshall cites retention: seven of the first 10 employees remained at the 10th anniversary; about half were still there at the 15th.
Full transcript
Data centers in space. Have you thought about this at all?
More than thought about it. We just launched the first test project for Google last week. Data centers—it’s all an energy problem. In space, for each solar panel, you get 5 times more power than you get on the ground because you can put them in a sun-synchronous orbit that’s always looking at the sun. We’re seeing 2 big trends in the world. One is the geopolitical changes that are happening, and the second is AI. We’re seeing a lot of countries needing our data really quickly. The point is, information is power, and by giving it to these countries, we can help them defuse tensions and make it more likely we don’t need to go to war.
You’re in beta with your AI app. 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. It’s fun to tour downstairs.
We didn’t mention this on the tour, which I think was a big miss, but we’re in the heart of San Francisco right now.
Correct.
We’re not in the South Bay or L.A., and we’re not in the middle of New Mexico.
No.
We’re literally in San Francisco.
Yeah. Few people realize that there is a massive satellite manufacturing facility in the middle of San Francisco.
So why did you choose this location?
Well, our founding team was at NASA Ames, just down the road near Mountain View, but we all wanted to be in the city where the cool kids hang out. So we came up here. It’s the same today. Look at the AI companies. Anthropic’s a few blocks that way, OpenAI is a few blocks that way, and even the Google Gemini team—you think of Google as being in Mountain View, but the Google Gemini team is a few blocks down the road. All the young engineers want to be in San Francisco, so we go where the cool people are.
For people who haven’t watched it yet, we just came off a tour of your facility.
Yeah.
What did we just see?
1. How Planet Scans Earth
What we just saw was a satellite manufacturing facility. We’ve made it way more automated, taken satellites the size of a double-decker bus and shrunk them down—you can see some of them in the background here—and enabled us to launch many more at a lower cost. With all of that, we’ve put up enough satellites to image the entire Earth every day, which is the first fleet that has ever done that. We launched the first set of satellites that grew to over 100 satellites, the first big-ish constellation of satellites. Now Starlink is a bigger constellation.
What is all that for? This is what we can talk about now. Really, in the end, this is an information business. We’re selling information. Why? Because we collect all this information about the planet, and we want to help people make smarter decisions, whether that’s for agriculture, to improve crop yields; security, to understand threats around the planet; disaster response; or all manner of applications. The addition of AI that we were just looking at means that more and more people can get access.
In a big sense, we’re seeing 2 big trends in the world. One is the geopolitical changes that are happening—the fragmentation and changes to the geopolitical environment—and the second is AI. Both are huge forces. Space generally, and Planet in particular, are super relevant to both of those. Geopolitics is all about understanding threats around the corner, understanding what’s going on, disasters, and so on. What better than information to help you understand that? And AI is all about having better information.
We can dive into each of those a little more, but basically, satellite data is critical to underpinning security, sustainability, AI, the lot of it. We’re seeing a boom right now, which is why we’re on this floor. We’ve just doubled our manufacturing capacity here in San Francisco, and that’s all because we’re seeing a lot of countries needing our data really quickly.
2. Security Drives Satellite Demand
Let’s go into the security piece of it a little bit. Take Ukraine. We helped to see the troop buildup on the border of Ukraine before the full-scale invasion happened. Now, we help provide data to Ukraine to help them monitor threats well in advance of those threats reaching their borders, to try and stop them and help Ukraine defend its country. I can’t get into all of the details, but at the core, it’s an information advantage.
They’re facing a conventional disadvantage. Russia has more troops, more tanks, more missiles, and more planes. But Ukraine has 2 distinct advantages. One is that they really care about their country and don’t want it invaded. The second is that they have an information advantage, and information is power. They’ve been extremely active in using the latest technology—drones, satellites, AI—to get an advantage. We’ve helped them as best we can with their incredible innovation. They’ve used our data and seen it used in incredible ways.
Other countries are going to Ukraine and asking, “What’s going on here?” They see that most of their satellite data comes from Planet, and they go, “Wow, okay, we need that too if Russia might invade us. What about China and Taiwan? What about whatever?” We also work with the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Navy uses us to monitor all of the South China Sea: 13 million square kilometers, an area of ocean slightly bigger than the United States.
They’re looking for illegal fishing activities, illegal activities like North Korean vessels violating oil embargoes, and Chinese activities that shouldn’t be happening, like building islands or what have you. They monitor that and provide the information to their allies in the region, like the Philippines, so they can all have a common understanding of where the threats are.
Admiral Paparo, who runs INDOPACOM, the United States command in the Pacific, also uses our data to monitor China for threats across the country, including industrial facilities that might supply them. Why? Because he wants early warning of any threat. For example, if China is going to attack Taiwan, he wants early warning. Can he get not just a day’s warning, but a week or a few months? If we can give them that sort of warning, it can help them prepare, deter, and pursue diplomatic options and other things.
The point is, information is power, and by giving it to these countries, we can help them defuse tensions and make it more likely we don’t need to go to war. That’s our mission on the security side. Now it’s gotten so big, especially because people have seen what’s happened in Ukraine and what Admiral Paparo is doing in China, and they realize, “Wow, Planet is doing something really unique: imaging the whole world.” We give everyone peripheral vision of what’s going on to help them see threats earlier.
Normally, satellites before Planet were only used to look at the things people knew to look at: the nuclear facility in North Korea, the Russian missile factory, or whatever. But we look at everything else and find things that might be emerging that they didn’t know they needed to look at. Now countries are coming to us and saying, “Can we buy your data? Can we buy your AI that sits on top to find these new threats?” They’re also saying, “Hey, can we just buy your satellites? We want some of them ourselves as well.”
Yeah.
Initially, we were like, “Well, you can just buy the data.” And then they were like, “No, no, no. We really want the satellites so that we have sovereign control of them.” So then we started answering the mail on that, and now we’ve done a number of deals. Japan is buying some of our satellites. Germany is sponsoring and funding another fleet of satellites. We’re doing some for Sweden, and these are countries that are now getting their first and best optical reconnaissance system that we build. We launch them into space, and then we hand over the keys so that they get to operate them. That’s also a booming business. This is why we’re in this lab that’s built up: we’re seeing so much demand for all of that.
Is all of the demand on the defense side?
No. We’re seeing the strongest demand there right now, but we’re also seeing a booming commercial business and civil government business. Civil government includes counties and states trying to use us to help stop wildfires and respond to them, and NASA using it for science and Earth system science. Brazil’s government is using it to stop deforestation, but no one can do that on their own. AI is covering all of that. The satellites and the AI enable this scale.
In civil government and commercial sectors, we’re working with agriculture companies like John Deere, Bayer, and BASF. We help them improve crop yields. We work with hedge funds. I can’t tell you who, but some hedge funds like to work with us to get alpha on stocks and commodities around the planet. We have a lot of understanding of crop yields around the world and infrastructure development.
We’ve even had some of the hyperscalers around here buy our data. Why? Because they want to monitor not just their own data center construction, but their competitors’ data center construction. We have an understanding of data center construction all around the world, not just in the U.S., but in China and other places. We have a wide variety of applications, but it’s true that defense is really what’s driving the biggest boom right now.
We reported significant growth last quarter: 58% year over year. I think the biggest part of that was defense growth. The other sectors are growing as well, but defense is growing the fastest.
Last year at the Reagan National Defense Forum, I had an interview with Emil Michael—
Yeah.
—Under Secretary of Defense—
Yeah.
—for the Department of War, and also the CTO there. Of a few companies—I think it was 3 or 4—he mentioned Planet Labs.
Is that why you came? Because he said it was a good idea.
Look, again, new technology is changing the nature of warfare. Warfare is increasingly hybrid and distributed, and it increasingly involves new technologies that can help you address that. Drones, satellites, and AI are the core of that. Satellites are less well known than drones, but they’re playing a critical role around the world, whether that’s in Ukraine or in Iran, and other places around the planet.
I have to ask you: What’s the craziest or most surprising thing you’ve seen?
Oh my God, I’ve seen so many things. When you look at a map, you see something static, but it isn’t. The whole world is changing. If you look at a field, the river will move. Human activity is changing everything, and everything is changing.
What I’m most excited about is what people do with our imagery. It’s a huge range of things. To give you some bizarre examples, we had some people in South America protecting dolphins in rivers. Even though we can’t see the dolphins, we can see the activity that was limiting their range. We’ve also seen people use our data in Africa to stop river blindness. You wonder, how on earth can we help with river blindness? It’s a disease that’s river-based, but we obviously can’t see the disease. It’s all to do with how close the village is to stagnant water, and we can see stagnant water in the imagery. So these NGOs were using it to warn villages, “You’re close to stagnant water, therefore get out of its way,” or what have you.
It’s all over the place. The most interesting applications on the defense side are a little more sensitive, but just know that it’s playing a big role in these conflicts around the world, and I believe it’s really helpful for the planet. As I said, it diffuses tension and reduces the likelihood of civilian casualties, and reduces the likelihood of war happening at all, because the best situation is that we don’t enter a war in the first place. Information diffuses tensions because it means that different sides can understand what’s going on.
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3. Three Satellite Fleets
To walk through the satellites that you produce—you produce a handful, and they’re all called different birds. I know we talked about this on the tour, but could you walk through the different use cases or—
Yeah.
—the specs for each one of them, starting with Dove?
Yeah. The Doves are our mainstay scan. That’s the thing that no one else has on the planet: the daily scan of the Earth. They cover all the Earth’s landmass, about 200 million square kilometers, so more than the landmass of the Earth. They cover a bunch of ocean territory as well, in 8 spectral bands at 3-meter resolution.
Then we have our Pelicans, which are our highest-resolution satellites. Those image particular tasking locations that our customers ask for. One is automatically scanning; with the other, you say, “Hey, take a picture of here, here, here,” and then we can do that. The most unique aspect is that we’re building up to a fleet that has much more revisit than anyone else and faster timeliness. If you say, “Hey, I want a picture of Tahiti,” you can get a picture of Tahiti. You can make the request, get the image back, and have it analyzed in 30 minutes, no matter where it is on the planet.
Then we have our Tanager spacecraft, which are our hyperspectral satellites. Instead of having 3 colors like our eye, these have 420 color bands that enable you to get a fingerprint of what you see on the Earth. It’s basically 400 different images for every point on the Earth’s landmass that you’re imaging, with really narrow spectral bands. What that enables you to see is not just that something is blue or green, but what type of blue or green it is, such that you can identify tree species and crop species. So it’s useful for agriculture, biodiversity, and monitoring land. But it’s also good for defense because you can see camouflage and the distinction between camouflage and a real vehicle.
It’s good for emissions and pollution, too, so we can detect methane plumes around the world. If there’s a gas leak, you can literally see the gas. Even though methane gas is colorless, we can see it because in this spectral band it sticks out like a sore thumb. So we can detect those gas leaks and tell operators, “Hey, you’ve got a gas leak,” and then they can turn it off. That’s good for the planet, and it’s good for them. It saves them money. Basically, we have different kinds of satellites that do all these different things. They’re all about collecting better information to help people make better decisions and take action.
4. AI Opens Earth Data
And to the point of being in San Francisco, we’re moving into the intelligence era.
Yeah.
You guys are in beta with your AI app. What are you doing in AI, and how does that change things?
Yeah. What this enables is an explosion in the number of people who can get value out of data. I used to work at NASA. I know those guys really well, and they use our data there. It’s amazing what they do, but that’s because they’ve got 1,000 people who know how to analyze satellite data.
Mm.
That’s great for them, but what is that farmer in Kansas or the journalist in Kentucky going to do with 4 million 47-megapixel images every day? They don’t know how to deal with that, right? AI is coming along, and you can just ask questions and get answers. That’s going to totally explode the number of users.
I was saying that satellites are going from a mainframe to a desktop—that’s what we’ve done on the hardware side. This is the explosion in the number of people who can get value out of it. It’s like giving people a desktop with no software on it and saying, “All right, off you go,” so only 1 in 1,000 people can get value out of it. Now you’ve got a basic operating system that anyone can use. Suddenly that computer’s useful to everyone, right? Basically, that’s what we see today. Space hasn’t gone through that transition yet, and I think AI is the thing that opens it up for everyone else.
So it’s not just the big countries. I think it’s actually going to help with a lot of defense and intelligence because it can help monitor large areas for threats and so on. But even more, it’s going to explode the commercial applications and all the applications in civil government. So many things could benefit: firefighters trying to stop and respond to fires, farmers, counties trying to stop illegal activity, people who don’t have permits for swimming pools. There are just bazillions of use cases for our satellite data in principle, but AI enables it to have value in practice for them.
Adding the layer of AI adds another business model. We were joking about this when we were walking over there, because through all the AI conversations we have on Sourcery, it always comes down to compute. First, where are you storing all this? How are you handling the shift in business model? Where are you getting all the compute?
The compute piece is simple. We put it on Google Cloud.
Oh.
We have some stuff on AWS as well, but mainly on Google Cloud. It’s not changing the business model that much because we were mainly selling data anyway. But now it’s just exploding the number of people who can get value out of it.
Okay.
It’s true that we’re now adding more analytical layers toward what we call solutions. That’s already using some AI.
But the AI tools that you were seeing are much more flexible. They’re not so specialized. You can ask any question in simple language, and they’ll have a go.
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5. Space Infrastructure and Security
Satellites, I mean, between what we’re seeing with Planet Labs, with Starlink, and even with geopolitical issues, they’ve just become a really hot topic.
Yeah.
One of the hot topics is data centers in space. Have you thought about this at all? Is it rational or irrational? Why would this make sense?
We’ve more than thought about it. We just launched the first data center test project for Google last week. Suncatcher is the name of their project. Before that, we launched NVIDIA chips on our Pelican spacecraft.
The reason we’re putting more compute upstairs is to process the data quickly. It’s great if we can do the image processing, recognize the ships, and run the queries up there, then just send down the answers. That means we can get the answers much quicker.
In the case of the LA fires, we took an image within a couple of hours of the fires starting. We got it down a couple of hours later, then had processing time—maybe another hour—and then they got the image. So now we’re talking several hours into the fire. What if we could have gotten that in minutes? That could potentially have meant those firefighters saving more lives, or those other first responders getting more quickly to help people. We want to reduce that timeline, and having compute in space helps with that.
Separately, there’s the question of whether we should just put all the computers in space. Yes, I believe it totally makes sense from a basic economic analysis. Why? The intuition comes down to something very simple: data centers are all about energy. On the ground, you would naturally power them using solar panels if you were just thinking about the cheapest way to do it, because solar panels are the cheapest watts per dollar. However, then you have intermittency because of clouds and nights, and you don’t want an intermittent data center. So then you have to add gas power or nuclear power. Now we’re starting to get really complicated, with much more permitting and much more time.
In space, each solar panel gets five times more power than it gets on the ground because you can put it in a sun-synchronous orbit that’s always looking at the sun. That means you just keep the panel facing the sun, and it’s always drawing power. There’s no interruption from clouds or from day and night. So you don’t have to have batteries, gas, or any of those other power systems. It’s five times more power straight to the chips, and then you just have to add radiators to cool those chips into the darkness of space.
We know how to do all of those things. You can send your commands up via radio and get your answers back via radio. There’s a little latency, but not very much, actually. So it’s all just going to be cheaper. Notwithstanding that, it’s also going to be better for communities that don’t want these data centers in their backyard because of rising energy costs, water usage, and other challenges. It’s just going to be smarter to put that infrastructure in orbit eventually. Arthur C. Clarke talked about these sorts of ideas many, many decades ago.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
But now it’s finally becoming a reality, and the first piece is compute. Eventually, we’ll put power in space and beam that down, and do other things, but the first piece, by far the easiest, is compute.
Back to the Google demo: we’re just doing a demo to see how their TPU does in space. We’ve already commissioned the spacecraft. It’s doing very well in space. We’re very happy, and Google’s very happy. It’s very exciting. We’ll test that TPU, see how that goes, and tell the world more as we go.
So there’s increased demand globally. There’s also increased sensitivity globally, and this brings in new national security concerns, especially with satellites. Why are satellites so sensitive and such sensitive assets? What can you compare it to if someone took down a satellite?
In many ways, satellites are like the sensors of countries. They’re acting as their eyes and ears. Obviously, it’s very threatening if you say, “Hey, I’m going to take out your eyes and your ears.” You can’t suddenly—you’re suddenly blind. The U.S., for example, gets its early warning of missile attacks from space.
Mm-hmm.
That’s how it knows if North Korea is sending a missile this way. Missiles use GPS. And then there’s all this civilian infrastructure that’s now dependent on it. You use your maps, you use your iPhone—you’re using GPS. You pay for a credit card, you’re using GPS. You look at Google Maps and use the satellite layer, you’re using satellites. You use the weather report, you’re using satellites. People don’t realize how much it’s baked into our lives today.
It also underpins a lot of our economy. The space economy is a few hundred billion a year, but the dependencies amount to much more than that. In short, countries’ security depends on it, and their economies depend on it.
As you mentioned earlier, you’re scaling globally, and there has been more interest from countries. Why has sovereignty become more important, and what are you seeing?
That’s the backdrop of the geopolitical fragmentation. The U.S. administration has asked other countries to do more in defense and for the U.S. to shift more of the burden to others. In doing that, a lot of those other countries’ first thought is, “Well, I first need to understand the threats in my neighborhood.” How do you do that? Satellites, as we just mentioned, are how you get your sensing. They’re your eyes and ears.
One of the first things countries want is that. Now, they look around the world and go, “Well, who’s produced all the eyes and ears?” We’ve produced more Earth-imaging satellites than any other country or company, so of course we’re one of the first people they call. That is driving a lot of demand right now. It’s very exciting. We can really help countries with their sovereignty needs. We can help them have their own satellites, choose where they want them to point, and control those satellites. They get to do that really quickly. In Sweden’s case, we managed to launch their first satellite four months after we signed the contract.
Wow.
Normally, in the aerospace industry, that would have taken five or 10 years. We did the same for the one sponsored by Germany in just two months. We can do that really fast, and that’s a complete game changer. There are two big things Planet does that no one else does: the daily scan and the fact that we can launch satellites really fast for people. We’re really leading the world in both.
Who’s on the no-go list?
There’s definitely a no-go list. First, there’s a list of U.S.-embargoed countries. The EU has equivalent lists. And the UN, obviously—we don’t sell to terrorists or, you know, North Korea.
In addition, we have a group of employees who look at deals and really think, “How is this aligned with our values?” They ensure that we’re going to see positive outcomes from them. We really care about this. It’s something we think very carefully about. We know our technology is very powerful, and we want to be good stewards of it.
6. The Fermi Paradox
Well, this is a difficult question. You have probably seen more images of the Earth than anyone else. First, have you seen any—
Aliens?
…aliens?
I knew it. No. The short answer is, we’ve seen lots of funny things. In fact, the U.S. Air Force alien office, whatever it’s called, did ask us for imagery, and we did provide it. In short, there isn’t really anything—
They move too fast? What’s the deal?
Yeah, funny objects, flying objects, flying devices, what have you. Anomalous stuff. No, most of it isn’t really anything. I’m sad because the interesting backdrop is that the universe is remarkably silent. We haven’t seen any aliens yet, and that’s shocking.
My co-founder worked on a mission called TESS at NASA, which was looking at other planets around nearby star systems. We’ve now discovered over 6,300 planets in our local galactic neighborhood, and none of them have any obvious signs of life yet.
And now we’re still looking, but in many ways the universe is eerily silent. This is what Enrico Fermi called—we now call it the Fermi paradox, after his question—which is basically, “What gives? How come there are so many planets, the universe is so big, and we still haven’t heard from the aliens?” This is a big question. I predict that we’ll actually find life off Earth within the next 10 years.
10 years.
Actually, I predicted that a few years ago, so now—
Oh.
—it’s probably more like 6 or 7. The reason is that we’re going to look at all those planets and their atmospheres. With the best modern telescopes we have on Earth, including the James Webb Space Telescope, we can actually detect chemical signatures, doing what we do with our Tanager satellite, but looking out. With that, we should be able to see certain signs in the atmospheres that might indicate life.
If you looked at Earth, you would see 20% oxygen in the atmosphere. That’s a dead giveaway, because oxygen grabs onto anything. It oxidizes iron; it oxidizes everything. The only reason we have this abundance is that life keeps it up—all the plants keep pushing all that oxygen into the atmosphere. If we saw anything like that, we would say, “That planet probably has life.” We wouldn’t be certain—we haven’t seen a picture of the alien yet—but we would say, “That is anomalous.”
We haven’t done that yet, but with all that surveying, I think we’ll probably find life. Still, that could be life that isn’t intelligent. We would expect to see radio waves from these things, and we’ve looked at most of those kinds of things, but there aren’t any. We haven’t seen any obvious signs of technology or technological life forms.
That’s rather worrying, because one possibility is that we reach the technology stage and then blow ourselves up. People seriously worry about this. We’ve got nukes. We’re sort of getting through that.
Yeah.
Now we’ve got AI.
Yeah.
Very scary. Obviously, there’s amazing upside potential, like we were talking about, but it also brings real risks, as we saw with recent hacking events and other things. AI could help terrorists build bad things, and we’ve got real risks from AI. Then there’s the whole control question: can we even control it?
We don’t know if the reason the universe is eerily silent is that civilizations blow themselves up when they get to this stage. Hopefully not. But this is why what we do right now to take care of planet Earth—or, as I call it, spaceship Earth, because we’re all on a spaceship, 8 billion of us, as Buckminster Fuller observed—is so important. It’s the only place where we know there’s life. Maybe there are other places, but so far it’s the only one.
Therefore, our responsibility to take care of it and not blow it up is not just locally important; it’s cosmically important. It’s our cosmic duty to take care of the Earth. So, in short, no, we haven’t seen any aliens, but that makes our role here even more important.
Question: are there any conspiracy theories we should be paying attention to?
I’m not a big believer in them. You’re talking to a scientist here. My friend at NASA used to run the hotline for people reporting aliens, and 90-something percent—
The hotline for aliens?
Basically—
Like, if the aliens would call?
No, not the aliens. The people calling because they think they’ve seen aliens—
Oh, gosh.
—that’s what I meant. Or the “fruitcake line,” as he would call it.
Oh, no.
Because, unfortunately, most of it isn’t real.
Yeah.
Most of these things have very similar explanations. Over 90% of them, though, are people observing Venus and not realizing it’s Venus. Even for things we can’t explain—and there are definitely some we can’t explain—the chances of it being aliens are really low. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we haven’t got that. But it’s fun to think about aliens in our galactic neighborhood, and I think we might see some in the next few years.
Do you have any particular sci-fi movies or books that you like?
I like Star Trek. My favorite is probably The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was made into a film. But the best is the original radio series. Those guys were sometimes drunk doing the radio show, but they were amazingly funny.
Yeah.
That’s why my favorite number is 42: the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and all the rest of it.
7. Persistence Wins
Amazing. As we close out, I like to take this in more of a personal direction. Our partner is Brex. Um, spending smarter, moving faster. They're corporate agentic finance platform. They're super intelligent, 'cause that's what we call it now, super intelligence. People say you’re a culmination of the 5 people you surround yourself with, or of the people who inspire you or mentor you. I’m curious: who is that person, or who are those people, for you?
When I was a kid, I was really inspired by an astronomer in England called Patrick Moore, whom I got to meet. He’s a bit like the Carl Sagan of England. I was young, building telescopes not so different from these—just on the ground pointing up, not in space pointing down. One of my teachers took me to meet him, and he was like a god to me. I was like, “Oh my God, we’re going to see Patrick Moore.” So he became a bit of a mentor.
I’ve been lucky to have many mentors I look up to. I did my PhD, very fortuitously, with Roger Penrose, who’s a mathematical cosmologist. But he doesn’t limit himself to that. I was doing physics with him, but he also has ideas about consciousness. He speculates and does amazing stuff in mathematics. He came up with Penrose tilings and made contributions in cosmology.
He also helped prove that singularities could really exist in practice, like stars could collapse into a black hole. The theory was clear from Einstein, but he proved that a nonsymmetric star could eventually become a black hole. In practice, that also means there could be an end of time if the universe collapses. We don’t think we’re in that scenario; we think we’re going to continue expanding. But it’s really interesting mathematics. When you meet people like that, you’re inspired by their genius. These guys are on a totally different playing field.
Yeah.
It’s very humbling. When I was doing my PhD, he was 70 and running rings around all the other professors, and of course around me as a student, probably coming in half-hungover from the night before. This guy was talking about string theory and cosmology and all the rest of it. It’s humbling to see genius, basically. I’ve been very lucky to have mentors like that through my career.
When I was at NASA, I had Pete Worden, who was a sort of maverick in the space industry. He was in the U.S. Air Force, then he went to NASA to run the NASA center where I worked. We argued a lot, but I learned a huge amount from him, and he really gave us a shield at NASA to do innovative things. That’s where we started with, “Let’s throw some phones into space and see if they work.” Which, by the way, is what led to all of this.
Yeah.
It sort of brings us right back to where we began.
I guess, to distill that down, what’s the key lesson you’ve learned through building the company over the years, going public, and launching more into space?
People say startups are all about timing and the best idea, and of course those things are obviously important. But I’d say persistence and endurance are the biggest things that distinguish entrepreneurs who succeed from those who don’t.
Our team has been at this for years, and we knew we were on a mission that was really important to help the planet: security, sustainability, AI, all the things we can envision it helping us with. We weren’t going to stop just because some VC said, “No, you can’t. That’s crazy. No one’s ever launched that many satellites. No one’s ever, you know, whatever.” That determination, that grit, and that inspiration of helping the planet—making the best positive contribution with these tools—is what keeps us going every day.
I was so proud on our 10th anniversary that 7 of Planet’s first 10 employees were still working at Planet. We just had our 15th anniversary, and about half of the first 10 are still at Planet. That says a huge amount, right? They could probably work anywhere. They have incredible skills, but they choose to continue working at Planet because they think the mission is cool. They’re doing amazing things. They get to work on satellites every day, and who doesn’t like that?
I don’t know. People love it. People love it. Will, thank you so much.
Hey, no worries.
What an amazing place to end it, and congratulations on all the success.
Thanks for coming.
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