The alpha, twice a week
That was 3 min.
Get the best new moments in your inbox every Wednesday and Saturday. It's free.
Check your inbox
We sent a link to your address. Click it to finish signing up. Not there in a minute? Look in spam.
or
Sourcery · 3 min · Nov 5, 2026
A NASA mentor gave Planet room to test phones in space
Will Marshall
Will Marshall traces Planet's origins to a NASA director who protected an unconventional phone-in-space experiment.
In this episode
Full analysis- 20:33Space-based compute could offer a cheaper power model4 min
- 4:05Satellite intelligence can give countries an information advantage3 min
- 29:20Marshall expects signs of life beyond Earth within a decadePro pick 4 min
- 25:26Planet says it can deliver sovereign satellites in months3 min
- 8:28Planet's imagery reaches agriculture, finance and data centers2 min
- 17:21Natural-language AI could open satellite data to more customers2 min
- 14:43Planet's satellite fleet ranges from daily scans to methane detection3 min
- 35:23A NASA mentor gave Planet room to test phones in space3 min
“And he really gave us a shield at NASA to do innovative things.”
Will Marshallat 37:58 · Sourcery
Takeaways
- Astronomer Patrick Moore first inspired Marshall's interest in space.
- Pete Warden gave the team room to test phones as satellites at NASA.
- That experiment helped lead to Planet's satellite model.
About this segment
Will Marshall traces Planet's origins to a NASA director who protected an unconventional phone-in-space experiment. The account shows how institutional backing let the founding team test an unusual idea.
Will Marshall is cofounder and CEO of Planet Labs.
Co-founded Planet and leads its Earth-imaging satellite network, after developing low-cost spacecraft at NASA/USRA.
Molly O'Shea, Host · Founder, Sourcery
Ex-Upfront Ventures investor; has interviewed Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey.
From “Planet Labs CEO: Why AI Data Centers Will Move to Space”, Nov 5, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 35:28
you're a culmination of the five people you surround yourself with or people that inspire you or mentor you so i'm curious who is that person or people for you when i was a kid i was really inspired by an astronomer in england called patrick moore who i got to meet he's a bit like the Carl Sagan of England okay and I was young building telescopes not so different from these it's just on the ground pointing up not in space pointing down and and so one of my teachers took me to meet him and he was like a god to me and I was Oh my god, we're going to see Patrick Moore!
- 36:02
So he became a bit of a mentor, but I have been lucky to have many mentors that I look up to. I did my PhD very fortuitously with Roger Penrose, who's a mathematical cosmologist. But he doesn't limit himself even to that. I was doing stuff with him on physics, but he also has ideas about consciousness, he speculates, he does amazing stuff in mathematics. like he came up with these Penrose tiling, he could make contributions in cosmology, he actually helped to prove that singularities could really exist in practice, like stars could collapse into a black hole. The theory was clear from Einstein, but he actually proved that a non-symmetric star could eventually be a black hole. So in practice, and that also means that there could be the end of time. If the end of the universe collapses, we don't think we're in that
- 36:56
scenario. We think we're going to continue expanding now. But anyway, really interesting mathematics. And I mean, when you meet people like that, it's just, I'm inspired by the genius. I mean, these guys are totally different playing field. And it's very humbling. He at 70, when I was doing my PhD was running rings around all of the rest of the professors and of course me as a student who's probably come in half hangover from the night before and this guy is going you know talking about string theory and cosmology and all the rest of it and it's humbling to see genius basically and so I've been very lucky with mentors like that through my career. When I was at NASA I had Pete Warden, who was a sort of maverick in the space industry. He was in the U.S. Air Force.
- 37:51
Then he went to NASA to run the NASA center that I worked at. And we argued a lot, but I learned a huge amount from this guy. And he really gave us a shield at NASA to do innovative things. And that's where we started with this, let's throw some phones into space and see if they worked. Which, by the way, is what led to all of this. Yeah. And so we're very, it sort of brings us right back to where we began.