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Sourcery · 3 min · Nov 9, 2026

Planet plans a tenfold data upgrade without a larger fleet

Will Marshall · Co-Founder & CEO, Planet Labs

Will Marshall says Planet measures coverage and capability, not satellite count.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 8:39Consumer electronics made satellite miniaturization 1,000x cheaper3 min
  2. 27:31Perfect reliability can mean you are not pushing far enough3 min
  3. 33:04AI can make satellite imagery searchable in plain languagePro pick 4 min
  4. 22:02Planet plans a tenfold data upgrade without a larger fleet3 min
  5. 20:01Planet can build a Dove satellite in about eight hours2 min
  6. 2:46Planet sells satellite data at software-like margins3 min
“it's more about what capability do you have on each satellite than the number of satellites.”
Will Marshallat 22:43 · Sourcery
22:43

Takeaways

  1. Planet says its fleet images about 100 times more area than other commercial systems.
  2. Owl targets one-meter resolution while keeping fleet size similar or lower.
  3. Optical links are intended to deliver imagery ten times faster.

About this segment

Will Marshall says Planet measures coverage and capability, not satellite count. Its Owl fleet targets one-meter daily imagery, ten times more data, and delivery ten times faster.

Will Marshall

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 “Inside Planet Labs (NYSE: $PL): Satellites, Planet AI & Area 51”, Nov 9, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 22:14

    JPL on and we just launched our second one literally last week and we've got another one that's actually I think behind there and we can't go in because that one's more export controlled yeah so we can't come into that you can see it's black top secret that that that payload is a little bit more specialized it takes a little bit more work and so we're we're launching a couple more of those per year sort of rate.

  2. 22:43

    Is there a goal to how many you're gonna build in a constellation or is some of this replenishing? Like how do you- It is replenishing now. And in fact, it's more about what capability do you have on each satellite than the number of satellites. We have the largest earth imaging fleet. It's about 10 times larger than anyone else. And most importantly, it images about 100 times more area than any other commercial actor, at least Western one.

  3. 23:12

    The Chinese are trying to build similar systems. In fact, they even copy our names. They called them pigeon or something. It was like a close to dove. Anyway, it was like it looked eerily similar. And they even named it eerily similar. But no, roughly speaking, we're the only ones that cover the whole world every day. If you look at any of the players, they might task to a few specific locations, but cover less than 1% of the landmass of the earth per day, or maybe a couple of percent at most.

  4. 23:39

    Whereas we cover the whole of it. so you know a hundred times ish area collection so that's what we really care about the owls are the upgrade to have the area collection the same but ten times more data per unit area because we're going from three meter resolution to one meter resolution And daily scan of the planet. And that's roughly three by three times more data. So 10 times more data almost. And also we're getting it back 10 times faster because we're adding optical links and links to get that back really quickly. So basically you can get it back within a few minutes. So we're getting 10 times faster back and 10 times more data. But actually the number of satellites will stay about the same if not go down a little bit because of the nature of how we're building those. So it's not how many satellites you have, it's what you do with them or something.

  5. 24:31

    Okay, is there anything else in here that we should see anything? Any technical specs? Well, we can see a few other things here. This is a propulsion system all laid out. You can see