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Inside Planet Labs (NYSE: $PL): Satellites, Planet AI & Area 51
Will Marshall says Planet's miniaturized satellites make daily global imaging affordable, while AI could make the resulting data easier to use.
Sourcery · Molly O'Shea
- Will Marshall is cofounder and CEO of Planet Labs.
The best minutes
- 8:39Consumer electronics made satellite miniaturization 1,000x cheaper3 min
- 27:31Perfect reliability can mean you are not pushing far enough3 min
- 33:04AI can make satellite imagery searchable in plain languagePro pick 4 min
Also worth watching
- 22:02Planet plans a tenfold data upgrade without a larger fleet3 min
- 20:01Planet can build a Dove satellite in about eight hours2 min
- 2:46Planet sells satellite data at software-like margins3 min
Skip the sponsor reads, the basic satellite hardware tour, the bird-name discussion, and the closing facility tour.
Full analysis · 6 min read
Real Alpha · Nov 10
Will Marshall says miniaturization cut satellite costs about 1,000x
- Will Marshall says miniaturization cut Planet's satellite costs about 1,000x.
- His account links cheaper electronics to fleet production, but gives no like-for-like cost breakdown.
- The test is whether planned upgrades and AI tools create more paid use without a larger fleet.
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Miniaturization cut costs about 1,000x
The number to repeat is about 1,000x, not a precise per-satellite price. Marshall says Planet built about 700 satellites in 15 years, and all 700 cost less than a typical NASA satellite.
At 2:36, he connects the reduction to miniaturized electronics. The comparison is striking, but the episode does not match missions, capabilities, or lifetimes.
Marshall contrasts this with earlier satellites he describes as larger than a room and costing at least $1 billion. That gives scale to his claim, not the accounting behind it.
So read 1,000x as his account of an engineering shift, not a peer benchmark buyers can reuse. The transcript supplies no cost series or matched performance comparison.
Our read
The figure explains the premise behind Planet's fleet strategy, but does not establish a buyer's cost savings. Miniaturization and commercial parts are the evidence Marshall offers.
Planet sells data from costly orbital infrastructure
Marshall's business thesis is that Planet sells information services, not spacecraft. He says image cells and analytics carry very high margins.
About 200 satellites in orbit image the whole Earth every day, according to Marshall. That resembles software economics at the point of sale, but every image still depends on infrastructure in orbit.
Planet also needs launch access, ground stations, and links that move data down. For example, Marshall says the company has about 48 or so ground stations around the world.
He says Planet launches about four or five times a year. Those assets support repeat imagery, but the episode offers no replacement rate, station costs, or service cost.
Nor does it give gross margin, revenue mix, or a bridge from hardware spending to software-like margins. Without those measures, the comparison remains Marshall's characterization, not a margin calculation viewers can verify.
Our read
The business model sells repeatable data from expensive infrastructure. For finance teams, the unresolved question is how much service margin remains after replenishment, launch, and delivery costs.
Commercial parts enabled a faster build cadence
Marshall says Planet used commercially developed electronics instead of recreating every component for space. His point is that phone and computer companies already fund improvements in those parts.
He also describes a different failure tolerance, sending up extra satellites so one or two failures would not end the mission. That approach joins purchased components, in-house integration, and fleet redundancy.
At 20:31, Marshall says Planet buys almost all chips externally but builds almost all systems internally. That distinction matters because an inexpensive chip is not a finished spacecraft subsystem.
Doves show the production ambition. Marshall says Planet has built over 650 Doves in the lab. He says it can build up to 40 a week, with each taking about eight hours.
Compared with the eight-year NASA build he recalls, that is a dramatic difference in build time. Still, Doves, Pelicans, and specialized Tanagers do not share one production cadence.
“let's take the best stuff that's already being developed commercially and use that for space”
Our read
The cost advantage comes from sourcing, integration, and accepting some redundancy, rather than one cheap part alone. Buyers should separate factory throughput from the reliability and replacement costs of a working constellation.
Owl targets more data from roughly the same fleet
Marshall frames Owl as capability growth, not a larger fleet. The planned system targets one-meter imagery, compared with three-meter resolution today, while retaining daily coverage.
He says the resolution change should mean almost ten times more data per unit area. He also expects optical links to return data ten times faster, potentially within a few minutes.
Most striking, he says satellite count should stay about the same, if not decline a little. Those remain targets in this episode, not reported Owl results.
Marshall gives no delivery date, customer price, or upgrade cost. Erik Bernhardsson said on 20VC in November 2026 that Modal's sandbox took years after launch to become a major business.
That is not evidence about Owl demand, but a reminder that infrastructure can precede a proven use case.
Our read
If Owl delivers its stated gains without a bigger fleet, output per spacecraft improves materially. The episode establishes a target, not its cost, timing, or adoption.
Marshall says perfect utility may signal too little risk
Marshall says Planet has generally obtained utility from every satellite that reached orbit. He lists out-of-focus telescopes, undeployed solar panels, and reaction wheels that stopped working early.
Then he calls 100% utility a problem, because it suggests the team is not pushing designs hard enough. He offers a newer sensor as an example of the capability Planet might pursue.
The test regime is demanding. Marshall describes 15 G launch shaking and roughly 200 G shock loads. Space temperatures swing from minus 40 to plus 20 degrees Celsius every 45 minutes.
The telescope optics must stay aligned within a fraction of a wavelength. He puts a wavelength at less than a micron, so permitted movement is a fraction of a micron.
Alexandr Wang said on Founders in October 2026 that Muse checkpoints had 80 of 100 rows green and 20 red. He said that was not good enough to launch.
That is a numeric launch gate. Marshall's point runs the other way, toward greater design risk, so these are not the same acceptance bar.
“we've got utility out of a hundred percent of our satellites which I actually think is a problem”
Our read
Marshall treats perfect utility as a warning that the engineering frontier may be too comfortable. He does not specify how much failure Planet would accept or how it would price that risk.
Plain-language search could widen access to imagery
Marshall's AI pitch is about widening who can use Planet's imagery. He says an LLM connected to satellite data can search the Earth in under a second.
The interface has 3,000 image layers reaching back 10 years, with images from pretty much every day. For example, a farmer could ask about a particular field rather than get general agriculture advice.
Marshall also shows a comparison of Area 51 imagery from 2021 and 2026. The screen surfaced structural changes and planes that appeared to have moved.
But Marshall said he did not know what one dark feature was. That makes the demo evidence of search access, not proof every answer is correct.
He called it early phase and later described it as a beta testing version. In an earlier Sourcery episode in November 2026, Will Marshall said plain-language search could expand Planet's users.
Jean-Denis Greze said on a16z Podcast in October 2026 that small-business users often have to discover and build AI workflows themselves. That is a different market, not evidence about Planet demand, but it leaves adoption as an open question.
Will Marshall · Sourcery · Nov 5Natural-language AI could open satellite data to more customers
Jean-Denis Greze · a16z Podcast · Oct 19AI adoption depends on showing people what to automate
Our read
Plain-language access could make geospatial data useful beyond expert analysts. But customers still need accurate answers and repeatable workflows, neither of which the brief demo measures.
What it means for you
- Audit delivered cost. Build a cost bridge for one imagery product, from satellite and launch through ground stations and delivery. Marshall's 1,000x comparison does not provide those unit costs.
- Set Owl acceptance bars. Track resolution, daily coverage, and delivery time against the one-meter and ten-times-faster targets. Separate measured results from goals.
- Test real user tasks. Try natural-language searches on farmer, journalist, or operations workflows. Compare answers with an imagery specialist and record errors and repeat use.
- Measure useful failures. Separate satellites that reach orbit, those that work, and those that produce customer-useful data. Track the cost of lost capability too.
What to watch
- Whether Owl delivers the stated resolution and faster data return without increasing fleet size.
- Whether Planet's AI beta supports reliable workflows for non-specialists, rather than only a compelling demonstration.
- How Planet defines useful satellite performance as it pushes new designs.
Send this to finance and product leaders weighing data infrastructure investment.
Watch the minute where Marshall explains the roughly 1,000x cost reduction
Written by Real Alpha from the episode's transcript and the other moments it links, then checked against the transcript. Quotes are the speaker's exact words.
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Read it with Pro, 7 days free- 0:35Miniaturization resets satellite economics
Will Marshall says Planet has built about 700 satellites in 15 years, shrinking spacecraft so the company can launch fleets. He says those 700 satellites cost less than a typical NASA satellite, a roughly 1,000x reduction, and argues that Planet combines the hardware barrier to entry with software-like margins on data services.
- 3:33Small optics resolve objects from orbit
Marshall shows the telescope and camera assembly, which he says can image trees and houses from 500 kilometers away. He describes star cameras and sensors that establish the satellite's orientation, reaction wheels that turn it, and radios that send imagery to the ground.
- 6:04Daily imagery needs machine analysis
Marshall says about 200 satellites image the whole Earth every day, producing about 4 million images and roughly 100 terapixels with eight spectral bands per pixel. He says imagery is useful to people and increasingly accessible to machine-learning systems that identify objects, since people cannot review millions of images each day.
- 7:37Consumer electronics changed satellite design
Marshall says satellites must survive launch shocks of up to 200 G, vibration and temperature swings from minus 40°C to plus 20°C every 45 minutes while keeping their telescopes in focus. He recounts a failed suborbital phone test whose electronics survived, and says Planet chose commercial electronics and extra satellites rather than developing every component or avoiding failures at all costs.
- 11:40Faster downlinks enabled daily coverage
Marshall says Planet's first satellites downlinked at about 1 megabit per second, limiting how much imagery they could return. Current satellites reach about 2 gigabits per second, roughly 1,000 times the earlier rate, which he says enabled the mission to image the whole Earth every day.
- 14:32Ground stations and birds define the fleet
Marshall says Planet built about 48 ground stations, often grouped in sets of four or eight at high latitudes to connect with its polar-orbiting satellites. He says bird names reflect mission roles: Doves evoke peace and security, Tanagers biodiversity, Pelicans high-resolution imaging, and Owls larger eyes and onboard computing.
- 18:06Pelican satellites integrate key systems
Marshall shows Pelican 10, a high-resolution satellite with its telescope integrated into a bus carrying attitude control, propulsion and radios. He says Planet buys chips and some telescope blanks but builds systems internally. Dove production can reach 40 a week, with each satellite taking about eight hours to build, while Pelican production is ramping up.
- 22:34Coverage matters more than satellite count
Marshall says Planet's fleet is about 10 times larger than any other Earth-imaging fleet and images roughly 100 times more area than any other commercial operator, at least in the West. He says Owl is intended to keep similar area coverage while moving from 3-meter to 1-meter resolution, delivering nearly 10 times more data and returning it about 10 times faster; the number of satellites could stay similar or fall slightly.
- 24:18Ion engines trade thrust for efficiency
Marshall says Planet uses xenon ion engines that are almost 10 times more efficient in space than conventional rocket engines, but lack the thrust to lift off from Earth. He says the larger collision risk comes from debris: about 10,000 satellites operate in space alongside roughly 100 million debris objects.
- 26:43Methane imaging can pinpoint major leaks
Marshall shows Tanager tracking a methane plume and says the company can alert a gas company to a leak so it can be turned off. He estimates that stopping one leak can equal taking a couple of hundred thousand cars off the road in terms of pollution.
- 27:31Testing exposes the hardest failure modes
Marshall says Planet tests satellites for shock, vibration and thermal vacuum conditions. He describes telescopes as the most delicate parts: their optics must not shift by more than a fraction of a wavelength. He says all 700 satellites delivered to orbit turned on and provided utility, though he sees a 100% success record as a sign the company could push harder.
- 32:11AI opens Earth imagery to more users
Marshall says Planet's platform has 3,000 image layers going back 10 years and connects an LLM to satellite imagery, letting users search Earth in under a second. He says farmers could examine their fields and journalists could investigate floods or fires. In a demo, he asks the system to compare Area 51 in 2021 and 2026, while noting that the beta can make mistakes.
- 37:22Planet tests satellite radios in an RF chamber
Marshall shows the Dove Nest, where Planet builds and stores Dove satellites, then takes the hosts into an RF chamber to test satellite radios. He says the chamber absorbs radio frequencies so engineers can check antenna power without reflections affecting the measurement.
Published Nov 9, 2026.
Transcript · 30 min read
Sourcery, hosted by Molly O'Shea, with Will Marshall.
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
We've built about 700 satellites here in the last 15 years. That is more satellites than any other company on the Earth except for SpaceX. All 700 of our satellites cost less than a typical satellite at NASA. There's about 1,000x reduction in the cost. But this is our AI interface. We can ask it questions. We have tied an LLM to the back end and it can search the entire Earth in under a second. Someone at NASA kept on saying when we were there, Why are we spending a billion dollars on a satellite when a phone like this has most of what a satellite has, but it costs 500 bucks? What was the answer to that?
We are here at Planet Labs. Thank you for having us. No problem. Welcome. So what are we going to see today? We're going to see some satellites. Right. Also some AI stuff. You'll get to see some of our new AI interface to all of our satellite data. But we're starting down here in the satellite lab because it's cool. I mean, we got a little peek. So you guys are in for a treat. There's some vibration plates and some like, what is that one thing? You have a thunderstruck? Yeah, that test is the shop table. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So as we walk through, we'll start over here. I know you have some older satellites we can look through, but what are the different areas that we'll see today?
Yeah, I mean, basically, this is our satellite manufacturing facility. So this is where we build loads of satellites. We just launched 20 more last week. We can pump them out. In fact, we've built about 700 satellites here in the last 15 years. That is more satellites than any other company on the Earth, except for SpaceX. So this is a manufacturing facility for satellites. We've launched about four or five times a year. We've done it on over 40 rockets. So what has really changed in satellite game has been just the sheer size and number of satellites. And Planet sort of pioneered miniaturization of satellites, taking satellites that are bigger than this room and shrinking them down to small size so that we can then launch loads of them.
Read the whole transcript
And with loads of them in space, we can do different kinds of missions. before each satellite was the size of a double-decker bus and cost a billion dollars minimum I mean some NASA missions cost up to ten the really cheapest ones cost a couple hundred million we're talking about launching all 700 of our satellites cost less than the typical satellite at NASA so it's about a thousand X reduction in the cost and that's all to do with the miniaturization of electronics and that's what we pioneered here in this lab something that I definitely want to talk about during our sit-down is the use cases have kind of pretty much changed substantially especially with the new you guys just launched with Google yes so you're moving into the world of
“but our margins look like a software business and so it has the best of both worlds”
you where the satellite is in space that's a GPS where it's pointing with a star camera the Sun sensors and then we take a series of pictures and then we embed that metadata on that picture so that we know where we're pointing and then we stitch that to the Earth's surface. Now, we have about 200 of these in orbit. They image the entire Earth every day. It's the only system that does that, that images the whole Earth every day. And how many images do you do a day, and what is the file size of that?
It's about 4,047,000 megapixel images, basically. So it's of order, I think, 100 terapixels. Oh my god. Yeah, and eight spectral bands for every pixel. So it's actually, it's kind of eight pictures for every point on the earth's surface with different colors but not just the three that we have rgb in our eye red green blue but we have eight spectral bands that cover near infrared into the optical wavelengths and so for people who might be newer to planet labs why is image data so important maybe versus like radio occultation data well there's all sorts of data that you can get from space um imagery is of course super useful because it is the kind of data that we can visually interpret we're visual creatures right you name it we can see it we can understand it also there's a huge amount of work in visual language models now so graduating from the machine learning things that we're doing recognizing cats and and dogs in videos online can now recognize buildings and ships and planes and trains or whatever it is that you're trying to find so AI is very ready for it just like we're very ready to look at it of course we can't look at four million images per day so we're using machines to do
most of the the heavy lifting there okay do you want to hold it sure oh my god what do you think if you dropped it it wouldn't be so bad because that is more or less dropping it from about this jobs is to throw this against the wall yeah exactly yeah i'll demonstrate in a second but and actually dropping it About this height onto a marble floor is about the equivalent of the shock loads that it takes on when the two stages of a rocket separate. That's intense. Yes, 200 G's, it's extremely intense. So one of the hard things about designing these satellites is not just that it needs to work, but it needs to work through the launch, which is 15 G's shaking, 200 G's bolt shock loads, and then in the thermal environment of space so where we're going from minus 40 degrees c to plus 20 degrees c every 45 minutes i mean that's much colder than you know a freezer much hotter than stay sort of like oscillation and this telescope must stay in focus for that whole time even movement of a fraction of a wavelength will put this out of focus so this thing has to survive those shocks, survive that thermal environment, and stay in focus. So the difficulty is not so much the fundamental optic design, but how do you
encase it in a system that will survive all of that load. Right, and so the first version that you had, you put, I'll put this down.
“let's take the best stuff that's already being developed commercially and use that for space”
so i have endless questions i guess before i get to all of them what is the biggest difference between okay v1 we're putting a phone up into space to one of these going up there to what we're about to see right now okay so one way to think about it is how much data they're producing and getting down to the ground um when we first launched the first satellite some of which are here, various parts, they would get data rates down at about a megabit a second.
So we take lots of pictures. We dump it down with a radio that's going at about a megabit a second. Well, if you're taking 47 megapixel images, you can't get very much data down at that rate. In fact, so now our data is about 2 gigabits a second, so about 1,000 times better. That means we're roughly getting 1,000 times more data than the first ones per satellite per unit time so huge increases in the amount of data and that's what enabled us to get to this first mission one we called it of imaging the whole earth every day this episode is brought to you by brex my favorite you become what you spend on and i refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist expense reports receipt chasing and manual closes. The companies building what's next from Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola, and Deepgram all made the same call. They all run on Brex. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards, expenses, and banking into a single stack with agentic finance built in.
AI agents that handle expenses automatically enforce policy before spend happens and close your books in minutes. That's why Sorcery runs on Brex, so I can spend time on building and not busy work. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Bye. From handshake to signature faster, Harvey, the AI platform built for legal work is trusted by 80% of the AMLA 100 and over 20% of the Fortune 500. Learn more today at harvey.ai. That's harvey.ai. AI needs more than chips. It needs power, land, and infrastructure. Zone develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers, and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Zone is building the foundation of the AI frontier. Visit zonefrontier.com to learn more. That's zonefrontier.com to learn more. Let's go take a look inside. I know you and your team work very closely together between manufacturing, testing, production, all that. So how do they communicate with one another?
What's the flow here? Well, we build all the satellites here. You'll see some of it. we're actually going to first go into the place where we build the bigger satellites. Now, all of this is done on these sort of automated test stands. This gentleman here is working on them, these guys here, and they build all the subsystems. That all comes together into this main clean room area, which you see here, which we can actually put our hairnets on and go in so that we can actually see one of the satellites. They're a bit bigger than those first ones because these ones, as I was mentioning, trying to get to a much higher resolution on the ground so and i don't know if you were asking about how they communicate with each other but we can talk about that but basically each satellite dumps its data to the ground stations but we've got 48 of those ground stations all around the world your own ground station yes we built basically no one had that either you can't go to fryers and get that either so basically we built about i think it is 48 or so of these parabolic dish antennas to enjoy.
S and X band in a few dozen locations. We often have four or eight of these ground stations at any one location because we have so many satellites there's many to look at at any one time even in the same spot and we're so we're and they're in Alaska, northern Canada, northern Norway, southern tip of New Zealand, southern tip of Australia so basically the highest latitude locations because our satellites are mainly in polar orbits and so they get much more contact points than closer your station is to the pole. So we put them as far north and south as possible with an internet connection because we have to get all that data back. Okay so as we go and we look through these I want to address one thing. All of these satellites are named after birds. Yes. Why?
okay this is actually a space tradition that precedes us and we were like in NASA there was the Eagle that landed obviously a lot of military missions like Kestrel eye or and we wanted to name ours after birds that were a part of our mission so doves trying to inspire how we're trying to help peace and security around the earth tanager is on hyper spectral satellite and that's because these are looking out for biodiverse areas. Tanagers are some endangered birds with a lot of different colors in the tropics, so we can track ecosystems. Pelicans are highest resolution systems. That's because they fly really low.
They fly so low, pelicans fly really low because they get a bit of lift off the water when they fly really low. They get a little like 10 or 20% more lift. And we can do the same sort of across the top of the atmosphere so we fly these satellites really low so they would get better resolution on the ground so we named them after pelicans because of that so we'll continue to name them after cool birds oh our next one is going to call owl oh yeah so we're launching all these owls because they've got bigger eyes and they're wise because they have a huge amount of compute on board so we're naming them after owls so we'll keep on doing that it's just for fun amazing okay okay we'll put some hairnets on yeah all right All right, so we're going into the clean room to see some of the bigger satellites.
You all hairnet it up. You look cool. We look cool. Let's go. All right. So, yeah, so in here we actually build the satellites, the bigger satellites. That's a stand for one of the satellites here. You can actually see these are the solar panels that will be attached to these bigger satellites. This is a bus of one of the bigger satellites, so that's the core spacecraft components. That does the attitude, determination, and control, it does the propulsion, it does the radio communications. The propulsion, I think, is on the bottom. And so basically all of that harness holds the payload, which is a huge telescope that looks down.
So most of the volume is taken up with that. Now somewhere around here we have one of the actual satellites. Oh, actually this is a bit of fun. You can see there the optics, the primary optics there. that is the big telescope looking down. So that gives you a sense of the scale. But here's the spacecraft that we're going to look at. So this is Pelican 10. So it's one of our highest resolution satellites. So this this is now integrated. It has the telescope inside of it. So here you can see in the back this is the propulsion system. You can see this is the feeder. These are the two main tanks. This is the pressurant tank of that propulsion system.
So that's the back end. The telescope is that, this is the connection that goes to the rocket here. And then these are star cameras that are... actually hidden uh enclosed so that they um we don't get dust in them and uh the telescope is inside of here you can't really see it um so it's all wrapped up in this main section
“i think each satellite takes about eight hours to build”
“it's more about what capability do you have on each satellite than the number of satellites.”
that on a bench. That's kind of fun. As I said, this is our telescope assembly here. So it's about 50 centimeters in size and that determines how small an object we can see on the ground together with the altitude of the satellite so that's it what kind of fuel are you guys using in this is xenon so it's a it's a it's an iron engine so they're very efficient in space they the the gas comes out of the back extremely fast much much faster like 10 times faster than a rocket engine a classical rocket engine it doesn't have as much thrust so you can't take off using these engines off the planet it's not nearly enough but once you're in space they're much much more efficient. Like, as I said, almost 10 times more efficient than those big rocket engines. I think it was SpaceX, Starlink that just put out, they want to try to open source the data for anti-collision avoidance. Yes, satellite, space domain awareness data, SDA, yeah. Yeah, so I think that's really cool. Early on, I mean, we have a lot more objects in space. Yeah. We want to stop
collisions. We worked very collaboratively with the other players. The biggest challenge, though, is less the satellites it's all the space debris so we've got about of order 10 000 satellites operating in space but we've got of order 100 million space debris objects so objects that were former satellites that blew apart satellites that crashed satellites that were deliberately taken out by anti-satellite weapons from the ground and those things caused one satellite to pop into tens of thousands of bits okay let's carry on what a wild wild problem it is it's wild wild space wild wild space great documentary by ashley vance which you were in by the way it's cool right have you seen it yes i have yeah before we went to rocket lab i watched that and uh their little fight between him and i think chris kemp it was just hilarious yeah um quite some characters those guys okay we can take all this okay we don't need this we do not need this for anything else by the way this is a post of methane tracking activities of the tanager spacecraft so this is a plume of gas by the way when we enable them to be turned off because we just tell the gas company hey you got a big freaking great leak on your pipeline
Turning this one off is the equivalent of taking a couple of hundred thousand cars off the road from a pollution standpoint. Oh my God. So one leak. Oh, when we go to the AI demo later, is it possible to see the difference of COVID versus non-COVID? You know when everything was off the world? We're going to have a look. We're going to have a look. Okay. We're going to ask the AIs. Let's ask the AIs. Is that named after a bird too? It should do. Yeah. That's a good idea. Okay, I'm going to steal that.
“If we have a hundred percent success it means we haven't pushed it hard enough”
chamber here what are you putting in there what is that that's a for Pelican yeah for the reaction wheels oh it's for the reaction wheels oh cool so you're Testing that subsystem What's going on? A bunch of 3D printers Yeah, 3D printers, fine Normal, normal stuff But those are the three main tests The shock, the vibe and the thermal vac Let's Go here By the way, I like this sign Oh, you actually have this? Do you know how many people talk about this but they don't actually have it?
Well, these guys have it Anyway, let's carry on. at getvcx.com. Public is a multi-asset investing platform where you can automate your investing with AI agents. Create your own custom agent with a simple prompt. Agents can monitor markets, execute trading strategies, and manage your cash across stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and more. Want to buy at market close and sell the next day's open? Just tell your agent. investing at public.com founders scale faster on deal set up payroll for any country in minutes hire anyone anywhere get visas handled fast and get back to building visit deal.com slash sorcery that's d-e-e-l.com slash sorcery so let's go upstairs and um cool uh yeah so we're gonna go up to the third floor i guess i could take this at this point you ready well he's ready let's go Come on! So here are some of our doves, there's a SkySat.
This is our new Pelican spacecraft that you were just seeing downstairs, the model of it. It's smaller. But that's scaled down. Oh, okay. But this is our AI interface. So basically, this is our imagery of the whole world. You can zoom in anywhere you want to zoom in on. You can go through time and see it as it changes over time. I mean, if we go up further north, if we go down to December, it's going to be snowier and so you can see all the snow cover. And, um, but, but the coolest thing is that we have, so we have 3,000 layers of images going back 10 years. So pretty much every day for 10 years.
Zoom in as far as you can. Let's see what, what we got here.
“all they need to do is be able to speak, and by the way, you can speak in any language into it.”
and an AI team specialized in doing this. Yeah. Cool. All right, anything else we should see while we're up here? Great. All right. And here's some of the AI engineers. Oh, we have an AI engineer with us right now. In the house. Was that demo sufficient? I don't know why I wasn't doing the search tool. I swear you're trying to get it to do right.
Yeah, yeah. But it doesn't do a perfect job, but it's getting better and better. And can anybody access that? How do you get access? It's on a beta launch right now, so anyone can access it, but it's just a testing version. but soon we hope to launch it exciting cool all right well we're gonna go to the sit down interview now let's do it there's another floor this is the first time anybody has seen this floor it's true you're the first one to come in yeah all right so actually i can show you just a couple of things before we sit down um but these this is the so-called dove nest oh so this is where we built all the doves and they're sitting in their nest waiting for the launch so you can see they're two by two in there quite the difference from the garage you started yeah it's a little bit more substantive that's true oh and there's one more fun thing thank you you can put it back um one more fun thing for you to see in here um so here you have to go in there both of you do you want want to go first? Is this where you scream? Yeah, exactly. I'm going to shut the door and then you can just talk a little bit. Okay. So we are here at Planet Labs in San Francisco and now we are trapped inside. You catch that? Yeah. It's cool, right? It's really cool.
So this is where we test the radios to go to space. Faraday cage or is it a soundproof No, it's an RF chamber such that all the radio frequencies get absorbed by this so that we can put our satellite here, point it there, and then basically reduce the power such that we can check that the right power is getting to the antenna without reflective rays spoiling our ability to tell whether or not it's actually emitting at the right power. So basically it's a way of testing the the radios are going to work in space yeah one final cool thing for you to see sorry am i getting in your way off you go no yeah we were just setting it up for you all right let's go hey it's molly if you enjoy our interviews check out our newsletter sorcery dot vc where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on or podcast interviews.
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