Planet Labs

Assembled from 22 blocks · 2 evidence · 24 related

1. Story
2. The company that made daily global imaging routine, by inverting the design assumptions of traditional Earth observation. Rather than a few large, long-lived, high-resolution satellites, Planet operates a large flock of small three-unit CubeSats — Doves — imaging the entire land surface at a few metres per pixel every day, complemented by a smaller number of higher-resolution SkySat spacecraft. The satellites are cheap, short-lived and continually replaced with improved versions, an approach only affordable because rideshare launch made access to sun-synchronous orbit a catalogue purchase. Its business is subscription access to the imagery archive and the analytics built on it, sold heavily to government, defence, agriculture and finance. Planet is a useful measure of the sector's scale because it is publicly listed and therefore discloses: its annual revenue is in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, which — for the operator that arguably defines commercial Earth observation — indicates how modest the whole commercial imagery market is beside satellite communications or GNSS-enabled devices. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Earth observation
5. The fall in launch price per kilogram
6. Planet Labs
7. Connections
8. The fall in launch price per kilogram
9. Earth observation
10. Reusable orbital launch
11. In-space manufacturing
12. Planet Labs
13. A recovered Falcon 9 booster is flown a second time
14. Satellite communications
15. Copernicus
16. Planet Labs
17. ERTS-1, later Landsat 1, begins the civil land-imaging record
18. The United States opens the Landsat archive at no charge
19. Sentinel-1A launches and Copernicus data becomes free and open
20. Evidence
21. Supports the finding that GNSS downstream revenue — devices, chipsets and services — runs to hundreds of billions of euros a year while Earth observation data and services revenue is smaller by roughly two orders of magnitude. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the contrast in magnitude is stated, the current-edition figures are not.
22. The satellite industry's revenue is reported in four segments — satellite services, ground equipment, satellite manufacturing and launch services — with services and ground equipment together forming the large majority and launch a low single-digit share. V55 verification basis: this session had no network egress and no remaining WebSearch budget, so the report was not retrieved; the segment structure is stated from author knowledge and every figure derived from it is given as a magnitude rather than a number.