Planet Labs

company · economy

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.

A company is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.