Good to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.
Absolutely. Robert, typically, we've just given companies a chance at the start to kick it off with a bit of an overview, trends that they're seeing, things that they're excited about. You know, I'll give you the floor.
Sure. Now, once again, happy to be here. Thanks for having us. I'm looking forward to the chat. Planet overview, pushing, you know, almost 15 years now as a company, five-the last five, obviously, as a public company. I actually joined the company after spending almost four decades inside the U.S. government, working inside the intelligence community, focused generally in this area of geospatial information and remote sensing. Joined the company in 2021 in the position. And by the way, to be really specific, what I chair is the Planet Federal Board.
Mm-hmm .
Which is a subsidiary under Planet PBC. So, think of it that way. But I do work with the C-suite on broad strategy, which I'm happy to talk about here. So five years as a public company, and I just coincidentally, as a calendar, was with the Planet team over in Munich for the Security Conference last weekend, and it's a good way to kind of reflect where we are in the movie. So Planet's core value and differentiated value is our daily scan. We scan the whole Earth landmass once per day, and now we're doing that for about eight years. So think of thousands of images that are now stacked up, literally over every part of the world.
What's most exciting, when you ask about trends, is that the compute and the computation that we're all living through and experiencing with artificial intelligence is now unlocking that latent value that frankly, has been difficult to, you know, to tease out over the years.
Mm-hmm .
We're able now to obviously offer what we think is compelling imagery datasets and what I'd call the raw materials on the left side of your process, to going to the other end and offering subscription services and analytics services and alerting services, and we can talk more about the countries that we're talking to and, and that we've made good progress in. But as somebody who, again, spent four decades inside the U.S. government, as awesome as we are in the U.S. government, four decades is a lot.
Yeah
And so there's a lot of baggage in there. When you come to the U.S. government, and by the way, they're a great customer too, great partner, it's sometimes difficult to bring a new value proposition to such a legacy organization.
Yeah.
When you go to a country that's just starting, they have a cleaner sheet of paper, oh, my goodness, that's a sweet spot for us because you can really kind of build a baseline of commercial first and then add government capabilities on top. U.S. has been reversed, right? Government first, commercial on top.
Yep.
I would say it's somewhere in this movie of transition. I wish it would go faster, both in my former government role and my current industry role, but it, it's still in transition. So very excited about those analytics services. We might wanna talk, too, about the constellation deals that we've been doing in the past 15 months. That's selling satellites as a service, which has been, again, a very exciting new area for us.
Yeah, there's a few things there I wanna-
Yeah
... I want to, I wanna follow up on. The first thing is the uniqueness of the data.
Yep.
Right? You know, can you talk a bit more about that? You've got almost a decade, right, of data, doing it daily. It's very powerful. It's very rich. As you mentioned, there are technologies that are emerging that are helping you mine that data.
Mm-hmm.
And provide a real kind of value and insights. Maybe you can just talk about how special that is.
Sure. So, I became the NGA director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, in 2014, in the fall. And I should get the date, but around the same time, Will Marshall, co-founder, current CEO of Planet Labs, did a TED Talk. I think it's... And I didn't know Will at the time. I'd never heard of Planet Labs at the time. But basically, his TED Talk kind of previewed your question.
Mm-hmm.
Why would you want to image the whole world, right? But Will basically went out and said, "I'm gonna build this company, and we're gonna figure out how to image the whole world once a day." And, and look, I get it. We're, we're a rather small community, but my head exploded. I said: "You can't do that. I mean, we've never done that. I mean, that's just not possible." And, but I was intrigued by... And 'cause, again, that was a private company with private capital, taking a risk and innovating to, to meet this, objective. And I think it took Planet three or four years from that TED Talk to be able to- they called it Mission 1, right? To, to do it.
Look, in some ways, and by the way, even today, I run into people that say: "Yeah, but that resolution, the spatial resolution of that is only 3 or 4 meters," so which is, you know, 10 feet to 12 feet. "It's pretty gross resolution, so I'm not interested in that." But to me, while I understand that, because I used to live in the spatial community, and, you know, everything was about how exquisite of image you can take, how detailed an image you could take, that the differentiated value of the daily scan was the temporal resolution.
Mm-hmm .
It's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, January, February, March 2016, 2017, 2018.
Yep.
Therein lies insights that just don't exist, even at very high resolution, because you see and sense trends over time, patterns of activity that just aren't detectable when you're staring in a very high resolution mode at a target. So one way to think about it is, as humans, we have two kinds of vision, right? We have our staring vision. You and I are communicating with each other, so you're giving me body, you know, language and signals. I'm waving my hands at you to try to convince you to believe me. But at the same time, we have peripheral vision. So that if somebody decided to throw a bottle of water, you know, "Hey, I don't like what Cardillo is saying," you know, I'll detect it at some point to do this, right?
I'll turn my head, I'll be alerted, and I'll put my arm up to defend myself. So think of the Daily Scan kind of like that. While you're doing your daily life, think of us as your peripheral vision. And not more than just general peripheral vision, you set the dial to what you're interested in. Maybe it's ship traffic, maybe it's rail traffic, maybe it's military activity. But you could set that dial, and the only thing that will... I mean, obviously, you're the customer, you can decide what you want, but you could only bother me when one of my dials gets a hit. If nothing gets hit, I don't want to hear from you, because then I know nothing's, y ou know what I mean?
Mm-hmm.
It's the absence of information or activity, which is necessary.
Yeah.
I know that was a long answer to your short question, but to me, that really is the difference. And again, to reiterate, no one else is doing this, which is, again, something that's very differentiated.
Yeah, in and of itself.
Yeah.
I think ultimately what's special is that you've wrapped a very scalable business model on top of this. You know, a separate question is debating the TAM, which we can get to.
Mm-hmm.
But talk about how easy it is to scale now that you have all this data.
And again, redirect me if I'm missing the point of your question, but when I think about where we're going vis-à-vis scale, it's less about the data itself and more now about the applications.
Mining it. Yeah.
That's right. And so, you know, Will Marshall has been, you know, public with our partnership with Anthropic and, experimentation that we're doing with large language models, which, as we all know, are large multimodal models now. Most of us has taken the picture of our fridge contents and asked for help getting... Well, you got to be able to interpret pixels to give you answers to that. Now, satellite imagery isn't exactly the same, but the fundamentals are the same. And so I mentioned earlier, unlocking the value, but really what it's doing is it's kind of elevating and to your question, it's scaling potential users that we just couldn't before. Again, you're looking at somebody... Yes, I'm in my fourth decade of this, so I've been around for a long time.
But, but it was an exquisite profession when I joined it, right? I went to school for nine months. Nine months. Now, I went to an Air Force base to do it, right? And it was all classified, but they would not let me do anything for nine months until I got trained. And then when I got trained, I was given the very basic stuff to do, because you don't want to make a mistake at that. So, you know, think of a very tailored, bespoke profession. Now, fast-forward four decades, I, I won't say it's quite as easy as a ChatGPT query, you know, but we're moving in that direction.
It's getting there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's getting there. And so to me, what's exciting are the scale applications that just literally weren't possible even a year ago, are now possible today.
Yeah. Maybe you can elaborate on some of those services-
Sure.
... that are possible to apply to this dataset.
I'll start with two big, broad areas, and we can unpack those-
Sure.
... if you'd like. Planet provides a Maritime Domain Awareness Service today, which is exactly what it sounds like. So, for example, kind of our largest contract in this area is with the U.S. Navy, who you might imagine is a pretty demanding maritime customer.
Sure.
The region they've asked us to monitor for them is the South China Sea. You might imagine that that's a pretty challenging area to monitor, and so we were very proud when we, when we won their contract, their competitively bid contract, about three years ago. Actually, Maxar was the incumbent at the time. The reason I think we became compelling and ultimately displaced them was frankly, one, the daily scan that I've been talking about was over the land. We weren't monitoring open ocean because, quite frankly, there wasn't much business in open ocean. And by the way, there's- we're still not monitoring all the oceans, but South China Sea, Mediterranean, Black Sea, Baltic, Gulf of Mexico/America, I'm not sure what we're calling it today, are very interesting areas. So we were adding that capacity, right, through our scanning service.
And in this case, we found the right partner, a company called SynMax, a privately held company that specializes in detecting ships from our datasets. So they brought the algorithm, right? We brought the dataset, and then we took that to the government, and they said, "Oh, that's the solution I want." So that's one bucket of solutions. And the other one is what we call Global Monitoring Service. So think of what I just described at sea, on land. And the one that we've been quite public about and proud about is a pilot that we're doing for the Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Hawaii. That is the U.S. geographic command responsible for China and North Korea, and lots of other trouble spots, but China mainly.
We've been now since last summer, so we're about nine months into a pilot we've been doing for the command. Think of it as a China monitoring service. Now, no, we're not monitoring every site in China every day. We're monitoring the sites that INDOPACOM has told us we want on the dial.
Yeah.
So let's face it, one of the major issues vis-a-vis a potential Chinese threat is to Taiwan. Obviously, it's in our interest to keep the commander of INDOPACOM as alert as possible to any change in Chinese disposition, and Admiral Paparo is the current commander, and he's been public about saying that he has lost what he calls traditional indication and warning. Which means there are signals that military commanders understand about other militaries, and you can imagine, you know, kind of the classic ones, you know, multiple aircraft on runways and, you know, activity in ports that would transport marines and et cetera and supplies.
Sure.
Well, the way China is leveraging its ability to mask those, it's done it by kind of elevating the noise level. They're flying a lot. There's a lot of maritime traffic, and so they're trying to kinda keep the noise level up so that should they make a decision to invade, it would be very hard to detect. So what we're trying to do for the admiral is move what we call left on the schedule. I get it. We're probably not gonna get the key indicator at the port or the airfield, but maybe at the place that supplies the port and the airfield, we'll see increased petroleum production or even medical preparations or logistics. You can imagine-
Unusual activity.
Right. And so that's what we're piloting now for the admiral. We're quite proud of where it's going. Obviously, a pilot is a pilot, and we've got to prove it, and we're obviously learning a lot, too. So those are the two big use cases, but let me just give you one more, 'cause it's-
Sure.
... it's a little different. We have a contract with the country of Brazil. They have an issue with deforestation, and not just deforestation, but illegal activity in the forested regions of Brazil, which are quite large and quite remote.
Yeah.
We do a daily scan. We provide the results of that daily scan, and one of the things. Obviously, they're looking for tree clearing or cutting. That would be an obvious potential misuse of the land, and obviously, Brazil knows what is supposed to happen with their forest. But the other one is just airstrips that get developed quite quickly, usually associated with counter-narcotic or weapons trafficking or human trafficking, et cetera. It's something that obviously somebody's trying to hide.
Yeah.
So when that gets indicated, right, and when they get that alert, they send the right people. And you know, maybe they send a drone ahead of time. You know what I mean? Then maybe they go to... or they deploy a patrol unit to go look. And I don't have the stats in front of me, but we've done events with our Brazilian customer, where they've talked about the reduction in illegal drug traffic and the reduction in deforestation that they've been able to do from that kind of scanning service.
Yeah. And as you demonstrate more and more use cases, it does feel like we're hitting a bit of like an S-curve, an inflection here. You know, award activity has been higher, right? Bookings are improving, et cetera. You know, talk to us about how important it is to show multiple different services, multiple different angles, and how all that's combining into a-
Yeah.
... you know, a broader trajectory.
Let me answer your question this way. So I'm gonna generalize to make my point-
Sure
... and if you wanna dive into any of these, we can.
Yeah.
But if you think about the early days of Planet and its offerings, predominantly it was an imagery company. Had imagery as a commodity, you are a buyer of imagery. Let's see if we can meet somewhere on this cost chart, you know, where you will pay this much for that imagery. We shake hands. I task the satellite, I download the imagery, and I send it to you, right?
Mm.
Now, by the way, we love those customers. We loved them then, we love them today. The NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, is a very large customer of that kind of model, right, that kind of service. Then I think the second set, and this is a newer set, is the people that said: "Yeah, look, I don't have a imagery factory to use your inputs. I just want the answers," right? Or the outputs, right? And so those are those dials that I set. And so we're seeing more and more people come to us and say: "I appreciate the imagery, but just send me the analytics." So-
Yeah.
... that could be a subscription, right? Or it could be the maritime service or the GMS service I described before. That's clearly growing. It, you know, I talked about kind of the weight of history and the U.S. model. When we go and talk to companies at the Munich Security Conference that don't have all that, they tend to go here, or they go to the third category that I'll talk about, which is what we broadly call Constellations as a Service. So, Planet... By the way, that global scan is accomplished through satellites that we call Doves and SuperDoves. There's about 180 of those in orbit at any one time to get the whole world.
We have a smaller number of SkySats, which are a higher resolution, I think 40-50-centimeter resolution that can be pointed and tasked at a specific area. Those are being replaced with Pelicans. We like bird names at Planet.
Yeah.
And Pelicans fly lower in real life, so we're gonna fly lower to get better resolution. So we're gonna get 30-centimeter resolution from our Pelican fleet, which has 6 up now but will grow to satisfy the market. And by the way, we've also launched a hyperspectral sensor, which is more a bespoke capability to really go after the methane detection and kind of climate mitigation issues around that. And we have announced that we're gonna take the Doves and build an Owl constellation. Again, back to the birds. But the big difference there will be 3-4 meters to 1 meter, so much higher resolution, but still the daily scan.
But back to my point about satellites as a service, up until 14 months ago, the only way you would've gotten access is either buy our imagery upfront or buy our analytics services here. Now, we offer this satellite as a service, and we've announced 3 of those deals. Japan was first, 14 months ago; Germany, 6 or so months ago; and Sweden, just 1 month ago. They're all very different. Well, they're all bespoke to what the country... But basically, what you should understand is the need that we've gone after is those countries' interest in having assured collection, assured capacity, guaranteed, so essential ownership. Now, again, each model is a little different. I can tell you a little bit more about the Japanese model. We've talked more about that.
We haven't talked as much about the last two, the details. But in the Japanese model, it's gonna be 10 Pelicans that they will own when they're over their ground stations. So think of it as fractional ownership, timeshare, if you will-
Yeah.
... of the whole orbit. But they get the part that sits over Japan, which is a large part of the world. But when it flies out of their area, it comes back to Planet to commercialize and monetize. So it's a win-win. They get their dedicated capacity when, where and when they want it. We obviously get revenue and, and returns on that, and then we also get to monetize the rest of the orbit.
Yeah.
So it's a growing model. When we had our Investor Day, Analyst Day in October, we talked about 20-ish. I think we actually used the number 20, so let's just say 20 -
Yeah.
...that were kind of in the broad pipeline to head to a potential satellites as a service. That included Sweden. Of course, we didn't announce that 'cause it wasn't done. And so think of 20 - 1 now out there-
Right.
... that we're pursuing in that third category.
And the pipeline is still robust, or is it growing, or how would you characterize it at a high level?
If you haven't noticed, the world's a little crazier than it was. It always seems to be, but it's-
Yeah.
... especially crazy this year. Again, I was in Munich. Europe, predominantly, because of the Munich conference, is quite nervous right now. They had made a long-term bet of, on cheap U.S. security. Turns out that bet's not paying off right now. As a matter of fact, it's reversing. The U.S. administration has told Europe, "Time to pay up," and, and again, "we're not going away, but we're looking for you to step up here." Planet comes in and says, "I understand your anxiety. I understand that, you know, you've got, you know, issues with your national budgets and, you know, parliamentary votes and, you know, difficult questions about how you're gonna raise your, your investment here.
As you think about owning more of your own security, you're gonna think about, you know, long-term production and manufacturing and, you know, talent and development, all these things that you would need to create a defense ecosystem, which probably will include, eventually, tanks and planes and submarines and ships. But everything I just mentioned is a multi-year, minimum of 5, but more likely 10-year proposition. You're just not gonna build a fighter jet on your own, you know?
Yeah.
So-
Sure.
However, if you want to increase your local awareness and your understanding of the threat and your regional activity, have I got a solution for you! And I'll just use the German example. The time delta between when they signed... We signed that contract, and they had access to one of our Pelicans, dedicated access, was two months. So we can move that quickly, and the reason we can is because of the proud history of Planet, which is agile, innovative, economically efficient development of satellites. We're proud of being able to do that, and we have an active factory in San Francisco. By the way, we love showing it off, if you're ever... And by the way, I mean downtown San Francisco, Harrison Street, so really San Francisco.
But we're also proud, we just announced the intention to build a satellite factory in Germany. We'll build Pelicans there. Again, those details will be working out, but lots of good reasons to do that. We need more capacity, we need to spread our manufacturing risk, and let's face it, it helps us, quite frankly, in Europe.
Yeah.
I mean, we had and have a large team in Berlin, about 300 Planet employees, but this obviously helps our local investment and local recognition, if you will.
Yeah. Changing gears a little bit, but building on the same themes, can we talk about how AI is being leveraged or could be leveraged in the business more and more, and what services or opportunities that might unlock?
It's terribly exciting. You know, we've talked publicly about our partnership with Anthropic and the Claude tool. We've got research teams dedicated to answering your question, what can happen? Will Marshall has been public about how impressed he has been. And again, you know, Will's an astrophysicist. He's very advanced understanding, obviously, of satellite technology, but also AI, about how good Claude was - is out of the box. So no fine-tuning, right? Just take the core Claude AI tool, load up some Dove imagery and say, "Tell me, tell me what you're seeing that's interesting." I mean, you could be more specific, interesting around Chinese military facilities in January. Claude will come back with an interesting answer, but just like your experience, you know, kind of get some things right, kind of get some things wrong.
Yep.
You go back, you just said, "Hey, I like the first part of your answer. Not interested in the second part. Please go back and rerun it." Now, we're not ready today to, you know, put that out, you know, download the app, you know, Claude Planet, you know, app kind of thing. However, to me, it's clear that the development of those models, which obviously are multimodal now, is going to accelerate the unlocking of the value that has been latent, hard to tease out of our archive. So I'm very optimistic about this. Please don't ask me how we'll market it, how we'll co-price it. I have no idea, okay? They don't tend to ask me those questions.
Yeah.
What excites me, though, is again, just as a personal user, that I've, when I've interacted with the kind of prototypes, it just, it has that same kind of like: Oh, my goodness! And look, I'm a lifelong professional here. I've been very pleasantly surprised with it. How it just... It lowers many barriers to admission here. And so-
Yep
... it feels like, to me, like we could broaden use cases and users, I think, in a very exciting way.
At a high level, though, it seems fair that, you know, a year from now or-
Mm-hmm
Make up a date in the reasonable future, we're looking back and saying like: "All right, Planet Labs really unlocked some interesting services, interesting-
Mm-hmm
“technologies that were AI-driven.” Is that, is that fair?
Oh, I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
And marketed it to customers. Is that?
Right. And again, I just don't know how to do that.
Yeah.
But, uh...
Right. The scenario.
But look, I mean, again, I'm not Will, but I've been around him and Robbie and another co-founder. They formed the company to be that, right?
Yep.
You know, the original, I think the original tagline for the company was, "Use space to help life on Earth," right? Just make life better by using space, right? And make access to space cheaper and more-
Mm-hmm.
... and make the world more transparent and all these things. And by the way, that is still the DNA of the company. Have we shifted or we you know added focus to defense and intel over the past few years? Of course, we have. And you've seen those results as we report out quarterly quarter. Let's face it, the budgets are there, right? And we're obviously competing for those budgets.
Yeah.
But yes, I do think that there will be a broader democratization, which again, goes to that core value proposition. But again, I'm glad we have smarter people in the company that can figure out, how do you do that while still protecting, you know, your differentiation and making sure that there is a monetizationable, I make up words now, you know-
Yep
... process to-
Yeah, sure, how to commercialize it.
Yep.
My, my point is just that there is urgency to deploy AI and create real products around it.
There is definitely urgency-
Yeah
to do so, yeah.
Got it. Okay. Can we just check through a few of the strategic highlights from the last quarter? And I was just hoping you could elaborate.
Good.
What I'm talking about are things like, you know, the Owl-
Mm-hmm
- constellation, and just double-clicking on that. You know, just update us on the progress there, and what that unlocks.
So again, Owl is the follow-on to the Dove, SuperDove constellation. It will be the new Daily Scan, so 3.5 meters down to 1 meter. We intend to have a tech demo end of the year, early next year.
Mm-hmm.
So around a year from now. We haven't announced, you know, when we think the full constellation will be up, but, you know, if you look at our past, tech demos tend to, when they work, right? I mean, that's our bread and butter, right?
Yeah.
Once we figure out the technology, we can ramp up production. So, I'm optimistic that we will have an Owl constellation in a handful, you know, or less, you know, of years, for sure. You know, look, I'll—you know, as a professional, I'm very excited about what we're gonna be able to sense and detect at 1 meter versus 3.5.
Right.
We've gotten great reception from government customers about, because they too understand what will be detectable. And look, we're also experimenting with onboard compute, right? We've announced the Edge Compute that we're doing with NVIDIA. So think of the algorithms that we're running on our desktop today, running in space, and why would you wanna do that? Because you could get to the answer sooner, right? Get the signal, run the algorithm, just send down the answer. And then the other thing we're working on is optically connecting our satellites to also move just data faster. So in a world in which, you know, what have you done for me in the last three minutes? It's better to be able to send you the answer in two minutes.
And so, we're setting up a series of links so that whereas today, our data is downlinked to a ground station, and by the way, we have a few dozen of those around the world, so there's plenty of them, but it still takes time to go from Norway to San Francisco, you know, and back to the customer. So-
Yeah.
So with the mesh network, we could, you know, compress those timelines. That too will be part of the demonstration that we'll look with Owl, so that Owl can be that mesh network and very timely responses to analytic detections.
Yeah. And then the manufacturing facility in Germany-
Mm-hmm.
What opportunities does that unlock?
It's Pelican's to start. That's what we've announced.
Yeah.
I mean, if you come to San Francisco, and I've already invited the audience, they're invited a second time, you'll see SuperDove production, you'll see Pelican production, and you might even see Tanager production. Have I talked about Tanager yet? That's our hyperspectral sensor. Yeah. So all done on the same shop floor, right? There's just different corners of it or different cubicles, et cetera. Berlin will be a Pelican factory in the beginning, but I think the market will decide whether or not, you know, it becomes more than that.
Yep.
Let's face it, you know, because of the geopolitics I mentioned earlier, as a U.S. company, we, we're a proud servant, a partner of the U.S. government. But let's face it, when non-U.S. countries are thinking about, "Hmm, how am I gonna grow my own capability?" They don't always think about, "Well, I'm gonna go buy that from a U.S. company first," right? They might wanna buy locally or develop locally.
Sure.
So, but, you know, we didn't wander into Germany yesterday, right? We've had almost 10 years of presence there. Now, that's that was with a satellite command and control station and our 300 employees. So we're German already from that sense or European already. I think this is also gonna help, you know, 'cause we'll hire German engineers and metal workers, et cetera, to populate the factory there in Berlin. And, look, obviously, we want to be competitive going forward-
Yeah
... and we think this is a way to increase our competitiveness there.
Recognition that there's a lot of demand for services in Europe, broadly.
That's correct.
Yeah. And then, Project SunCatcher, that was another thing that came up recently. Would you mind just elaborating on that?
So SunCatcher is our research and development agreement with Google, which, by the way, is a long-term partner and investor in Planet Labs. Actually, the SkySats, I haven't talked much about those. Those are our legacy. They're currently still flying, but those are our legacy, high-resolution satellites that Pelican is replacing. Those we bought from Google a few years back. They were called Skybox for them. So we've had a pretty tight relationship with Google. SunCatcher is very early days exploration of a potential compute in space proposition. And look, I'm the wrong guy to have the debate about how real this is, and if it's real, how close it is. I appreciate there's vastly disparate views about compute in space.
You should think about SunCatcher this way, about us doing very early exploration of the core R&D that would be required at a very small scale. I think a lot of the debate is about, not the basic R&D, I think people agree about the engineering science. I think where people disagree is, how can you scale that?
Yeah.
So I guess our message is, while we're excited about it. Well, we're obviously excited about our partnership with Google in general. While we're, we're very interested in it, we'd recommend caution here, early days. Sundar, by the way, talked about a 10-year horizon, kind of is when he thinks about it. I'm not gonna question that. I'm just gonna throw it out that there's somebody that's pretty thoughtful about delivering services like compute in space. But please don't think about it as a quarter-to-quarter-
Sure.
... kind of, effort.
Yeah, no, makes sense. And we have a few minutes left. I wanted to talk about M&A and the broader strategy there. You have had a couple successes. Bedrock comes up, right? Maybe you could talk about the landscape as you see it and you know how you think about the M&A philosophy.
I'm just happy I got this far in our conversation without saying, "I don't know a ton about that.
Yeah.
Guess what? I don't know a ton about that. Now, look, I've met Bedrock. I'm very impressed with them. I'm glad they're on our team, but it's not... While I do strategy, I don't do that part of the strategy, so I'm sorry.
Fair, fair enough. Maybe I can open it up to the audience for any questions. Oh.
Sure.
Yes.
And sensing within space-
Yeah.
... the other things going on in space, are you going after that?
So non-Earth imaging, which by the way, I just have to say is exciting for me as a civil servant to say in public, because for years I couldn't talk about it, right? It was so sensitive, right? Nobody talked about, w e called it Sat- Squared in the days, satellite-to-satellite imaging. So this is just fun for me. It's an area that we have discussed various partnerships with companies that are pursuing this as kind of a primary delivery service. But I would describe it as more of R&D test and evaluation versus something that you know, I would put into those you know, three big buckets. So exploring, willing to be surprised perhaps at what it might become, but not a key business area for sure for now. Yes, sir.
I have two quick ones. So, number one, you've got a factory in San Francisco. You're building another one in Germany. I'm sorry if I missed it. Like, what quantum of satellites are we talking about here? How many do you need number 1?
So, since Planet was born, we've launched around 700.
Okay.
So, it's a lot. It's the most Earth observation satellites anyone's ever launched. Now, Elon's launching a lot more comm satellites. We won't compete with that, but for Earth observation. So and, you know, we launch about quarterly. I mean, we launch, we subscribe to a Falcon 9 or a Rocket Lab. And, you know, every launch is obviously different, but, but I think our last launch, you know, had a Pelican and 36 Super Doves. So, we launched them in flocks. So that's the- those are the kind of numbers. Yeah, I know, it's a bird thing. Those are the kind of numbers that, a nd again, if you, if you come to Willy Wonka land in San Francisco, you'll see it's, it's, it's a busy place, and, and we can turn them out quite quickly.
I mentioned the responsiveness to the German demand, you know, two months. We and the way we did it was basically, they quote, "Took a satellite off the line." So think of a, you know, automobile line. "Oh, I want that car." "Well, it'll be done next Thursday. You can have it next Thursday." Now, we're not quite that fast, but very proud of that kind of volume. Germany again, will be focused on Pelican to begin with, and then we'll see from there.
Are they principally Low Earth Orbit or-
Yes.
Okay.
Yep.
And then finally, it sounds like the level of redundancy around sort of, denial of, in a more... Do you have the redundancy in a sort of denial of-
Yeah, when you-
... yeah.
Space is a competitive environment. Yeah, the Planet approach is proliferated architecture, right? Meaning, not that we want people to attack our satellites or to jam them or to lase them or whatnot, but if it happens, we don't just have one or two, we have 180. And again, we're not asking anybody to do anything to any of our satellites, please. But we understand that it is a risk. An d I know we're over time, but just, you know, one of my early introductions to the Planet was one of the launch failures. This is back in 2014. Remember, I was just learning about them. It was a launch from Virginia, which is an interesting place to launch from anywhere. It was an Antares rocket, at the time, and it was at night. It was a dramatic explosion, right?
Just one of these fireballs that go up. There was like 36 Doves on the thing. Some of them landed on the beach, right? Because that's as far as they got. And they started to communicate. They said: "Hey, I'm in space. I'm ready to start taking pictures." And we said: "No, you're not. You're here on the beach." What I loved about it was, and I can't remember the exact number, but three months later, I think it was October to December, some of the same Doves that either landed on the beach or maybe they stayed, you know, intact, were launched on a SpaceX rocket. You know what I mean? So to me, that's resilient, right? And that's 10 years ago. And so we're very proud of our ability to, you know, brush off the sand, and, and let's, let's go again.
Listen, that was fantastic. Robert, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
You know, really appreciate it, and thank you for the audience for being engaged.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate it.