00:08:37 · Will Marshall
[00:08:37] S1: No. We're seeing the strongest demand there right now, but we are seeing also a boon in commercial business and civil government business as well. So, civil government is counties and states trying to use us to help stop wildfires and respond to them or NASA using it for science and earth system science. It's, Brazil government using it to stop deforestation, but no one can do that on their own. AI is covering all of that. Satellites and the AI enable this scale. At Civil Government Commercial, we just are working with agricultural companies like John Deere, Bayer, BASF. We're working and there we help them improve crop yields. We work with hedge funds. I can't tell you who, but some of the hedge funds like to work with us to get alpha on stocks and commodities around the planet. We have a lot of an understanding of crop yields around the world, a lot of understanding of infrastructure development. We've even had some of the hyperscalers around here buy our data. Why? Because they want to monitor not just their data center construction, but they want to monitor their competitors' data center construction. Have all the understanding of the data center construction all around the world, not just in The US, in China, in other places. We have a wide variety of applications, but it's true that defense is really what's driving the biggest boon right now. We reported a significant growth last quarter. It was 58% growth year on year, but I think the biggest part of that was the defense growth. So the other sectors are growing as well, but the defense piece is growing the fastest.
00:10:22 · Molly O'Shea, Will Marshall
[00:10:22] S0: Last year at Reagan National Defense Forum, I had an interview with Emil Michael, under Secretary of Defense for the Department of War, and also the CTO there. Of a few companies, I think it was three or four, he mentioned Planet Labs. [00:10:41] S1: Is that why you came? Because you said it was a good idea. Look, again, new technology is changing the nature of warfare. Now it is increasingly hybrid. It's increasingly distributed and it's increasingly new technologies that can help you address that. Drones, satellites, and AI are the core of that. Satellites is less known than the drones, but they're playing a critical role around the world, whether that's in Ukraine or in Iran and other places around the planet. [00:11:16] S0: I have to ask you, what is the craziest thing or most surprising thing that you've seen?
00:11:20 · Will Marshall
[00:11:20] S1: Oh my God, I've seen so many things, but basically, when you look at a map and you see it's just static, it isn't. The whole world is changing. If you look at a field, the river will move. Human activity is changing everything, but everything is changing. But I mean, we've seen, what I'm most excited about is what people do with our imagery. Like, it's a huge range of things. To give you some bizarre examples, we had some people in South America, protecting, dolphins in rivers. Even though we can't see them, we can see the activity that was limiting their range or something. And we saw people use our data in Africa to stop river blindness. You're like, how on earth can we help with river blindness? It's a disease that's river based, but we obviously can't see what it is. But it's all to do with how close the village is to the stagnant water. And we can see stagnant water in the imagery. So these NGOs were using it to warn villages, you're close to stagnant water, therefore get out of this way or what have you. So it's just all over the place. The most interesting applications on the defense side are a little bit more sensitive, but just know that it's playing a big role in these conflicts around the world. And I believe one that is really helpful for the planet. As I said, diffuse tension, reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties, reduce the likelihood of war at all happening because the best situation is that we don't enter a war in the first place. And information diffuses that tensions because it means that different sides can understand what's going on.
00:13:08 · Molly O'Shea
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00:14:49 · Molly O'Shea
[00:14:49] S0: To walk through the satellites that you produce, you produce a handful and they're all called different birds. I know we talked about this on the tour, but could you walk through the different use cases or the specs for each one of them starting with dove?
00:15:03 · Will Marshall
[00:15:03] S1: Yeah. So the doves are our mainstay scan. That's the thing that no one else has on the planet, the daily scan of the earth. They cover all the earth landmass, about 200,000,000 square kilometers. So more than the landmass of the earth, they cover a bunch of ocean territory as well in eight spectral bands at three meter resolution. Then we have our pelicans, which are our highest resolution satellites, and those ones, are imaged in particular tasks locations that our customers ask for. So one is automatically scanning. The other one you say, Hey, take a picture of here, here, here. And then we can do that. The most unique aspect of that is that we're building up to a fleet that has much more revisit than anyone else and faster timeliness. So if you say, our goal is if you say, hey, I want a picture of Tahiti, you can get a picture of Tahiti. You can make the request, get the image back and analyzed in thirty minutes, no matter where it is on the planet. And then we have our Tanager spacecraft, which are hyperspectral satellites. So instead of having three colors like our eye, these have four twenty color bands that enable you to sort of get a fingerprint of what you see on the Earth. It's basically 400 different images for every point on the earth's land mass that you're imaging and with really narrow spectral bands. And that what that enables you to see is not just that that's blue or green. There's this type of blue or green such that you can identify tree species, crop species. So it's useful for ag and biodiversity and monitoring, land, but it's also, good for defense because you can see camouflage and the distinction between camouflage and a real vehicle. It's good for emissions and pollution so we can detect, methane pollutants around the world. So if there's a gas leak, can literally see the gas. Even though methane gas is colorless, We can see it because in this spectral band it sticks out like a sore thumb. So we can detect those gas leaks and help people tell operators, hey, you've got a gas leak and then they can turn it off. That's good for the planet and it's good for them. Saves them money. So basically different kinds of satellites that do all these different things. They're all about collecting better information to help people make better decisions and actions.