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.
00:17:24 · Molly O'Shea
[00:17:24] S0: And to the point of being in San Francisco, we're moving into the intelligence era. You guys are in beta with your AI app. So what are you doing in AI and how does that change?
00:17:37 · Will Marshall
[00:17:37] S1: Yeah, well, I mean, what this enables is an explosion of the number of people that can get value out of data. So I used to work at NASA. I know those guys really well that use our data there. It is amazing what they do, but that's because they've got a thousand people that know how to analyze satellite data. That's great for them, but that farmer in Kansas or the journalist in Kentucky, what the heck are they going to do with 4,000,047 megapixel images every day? They don't know how to deal with that, right? So AI is coming along and is like, you could just ask questions and get answers. That is going to totally explode the number of users. So, you know, I was saying how satellites are going from like a desktop or mainframe to desktop is what we've done on the hardware side. This is like the explosion of the number of people that could get value out of it. It's like giving people a desktop with no software on it and say, All right, off you go. One in a thousand people can get value out of it. So now you've got a basic operating system that anyone can use. Now suddenly that computer is useful to everyone, right? Basically. And that's what we see today. So space hasn't gone through that transition yet. And I think AI is the thing that opens it up for everyone else. So not just the big, country. So I think it's actually going help with a lot of defense and intelligence because it can help monitor large areas for threats and so on. But even more, it's going to explode the commercial applications. It's going to explode all the applications in civil government. So many things could be benefited. Firefighters trying to stop and respond to fires, farmers, counties trying to just stop illegal activity of whatever people that don't have permits for swimming pools. Mean, there's just bazillions of use cases of our satellite data in principle, but the AI enables it to have value in practice to them.