 It's great to be back at MIT. I have fond memories here when one of the missions I worked on while at NASA was incubated here and ended up becoming the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. So we started that in 2006, and it launched in 2017, right? 2006 launched in 2017. That is a long time. When we first wanted to do this mission, we wanted to do it as a high-risk mission, a mission of opportunity, something that would be $20 million, take two years to build, had nine cameras on it, and it was going to do an all-sky survey to look at the night sky to understand what are the closest and brightest stars to us that have exoplanets. And we were racing to do it because we wanted to have a target deck for JWST to look at. But JWST still has also not gone up into space either. So that $20 million concept turned into an amazing mission, and it ended up costing $300 million. But it's led here at MIT. George Ricker is a really, really good friend, and it's an extraordinary science already coming out of it, and they're already talking about their extended mission. Anyway, it's a delight to be back. My background, I worked at NASA for about 10 years, half the time at Ames being a performer, building teams and technology out in California, and the other half the time at NASA headquarters, where I did more policy, program formulation, high-leverage work that is, if you have headquarters colleagues, it's hard work. It's terrible work, but it's high-leverage, and they're doing it on behalf of the performers out there for the missions. But what I'm here to talk to you guys today is about the planet, what I have done since leaving NASA seven years ago, and the first of a thrust of three talks during the industry track. And so I'm gonna go through a little bit about history since we are talking about last 50 years and the next 50 years, and why things are exciting right now in the entrepreneurial aerospace community. Give you a little bit about planet for those that don't know about our organization, but I would rather spend more time toward the end to talk about the why, and the opportunities that we have as a community to be intentional with the businesses that we start with the projects that we take on. Mildly inspired by Loretta's comments from earlier this morning. By the way, if anyone has anything to add, if anyone has a question to ask, please, we can make this as interactive as possible. So there were, if we look at this chart, this is from Serafin. It's a new venture capital fund based in the UK. All focused on space investments. There were $3 billion of total investment last year alone into the aerospace sector. That's quite a large amount of money, and it's growing. And they've separated out by different phases of the sector, if you're building something, if you're launching something, if you're operating something, as well as broken out by the different maturity rounds of getting access to capital. And this is all space investment. It's not just venture capital, but it's all space investment. There are other sources of capital that's out there. And if anyone's interested to talk about that, not all businesses should be funded by venture capital, and I'm more than happy to discuss that. And I'm sure that Jeff, when he's rounding up the space industry panel, will also know that there are many ways to build an intentional business. Venture capital is not for everybody. So, looking back, this is Apollo 17, the last time we were on the moon. And this also was the 1971, is that right, or 72, 71? 72, thank you. It was also the year of this guy, which did not show up pixelated before. This is Landsat. This is an Earth observation satellite that NASA launched in 1972. And also, in 1971, 72, this was what was happening inside the National Reconnaissance Office. This is an amazing program. It was declassified not too long ago and thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of materials that were opened up to the public. This is a very secret program. This is known as Corona or Gambit. And this guy, if you take a look at it, you see the human right here. It's huge. And this was photo reconnaissance. So, this was before digital cameras. They actually took pictures in space and they deployed the film. They re-entered the atmosphere. They picked it up with a helicopter and they captured it. And that's how we did reconnaissance back in the 60s. And this arguably is, I would argue, the original, or not the original, we'll put it that way, the original Agile Aerospace for Earth Observation. These teams loved what they did. They preserved it. There's a full version of one of these in Dayton, Ohio, if you're interested to look at it. It's just phenomenal, the engineering work that went into this stuff. But we've probably all seen this chart before. This shows NASA's budget, a huge peak during Apollo. And then it kind of tapers off. But it doesn't mean that we stopped investing in space. Most of the investment in space in that period of time has all gone to reconnaissance efforts, military activities, and infrastructure that we needed in order to understand freedom of navigation, the ability to know weather, but then also early warning systems and so forth. And space has quite a major infrastructure that's invisible to most people that really allow for us to enjoy the 21st century. So there's quite a bit of space expenditure that's not captured in here. It's not just NASA. NASA's about a third of what the US government spends in space, and it spent more than a third during Apollo. It was very, very much integrated together. But what has happened too over the time is a lot of massive consolidation in the industry. We know the big defense aerospace contractors that are out there. And this happens in many sectors, telecommunications. It happens in advertising. It happens with mature industries, where you get to a point where there are more of major competitive landscapes. And it's a sign of a maturing industry. But, as I mentioned before, with TESS, taking 12 years to launch, going from 20 million to 300 million, the systems that we have in space, mainly driven by the government, is to make sure that it works. It is to buy down your risk. And you buy down risk with more time, more people, more money. And it does work. There's phenomenal stuff that we do. But I decided to leave NASA with two of my best friends, recognizing the fact that there were two converging trends that we could then bring to building spacecraft. And we wanted to build spacecraft differently. That is access to space, the secondary payloads. It's on the left. It's the 3U form factor. And then on the right is an open source operating system, the Nexus One. So the first Android phone. But it's not just the operating system. It is the 50 companies inside of that phone. All of the chips and the connectors. The billions of dollars that go into that R&D every single year and ride Moore's Law. And we wanted to figure out a way to strap Moore's Law to space, change the economics of a satellite, which then allows for you to mass manufacture them, which then allows for you to do a new mission that you couldn't do before. And this was all in the garage, thinking about this. So this was us seven years ago. I think five people in here are still in the company. And you can see right here in the lower right-hand corner a little imaging satellite that fits inside that box in order to get access to space. And so we thought about the different missions that we could do and why we would do it. And we came up with a really good mission for giving internet to the world and enabling the transparent planet. And we chose the latter to focus on Earth observation. And so now over the last, oh, I should say, when we decided to do that mission, it was based on a number of factors from cost to an MVP to get access to actually get viable traction in space, engineering difficulty, but then also something that was motivating to us. And so in the garage we came up with this mission. And we had that North Star at the core of who we are, which is to image the whole world every day and make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. And this comes from so much history of photo reconnaissance and of a lot of work that had been done in the military and in the intelligence community, but then also converging trends of other technologies from other aspects of society that we can then bring to this mission. To image the whole world every day, that means we needed over 100 satellites to be working. And that had to change the model around how much that would cost in order to operate. But ultimately it's about the outcome, the impact that we want to make. It's not just about space. Space to us, while we're space geeks, is a cost center for us. And we've chosen to then use that to come up with the unique data feed that we can then commercialize on top of. So over the last seven years, we've gone to space many times. We practice something internally that we call agile aerospace. So about every three to four months, we redesign our satellite. We're on the 15th generation of the satellite. We've been to space successfully 23 times. We were on two that were unsuccessful, the Antares and the SpaceX. And we've launched 331 satellites in the space over this period of time. Many of them were with Jeff via NanoRacks, deployed from the International Space Station. And that was a phenomenal partnership. And something that really got us access to space early and often. 15% of the global launch capability goes to the International Space Station. And our little satellites are six kilograms. And so you can, it's not as big as the AMS. So you can put a whole bunch of those things in there and deploy them from the space station. And that allowed for us to test up frequently. Today we get almost eight terabytes of raw data down a day. We operate about 120 Dove satellites, the small CubeSats. And we image the whole entire world every day. So we've been doing that for about a year and a half. We've been imaging the whole world about every week for about two and a half years. And in order to do that, we autonomously operate all of those satellites in space. We have about a dozen satellite engineers that operate a fleet of a combined fleet of SkySats as well as Doves. This shows a little bit of the trajectory of where you can go when you allow yourself to take a little bit of risk and to learn and lean forward. Every single subsystem has increased over time. And these are real data. I mean, we're getting peak 1.8 gigabits a second and build 15 in a CubeSat, 1.2 on average. We get a lot of data down. And we've increased the capability of the satellite tremendously to really fulfill the mission that we wanna go after. The other trend that's happening is disaggregating space systems. Especially when combined with responsive launch, as Mandy will talk about with Virgin orbit, we'll really open up new missions that otherwise were not possible before. To go to particular orbits that you want to when you wanna go. And it opens up quite a bit of flexibility and freedom for the entrepreneur to get to space when they absolutely need to rather than waiting a couple of years. And it also allows for people that are reliant on that orbital infrastructure to be resilient and to operate. So the overhead architecture, as some people call it, for the 21st century will shift and adapt over time. This shows an Indian launch that we did about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago now, for 88 of our satellites that were done in one launch. And so you can see all of them being deployed here. This is what really drives most of the fleet today. And we continue to launch more spacecraft. In December, we had three launches alone with 33 satellites on it, about three different classes of satellites that were on there. We just delivered another 20 satellites to India, actually, that we'll launch at the end of the month on the 31st. And these are build 15 satellites that have more spectral bands, increased lifetime, a lot of onboard compute, and the overall direction of where things are going in space is you collect a lot of data and you do a lot of computation with at the sensor level and send answers back down. So there's gonna be interesting architectures moving forward. This shows a little bit about our mission. So with about 100 satellites, we actually only need about 75 or so. 100 satellites in sun synchronous orbit, we create a line scanner for the planet. So this is half of what we do to image the whole world every day. And then we have SkySats. This is with a company called Skybox that was bought by Google and then we bought them out of Google and built another eight of these satellites and put them up in the space. And so we have 15 of these SkySats that are up in space that are about five times higher resolution than the Doves. So 70 centimeters per pixel. So they can see much higher granularity of what's happening. When you combine those two data sets together, you can come at really interesting missions where you can have an effective submeter update of the planet relatively quickly. So the other thing we kind of got lucky about is a whole bunch of computer vision machine learning. We have on average 800 images of everywhere on the planet. And using a lot of those algorithms and storage and compute being a utility really allow for us to index much more about change on the earth so that people that aren't remote sensing scientists can have access to these information feeds to then build new insights or new businesses on top of our decision-making tools. And so this is largely what we've been working on the last two years. We have a large software team. We have more software engineers in our company than we have aerospace engineers to index the planet so that we can understand what's happening, when it happens, and then get to a point of anticipating what's about to happen so we can make better decisions. And we need to do it because we absolutely are terraforming this planet. Since the first Landsat satellite went up, we've doubled the population on our planet. You have a question? I think we're vena-forming the planet. We're vena-forming the planet. That is, let's hope not. We have to get out in front of that because then we're going to have to go and terraform a planet in order to actually survive as a species. But this is a call to action. I mean, we have to do it. We have to do it. And being able to give people the tools and the data and the stories to understand that we are all denizens on this earth and that we are affecting the environment for everyone is critically important. And for us as a company, we're a small company. We're about 400 people. And we're focused on making sure that we endure. We're trying to build something for generations. So our focus is selling to people in remote sensing. They have the budgets for it. We can become profitable with it. We're not far away from that at the moment. Slow and steady to do that. All of this software stuff, though, then makes it available to the rest of society. When these tools become available, then journalists can use it really easily. We can use it really easily. Then the average person can understand change in the planet to see news in a different way and to take responsibility for those around us. So imagine being able to index and catalog the whole world every day and how it's moving over time. We're doing that right now with all boats, all planes, all roads, and all buildings. I'm gonna go relatively quickly because I wanna talk about some of the other things. Here's actually just a bit of an example of this place in Bangladesh being able to use our algorithm to look for buildings over time. If it's just run over the world, if all of a sudden it pops up and you didn't expect it, that might mean something. And you can see this happened in a relatively short period of time. Really, really, in Bangladesh that nobody was really looking. And these are the Rohingya. Being able to do a global change detection like that where you can spot something that happened and allow for that level of transparency for the world to react and to respond is part of our responsibility. And same thing for a flood here. Being able to then look for, recognize the fact that a new IDP camp came in with roads and then the roads went away because there was a flood of then to automatically task a sky set in order to actually see that flood and how that has occurred over time. So we are a commercial company. We are venture capital funded. We have raised almost $400 million over the course of our history. But we are a purpose driven company. We have a mission at the core of what we are doing and we wrap a business model around it. So we own all of the data and then we license access to it to different sectors of society and value based pricing and a price that they can afford. So we have an education and research license for instance which is a lot less than for instance an agriculture license. And that business model is new to the sector because this sector has primarily been driven by the intelligence community. So I'm gonna stop now and talk a little bit more philosophically around call to action and for where we are as a species on this planet. This is a picture of Andrew Zully. Andrew is a fellow at Planet. We have three fellows. They get to do what they do and they get to do their life's work at Planet. And I have the fortune to collaborate with him on many things. He leads all of our impact efforts. So a lot of the work that we do with nonprofit organizations with the UN, et cetera, et cetera. And I've adapted this quote from him is that we're in the midst of wicked problems as a species. We face 21st century challenges. We have a 20th century economic system and with 19th century institutions and we've been reliant on the institutions in order to step up and take leadership for some of these challenges. And they haven't been able to do so. Just operate at a bit of a different scale. And this is where I argue that we in industry can play a very, very important role. And if you are a purpose-driven company and you have a mission at the core of your organization, that also leads to good business because people wanna work for you. You will get a favorable regulatory environment as well as media impressions. And it has to be authentic and real. And over time, these things change. Our institutions change with law. We have a built-in learning loop associated with this. Same with the economy. The economic system will change because people want to be able to make more money. And so there will be different types of instruments, financial instruments that are out there. And luckily, we are in a sensor revolution right now collecting so much data about our world in near real time that we might be able to measure some of the things that are not captured within the global economy to then bring it in. So otherwise known as an externality. Here's a bit of a framework of thinking about that. Based on the sensor revolution, we have a vast amount of information. With storage and compute and machine learning on that, we're getting the insights that are coming out of that information. Working with the scientific community, they can unpack those insights, look at the algorithm, make sure that is in fact accurate, that it's spatially explicit, that it is unbiased, that it is repeatable. That's something that is a proxy of value for something that we're measuring as society. When you have an indicator based on that, you can actually pass laws. So then you work with forward-leaning governments for them to incentivize citizens and companies to avoid some of the negative consequences of some externalities and incent good ones. That requires having a measuring, reporting, and verification system to be able to do that. If governments are able to pass laws to do that and to measure against it, all driven by this third party indicator, then it shows that society values it, and over time, and this is a hypothesis, so we'll see, and we better try to do something because if business as usual for this century is not gonna be good for denizens of earth, over time we might be able to bring that externality into the global economy. The Sustainable Development Goals. If you are an entrepreneur in here today and your company is not helping to solve at least one of these, think again. Please, these are wicked problems. These are 17 major, major wicked problems that we face as society. These are also externalities. These are things that aren't measured inside of our global economic system, even though we value them. And luckily, being systems thinkers, you can think through what's the role of academia, what's the role of government, what's the role of a technology player, what's the role of a corporation in order to try to attack some of these activities. I should also say we've done a deep assessment of this. 12 of the 17 SDGs can pretty significantly be measured, reported and verified with earth observation data. The other thing I wanna mention too, as for those in the room that are innovators, scientists and engineers, the social responsibility that you have for the technology and the knowledge that you bring into the world. Famously, there's the Einstein-Russell Manifesto, which talks about the need to take responsibility of the effect of your knowledge that you're bringing into the world. And my favorite line of this is to remember your humanity and forget all the rest. We are a shared species and denizen on this planet. We have major challenges that we have to have the brightest minds in order to be aligned with. And we should recognize that our economic system, companies and governance are all human invented systems that can adapt and change over time. Now, some timescales are pretty long, but we need to be thinking longer term in order to make sure that we inhabit the sub-planet in an intentional manner. So with that, I'm gonna stop and I'm happy to take any questions. Yeah, do you want me to do something with this? Please. Robbie, I'm only the back professor here in AeroAstro. It's really impressive what you've done in the last seven years. I think we're all in awe of what you showed here. And I had two questions. One was you mentioned data fusion, that you're actually internally fusing your different data sets to get high resolution. So what do you think about data fusion between satellites and, say, stratospheric or drones? And then my second question is, could you tell us a little bit more about the business side? How much do you charge for your imagery? Do you have special programs for small companies, academics, et cetera? Yeah, so first with data fusion, it's all about data fusion. If you take a look at any machine learning algorithm, you need at least two sets of data in order to do that. Data to classify it and also data to feed it to then run the algorithm. And there's no one data set that's necessary. So the more that we can actually harmonize them, bring them together and you can query across them, you can gain even greater insight. So it has a stratospheric or other data collection, absolutely. One of the major things that we're doing this year is approving that harmonization and interoperability promise that we have with our customers because we're upgrading our fleet tremendously this year. Every year we launch about a third more satellite, so it's incrementally upgraded every single year with backward compatibility, so the workflows still stay the same. And the ones that the 20 that we're launching are really nice and they're fully interoperable with other government systems like Sentinel satellites as many more spectral bands, not just four. So yes, more data, the better. Have there be really good standards to let the data be where they lie so you can query against it? I think we're going back toward more of a federated model of being able to do that. Second is business model, yeah. So we have a licensed subscription business model that then allows for us to do value-based pricing and make sure that we can give access to this information in this site to aspects of society that matter. So we have a media program, for instance, that doesn't cost any money. So they have access to the same exact things that someone paying us tens of millions of dollars a year for would get access to, but it's a limited use of what they can use it for. And that's one of the reasons why we don't do exclusivity. So we're leaving a lot of money on the table because the existing market is really used to that exclusivity, but we're playing a bit of a longer game. We wanna own all of the data because the archive just gets better and better and better and better. And we have a bit of a compounding moat inside of our organization with that data feed. So yeah, so we have an education research program. I don't believe MIT is on that one yet, but it's pretty compelling. So we'll talk afterwards. Yes, sorry, now we're almost out of time. Five minutes, please. Hi, Robbie. My name is Jaren Chu, and my question for you is related to what you mentioned earlier around social responsibility and ethics. And what I'm curious about is, so I've run business development, sales and marketing for a consulting company. And when we heard about what happened with McKinsey's report for Saudi Arabia and how it was used for essentially cracking down dissenters and human rights activists, we were kind of shocked because no one expected a private report to be used in that way. So my question for you is, when you're providing data and imaging data on all these parts of the world to potentially government clients, how do you decide whether or not to sell them that data? Because you don't necessarily know what their intentions are. That's right. It's much more difficult to have a government abide by terms of service. So it's easier to do that with commercial players, everyone else other than governments. First of all, I believe that an organization should never outsource their ethics. And ethics is a process that you wanna come up with outside the fog of war so that you raise the flag when you follow that pre-determined process. To have a deliberative approach, or what we do at Planet is we have a small ethics team, anyone can raise the flag, we have a deliberative approach and then we issue a statement to the CEO. Well, so ultimately it's his choice. And there have been a number of deals that we have not done because we chose not to do it. Now it's harder if there already are a customer because a government won't let us terminate them for convenience. They would never sign that. So this is a little counterintuitive but we actually want there to be more of a limited license for government customers so that we don't have to renew it if we don't want to. We're still making up this model as we move forward. If you have ideas, please let us know. But this is a weekly conversation. Sometimes it's a daily conversation. Something happened last week. And I will tell you about it, not on camera. And yeah, so it's tough, it's gray. All technology is gray. So for somebody to say, oh, I'm a neutral platform, you can do whatever, nah, that's a cop out. We have a responsibility to society for both the intended and unintended consequences and there are levers that we have in order to rein it back in if we mess up. There was something else, yeah? Hi, I'm Robert Kennedy. 25 years ago, almost to the month, I'm the guy who got the Soviet Spice Ad imagery of Capitol Hill and the Pentagon for the Commercial Remote Sensing Hearing in the House Intelligence Committee and the Science Committee that led to the Clinton administration's PDD-23. I'm really pleased to see what you'd- This is for the Commercial Remote Sensing Act that actually created that. So I'm really pleased to see what you've done with the power. Thank you. In the 25 years. Thanks for doing it. And also, that was really done by Walter. Walter was on multiple sides of that. This is Walter Scott, the founder and the CTO of Maxar. He's devoted his life to this and really created this industry. One doesn't often get a chance to embarrass the DCI and live to tell about it. My question to you is, is ITAR a pain in your butt? Does ITAR limit you in any way? MTCR? So for us at Planet, no. We, not yet. Let me just put it that way. We have a, we build all of the satellites ourselves. And my two co-founders, one's British and the other one's Australian. So I had, from the very beginning, needed to figure out these systems in place. And so we are non-discriminatory employer based on geography of birth. We figure it out. We really make sure that it works. But ITAR is really, if you're attached to a launch vehicle, anything that moves, that is definitely a thing. Part of the reason is why we use a lot of brokers to do that so we don't have to abide by some of the stringent ITAR rules. We abide by EAR, but we do it to ITAR quality inside the organization. As we move to other phenomenologies and other sizes and other types of stuff, then there will be more controlled technology. But there is progress in it where a lot of people are recognizing on the hill and elsewhere that the commercial US sector is gonna be vitally critical to the 21st century aerospace ecosystem and how the US competes globally, not just with military intelligence and civil, but also with commercial. And so this is a 10-year shift as government players recognize that we're all part of the same community and that there is a revolving door. I mean, there are probably six companies that started out of my company because people left to start them. There are a number of people from more traditional aerospace background coming into planet. Some people that go to planet back into them. This is, we're all part of the same community here. And there is a bit of a fire that's lit with this administration in particular, recognizing that they've been doing sustaining innovation for about 25 years and that there are some disruptive capabilities that are coming up. So it will kind of be a bit of an exciting time, but for those that are companies, I would really try to encourage you to treat the US government like the large enterprise customer they are rather than the customer. Now it's a perfectly good business if you want to be a defense contractor for sure. If you want to be a commercial business, really try to make sure that no one customer is more than a third of your revenue, otherwise you lose market power and be patient because it's the right thing to do for the ecosystem. It's the right thing to do for policy even if it's not what the procurement officers want. So go slow and steady and build the market. And largely that's the message here is that we as a community are building that market. The reason why Walter is a good friend and colleague is because there aren't very many people that are selling imagery and it's a tiny market that we can then open up to the rest of society. I think I'm up on time. I'm up on time. I'm up on time. Thank you guys very much. I'm around for the rest of the day. Talk to you soon.