Planet Labs is doing a great job of raising the profile of NewSpace [1]. I met Will Marshall when I was interning at NASA Ames in 2007. He was setting up their Mission Design Center. I remember they were working on PhoneSat at the time [2]. There was generally a mood of change at Ames, backed by a great administrator, Pete Worden.
I was at the 1st Startup Weekend dedicated to Space this weekend in Bremen, Germany [3]. It was a fascinating weekend and a great opportunity to explore many NewSpace ideas. Chris Boshuizen gave a remote talk on the Friday. They’re differentiating themselves from the competition through their high repeat rate and I think they have a lot of interesting avenues for growth ahead.
It’s good to see institutional investors getting involved in NewSpace. Nikunj is a family friend; I’m looking forward to picking his brain about this deal and his view of the market. Space Angels Network [4] is also doing a great job of raising the profile of this new industry. Hopefully, we see a lot more investment in basic products and services that will open up a tremendous number of space-based applications in the coming decade.
Ever since Steve Jurvetson mentioned these guys, I have been super excited to see what is going to happen in full earth imagery. A lot of talk has centered around traffic recognition (either predictive patterns for motorways, or store commerce based on volume flux), crops and agriculture, climate recog (polar caps, rainforests) etc. It is going to be exciting to see what developers do when the API is rolled out in a much sharper cadence.
We always ensure that our satellites are well below the
UN 25 year guideline, and we will never launch a satellite
into an orbit with a predicted lifetime greater than 25 years.
Thanks for the link! I was looking for some papers on the topic (small satellites & space debris). Here are a few that popped up (not sure if CubeSats are 100% apples for apples):
Question for you sir[?]: is it possible to build a massive radio antenna array outside of the atmosphere using a widely spread out constellation of satellites? Like, something of a dimension and intensity that would be impossible/unsafe to do on the earth's surface? My apologies if this is a dumb question...
I am not GP, but if you are interested in satellite communication networks, spaceX and google have partnered to do something similar. It will have some extra-terrestrial advantages like needing less hops to get to destination and light moves faster in a vacuum.
This may sound crazy, but i was talking about a transmitter and i was thinking about it being pointed outward, not inward. I am of the opinion that crafted radio signals are the easiest and most efficient way to tell 'whoever' that someone is here and they know math. The constellation would serve two purposes: let asteroid miners listen to NPR outside of the control of NASA or Weyland-Yutani and broadcast a signal to the universe that we are here. I will not be offended by the wave of chortles. Also, i imagine a radio telescope that stretches 300,000 miles might be able to pick up a lot we cannot see.
There's no particular advantage to putting an interstellar transmitter in orbit. Attenuation on the way up isn't a huge problem. Arecibo could in theory communicate with a similar installation across about 10,000 light years.[1]
Thank you for the link; i will read it. I get that 'they' could detect each other, but wouldn't it make detection much easier if the signal was stronger?
I have heard this notion and, respectfully, i think it is bonkers. If a super advanced civilization wants to pulp us, i doubt they will need any help in finding us [as they are already watching the '38 Olympics and I Love Lucy. If, alternatively, they are some nomadic space dickheads looking to pick a fight, than i can think of no better way to prove that we are ready to be an interstellar species. Finally, if they are some insectoid space roaches that can hurl meteors across space at our little marble... good. I want to be a Starship Trooper. In any of these situations, humanity will become unified and space marines become a reality. Yayzors. I know this is a lot of silly conjecture, but the thought of multidimensional super beings having it in for us is as far-fetched as an invisible Jew in the sky who writes down everything you do and hates gay folks.
For a long time, public satellite imagery came from satellites flown by the US Geological Survey (USGS). They came in two flavors: geostationary and low-earth orbit.
The geostationary satellites are perched very high above the earth, and take frequent pictures of the 'full disk' of earth. This is invaluable for weather forecasting, as we can see what clouds are doing in real time. However, they are so far away that you need big, expensive satellites and big, expensive launches, and the resulting resolution is quite poor (like one pixel per 5km depending on latitude, and worse at high latitudes).
On the other hand, the low-earth orbit satellites fly just above the atmosphere, and can take pictures at much higher (spatial) resolution, but may only fly over a particular spot of land once per day. So you trade temporal resolution for spatial resolution.
With miniaturization, advances in imaging and related technology, and decreasing launch costs, it should be possible to deploy a constellation of small low-earth-orbit satellites, to provide good temporal AND spatial resolution. That enables a whole bunch of new applications.
However, I'd be a bit concerned that long-lived airborne drones flying at high altitudes might do the same thing (good spatial AND temporal resolution), but at a lower price point and in a more efficient way (since you only fly where you want to look, instead of covering the entire globe).
Satellites in LEO (including ours) travel at about 17,000 mph — drones can get nowhere close to that, which affects total coverage area possible per aircraft / spacecraft, which in turn will affect costs and operations.
Ground speed doesn't seem like a feature to me - after all, the ideal is an unblinking 'eye in the sky' that provides high-resolution video for large regions a la ARGUS. A stationary observer seems like it would provide more valuable information than an orbiting one.
With orbiting satellites, most of the time the birds are over the ocean and empty stretches of land that most people don't care about. You're wasting most of your bandwidth and storage on places that someone might be interested in one day...
Don't get me wrong, the work you're doing is very cool, and global data sets are really fun! Unfortunately, I've found that the 'value density' of these global data sets isn't great.
You cannot keep a stationary drone in the sky for long stretches of time. Their field of view is also going to be massively smaller than a satellite. You would need a lot of them just to keep the same amount of coverage.
How do you know nobody is interested in the 'ocean and empty stretches of land'? It could provide a lot of meteorological and geological data for scientists for example.
Funny you should mention meteorological use cases. At a previous startup, we built global historical weather data sets (at 5km resolution, 30+ year hourly time series), accessible via a metered API. This took HPC, storage, and engineering investment about an order of magnitude less than Planet. We also had a whole room of tapes filled with satellite imagery from the world's governmental Met offices...
Our main use case was for wind and solar renewable energy, but we also entertained other uses, like architecture and agriculture. These data sets turned out to be difficult to monetize; while the continental US data set may have broken even, the rest of the globe never recouped the cost of storage, let alone the supercomputer time. It's not that people around the world weren't interested in the data, they just couldn't justify paying for it.
Drones have to worry about airspace rules, which satellites do not.
One advantage they're keen to promote is that a 15-year lifespan sat has, by the end of its life, a 15-year-old camera. Technology marches on, and small cheap (nearly disposable!) satellites can just roll improvements into their replacement cycle in a way that the big boys can't.
If you assume UAVs will improve while space launch costs stay flat, you probably have a point. If space launch keeps getting cheaper (thanks Elon!) then the persistence of satellites will give UAV swarms a run for their money.
I'm curious how much equity founders have after such investment with so many investors? I know there's no standard rule here, but I don't know anything about investors, raising money etc., could someone give me few examples with real life numbers?
Planet Labs has raised a total of $160.1 million in funding across 4 disclosed rounds.[1] I'm going to assume there was also an angel round. Here is some (super) rough math:
| Round | $ in MM | post-$ | non-VC % |
|-----------|----------|----------|----------|
| Founding | - | - | 100 |
| Angel | 1 | 10 | 90 |
| Series A | 13.1 | 50 | 75 |
| Series B | 52 | 225 | 58 |
| Series C | 118 | 550 | 45 |
Note this announcement is the "second closing" of the 95MM Series C from January[2], which means the terms are very likely identical. The WSJ reported the Series C valuation as "materially above" 500 million.[3]
I picked these valuations out of thin air. The only "standard" thing I've seen is that most VC funds are structured for 20% minimum stake in Series A rounds. Later-stage rounds often target less ownership.
The above calculation doesn't take into account any stock for employees. With that, I'd estimate the founders still collectively own about 30-35% of the company.
This could also be totally wrong, since I have no idea what the real numbers are. But as an exercise, you get the idea. :)
If we forget about the percentages they own and focus on the value of their stock we see that their stock goes likes this:
$0
$9m
$37.5m
$130.5m
$247.5m
I suspect that the founder ownership percentages are actually lower than you've suggested and that right now they own somewhere around 20 to 30% which is still valued at $110m to $165m.
Maybe percentage determines voting power but there are plenty of mechanisms that can and are used to retain control at the equity percentages we are talking about.
I can say "creepy" ... e.g. sooner or later, anytime I walk outside, there's going to be one or more microsats "watching" me. Yeah, I know it's "nothing personal" ... today.
Makes me wonder about adding "Procure a personal ASAT system" to my dream list for the future.
That sort of creepiness, privacy concerns or whatnot are valid, but I think they almost need to be isolated out of such conversations.
The world is changing fast with all sorts of relevance in that realm. I think it's almost futile for us to try and comprehend how this stuff will work and how we feel about it. History is often notionally zeroed at the invention of written records. The king of an illiterate realm is prehistoric while Nebuchadnezzar or Hammurabi are historic rulers, leaving behind an intentional record from their times.
There are people today with thousands of hours of HD video and audio records. Facebook photos. HN debates. You can know who they are and how they think, to an extent, from those records. Their great grandchildren will be able to too. This is getting stronger. The quantity and quality of information being recorded is enormous. You might call it post-history. The period abbot which our level of knowledge is as complete as it is about the present.
I think it's the kind of great change that can't be understood from foresight.
Interesting. A while back on HN there was discussion of some actor (Tom Cruise??) using satellites to free child soldiers or something.. and conspiciously absent of pointing out the wars in the middle east
I was at the 1st Startup Weekend dedicated to Space this weekend in Bremen, Germany [3]. It was a fascinating weekend and a great opportunity to explore many NewSpace ideas. Chris Boshuizen gave a remote talk on the Friday. They’re differentiating themselves from the competition through their high repeat rate and I think they have a lot of interesting avenues for growth ahead.
It’s good to see institutional investors getting involved in NewSpace. Nikunj is a family friend; I’m looking forward to picking his brain about this deal and his view of the market. Space Angels Network [4] is also doing a great job of raising the profile of this new industry. Hopefully, we see a lot more investment in basic products and services that will open up a tremendous number of space-based applications in the coming decade.
Congrats to the Planet Labs guys!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewSpace
[2] http://www.phonesat.org/
[3] http://www.up.co/communities/germany/bremen/startup-weekend/...
[4] http://spaceangelsnetwork.com/