Will4Planet

Unfortunately pricing isn’t as simple as $x/image. There’s puts and takes on everything from what’s the resolution, how old is the image, what are the license terms e.g. are we releasing it publicly for free (ie, world events or natural disasters), does the user need access to additional tools and analytics, and so on. We’re constantly working to make this more efficient and hopefully one day the industry will go in that direction!

I am generally quite pro the development of more space law. It's a very nascent field with really only 5 treaties - whereas law for the land, sea or air are vast.

Things I support are:

- debris regulation that prevents the cascading issues of space debris. Just like the earth's climate, the sooner we nip this in the bud the better. Much has already been done in this area but more still. The main thing here is that we need to ban kinetic anti-satellite weapons (ASATs) which generate huge debris fields and countries (like US, China and India have all recently done), do to show each other that they can blind the other. This is just dumb. Secondly we need to have redundant propulsion systems on any mega constellations that fly at higher orbits e.g. >600km.

- we need to start working on space resource rights -- countries (e.g. China, US) and companies (e.g. SpaceX, Blue Origin) are going to the moon and many want to make claims. Right now the law says no one can appropriate land on other celestial bodies (or put military bases on them), but doesnt really speak to anything further, including what happens if you mine some resources, are they yours? And when you land, can you be protected from others landing on you or what? All this needs to be worked out. Ideally before there's a conflict

- to your night sky point, I do feel the number and brightness of satellites (esp Starlink now) is effecting the night sky, not just for astronomers, who are definitely already pissed off, but also everyone -- and it effects how we see the universe. Should kids grow up and just see thousands of satellites overhead as well as the stars, or is it their right to see the natural night sky? So I feel like something is needed here. (btw I know this was discussed at the last UN COPUOS meeting -- the body that deals with space law.)

yes and concluded no. Whilst we have expertise there, that's not our goal: our goal is to help the planet with better data. And, from a business perspective, it's not a good business.

Let me elaborate briefly. In some senses, Planet’s is three companies in one: a space company, a data company and a software company. But really one should think of planet as a data company -- we don’t sell satellites or SW, we sell data. And that’s important b/c data businesses are very scalable -- we can sell each image multiple times and the incremental cost is very low -- so we get to high margins. (whereas rocket/satellite services companies cannot/its much harder).
To think of planet as a data company would be like thinking of Google as a server company. Yes they are good at servers, but that’s not their business -- they are a search business. Our satellites similarly are our back end. Now I would argue they are much harder (and sexier) but still back end :)

firstly you can start a free trial now, but it is limited in volume and time. Secondly, our focus is on larger enterprises. However, we do have a lot of researchers and other smaller users using it today -- generally its when their institutions buy and give access to them. So, for example,. NASA recently purchased data access for all civil government scientists in the US + all NSF funded researchers (~280,000 people) -- so for them its free at the point of access.

In time we envision the type of access you speak to here, its mainly just not our prime focus today. And we're working towards the tech to make it easy enough to use for this group -- a central goal of planet is to democratise access (many of the users we serve today could not have used satellite data before Planet).

Space debris is super important-- and I personally care a lot to the point (spent 2 years of research on the problem at NASA!).

In short, Planet keeps its satellites at lower altitudes to avoid creating debris: By staying out of high traffic altitudes and ensuring timely deorbiting, Planet does not contribute to long term space debris.

More broadly, the humanity/the space community has to do something about the existing debris, and I think the best approach is something we came up with at NASA called LightForce https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20120016689