Dear readers,
Welcome to Quartz’s newsletter on the economic possibilities of the extra-terrestrial sphere. Please forward widely, and let me know what you think. This week: What kind of Planet is that, human spaceflight follies, and Elon Musk’s $5 million hit.
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Branding is tricky! It’s been observed that when WeWork is a tech company, it can gun for a $65 billion IPO, but when it is a real estate play, it is desperately seeking junk bond financing.
Similarly, being a “space company” has some advantages: Some early investors and hires are very excited about getting extra-terrestrial, and it’s definitely a differentiator. But the rep can also be a challenge, since most potential customers don’t particularly care about space.
“We think of Planet really as a data company,” co-founder and CEO Will Marshall said this week at the satellite, nope, data firm’s first customer conference. “Data is the core.”
It wasn’t quite “developers! developers! developers!”, but as far as conference keynotes go it offers a universal message. After all, data is the new oil. And data has always been the point, ever since Marshall and co-founders Robbie Schingler and Chris Boshuizen were scientists at NASA, designing cheap spacecraft to go find out stuff about the universe. The business opportunity is pointing those spacecraft back at the Earth.
Nine years on, they operate more satellites than any other private enterprise. Other companies in remote-sensing have positioned themselves as analysts of others’ data, but Planet wants to collect it, too, bearing the capital expense of operating a satellite constellation with the sales, platform maintenance and analytical tools. The challenge now is to get people to forget about the spacecraft.
“At Planet we talk a lot about satellites too much, it makes me a bit sad-ellite,” Louis Rousmaniere, a Planet product manager, observed to audible groans, before talking about how the company was working to improve not just their imagery, but how quickly customers get it and how easily they can use it in other workspaces and with other datasets.
There’s still one advantage to owning your own fleet—you can put up the sensors customers want. At the conference, Planet said it would start sharing data detected in four additional sections of the electromagnetic spectrum, which should add sophisticated new capabilities for people seeking to do things like measure plant distress from space. It also announced that it would attempt to lower the orbit on some of its most powerful satellites to provide images with a resolution of 50 cm per pixel, up from about 72 centimeters or more today.
Planet now has more than 500 customers around the world, including a new contract with the National Reconnaissance Organization, the premier US spy agency, unveiled on Oct. 15. The details are shrouded in secrecy, but the contract is understood to extend a previous agreement, worth roughly $1 million per month, for the government to access some of Planet’s imagery.
As the leading venture-backed remote-sensing firm, Planet’s ability to brand itself as a data provider is more than just a question for its own business model, it’s a test of the whole sector’s value proposition. Sometimes the best space business doesn’t talk about space at all.
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Imagery interlude
We’re finally getting the all-woman spacewalk NASA promised earlier this year, but then cancelled when correctly-fitting spacesuits weren’t on hand. Now, astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch are prepping to go fix a troubled electrical power system on the International Space Station, and we are told they have the all the gear they need.
Meir and Koch are expected to get to work today or tomorrow repairing the broken power unit.
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SPACE DEBRIS
Artemis got rolled again. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, but the latest news from Congress is still not good for the 2024 lunar return program dubbed Artemis. NASA’s inability to articulate either a good reason to bump the target date up by four years or a full plan for how to do it (now expected early 2020) is the main reason lawmakers aren’t lining up to fully fund the accelerated program. We may look back on the time between Vice President Pence’s March 2019 announcement and whenever someone in authority finally concedes it ain’t happening as a kind of fever dream. In related news, the first flight of the Boeing SLS rocket—so critical to the lunar mission—is likely to be pushed into 2021.
NASA gets a new executive. The space agency tapped Doug Loverro, a long-time military and intelligence bureaucrat focused on space policy, to lead its human spaceflight programs: The work being done on the International Space Station, the spacecraft that keep the station supplied with cargo and crew, and efforts to send humans on to the moon and Mars. Loverro’s first big decisions will revolve around the private companies vying to fly astronauts to the space station next year. He was recognized for thinking outside the box at the Pentagon, but can he adapt to NASA’s equally complex culture?
A $5 million hit. Speaking of NASA’s complex culture, Politico reports that the space agency paid $5 million to SpaceX for a safety review NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine demanded after CEO Elon Musk took a puff on a joint while taping a podcast. Given that SpaceX is already required by law to maintain a drug-free and safe workspace, the review is seen by many in the industry as a CYA maneuver (aerospace people love acronyms). Boeing, the other provider of NASA’s future commercial spacecraft, paid for its safety review out of its own pocket, but the aerospace giant is also being paid $1.7 billion more than SpaceX to provide the same service.
A new eye in the skies. LeoLabs has turned on its new radar station in New Zealand, giving it the ability to track objects orbiting the Earth that are smaller than 10 cm in diameter, as well as give more certain coordinates for larger spacecraft. The news is welcome for organizations struggling to improve space traffic management as plans to dramatically increase the number of satellites come to fruition. (SpaceX is seeking approval for 30,000 satellites; currently, a little over 2,000 active satellites orbit the Earth.)
More Kiwi space news. The fifth launch of 2019 for Rocket Lab, the US-New Zealand small-rocket start-up, is expected this week. The cargo is a test satellite from the Silicon Valley-based startup Astro Digital, which is pivoting from trying to be an Earth-observation company to being a satellite-services firm. The satellite, called Palisade, will test out a new communications system.
Your pal,
Tim
This was issue 19 of our newsletter. Hope your week is out of this world! Please send your most expensive cannabis experiences, favored lunar return architecture, tips and informed opinions to tim@qz.com.