National Geographic

THEY ARE WATCHING YOU 59over their keyboards in an open work space, asidefrom a few conference rooms named after someof the company’s heroes—among them, Galileo,Gandhi, and Al Gore. I sat in one of them over-looking the upscale employee cafeteria, wherelunch would later be followed by a happy hourof Napa wines and California microbrews.Marshall and Schingler joined me. The formeris a lanky Brit with wire-frame glasses; the latter,a broad-shouldered and easygoing Californian.Both are 39 and seemed fully recovered fromtheir dinner the previous evening to celebrate thefifth anniversary of when they started workingfull time at Planet. At NASA they had been cap-tivated by the idea of taking pictures from space,especially of Earth—and for reasons that werehumanitarian rather than science based.They experimentedby launching ordinarysmartphones into or-bit, confirming that arelatively inexpensivecamera could functionin outer space. “Wethought, What couldwe do with those im-ages?” Schingler said.“How can we use thesethings for the benefitof humanity? List theworld’s problems: poverty, housing, malnutri-tion, deforestation. All of these problems aremore easily addressed if you have more up-to-date information about our planet. Like you wakeup in a few years and you find there’s a hole in theAmazon forest. What if we could have suppliedinformation about this more rapidly to the Bra-zilian government?”In storybook fashion, Marshall and Schinglerdeveloped their first model in a garage in SiliconValley. The idea was to design a relatively low-cost,shoe box–size satellite to minimize the military-scale budgets often required for designing suchtechnology—and then, as Marshall told me, “tolaunch the largest constellation of satellites inhuman history.” By deploying many such de-vices, the company would be able to see daily‘THE REAL THREAT ISINTEGRATED SURVEILLANCE.I’M A MIDDLE-AGED FAT GUY;I WALK INTO A SUPERMARKETAND IMMEDIATELY THEY STARTADVERTISING FOR CROISSANTS.’``````TONY PORTER,U.K. SURVEILLANCE CAMERACOMMISSIONER``````changes on the Earth’s surface in totality.In 2013 they launched their first satellites andreceived their first photographs, which provideda far more dynamic look at life around the worldthan previous global mapping imagery. “Thething that surprised us most,” said Marshall,“is that almost every picture that came downshowed how the Earth was changing. Fields werereshaped. Rivers moved. Trees were taken down.Buildings went up. Seeing all of this completelychanges our concept of the planet as being stat-ic. And instead of just having a figure about howmuch a country has been deforested, people cannow be motivated by pictures that show the de-forestation taking place.”Today Planet has more than 200 satellites inorbit, with about 150 it calls Doves that can imageevery bit of land everyday when conditionsare right. Planet hasground stations as faraway as Iceland andAntarctica. Its clientsare just as varied. Thecompany works withthe Amazon Conser-vation Association totrack deforestation inPeru. It has providedimages to Amnesty In-ternational that document attacks on Rohingyavillages by security forces in Myanmar. At theMiddlebury Institute’s Center for Nonprolifera-tion Studies, recurring global imaging helps thethink tank watch for the sudden appearance of amissile test site in Iran or North Korea. And whenUSA Today and other publications wanted an aeri-al image of the Shayrat air base in Syria before andafter it was bombed by the U.S. military last Aprilin retaliation for a chemical attack on a rebel-held Syrian town, the news organizations knewwhom to call.Those are pro bono clients. Its paying custom-ers include Orbital Insight, a Silicon Valley–basedgeo-spatial analytics firm that interprets datafrom satellite imagery. With such visuals, Orbit-al Insight can track the development of road or