Former NASA Scientists Start Space and Analytics Company
Planet Labs Reveals First Images from Space, SpaceRef Business
“Planet Labs, a space and analytics company, announced plans to launch the world’s largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites to image the changing planet and provide open access to that information. Today, they revealed the first images from their first two satellites.
“Planet Labs will create an entirely new data set, with both humanitarian and commercial value,” said Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. “We’ve become used to having imagery of the entire Earth. What we haven’t yet understood is how transformative it will be when that imagery is regularly and frequently updated.” Everyone from ecologists to citizen journalists will be able to track frequent changes to any place on the planet — a frequency and coverage greater than ever seen before.”
I think this is great. Until very recently, this sort of operation would have been something that only a government would have done, using tax-payer money. This is just the latest in a growing list of examples of how the terms “space” and “commerce” can go together. The times, they are a-changing.