https://www.planet.com

http://kcfj570.com/2019/01/28/company-launches-largest-fleet-of-satellites-in-human-history/

Will Marshall is another of the company's founders.

Will Marshall: We see rivers move, we see trees go down, we see vehicles move, we see road surfaces change and it gives you a perspective of the planet as a dynamic and evolving thing that we need to take care of.

David Martin: Is that what people are supposed to conclude from seeing all this change?

Will Marshall: Well, you can't fix what you can't see.

That kind of save-the-world ambition carries a big risk, especially for a small firm that's just getting started.

Will Marshall: Planet has many records. We've launched the most satellites in the world ever, but we've also lost the most satellites ever.

Four years ago, Marshall gathered his staff in what planet calls the "mothership" to watch a rocket carrying 26 doves blast off.

Will Marshall: It was a big deal. And we had a customer in the audience at the time that we had brought to see a launch. It was really embarrassing.

Chester Gillmore: I'll never forget it we see the, you know, smoke coming and everyone's cheering and then it goes, and then ka-boom.

Chester Gillmore runs Planet's satellite assembly line.

David Martin: You lost how many satellites?

Chester Gillmore: Twenty-six, I think we lost, yeah, 26 (makes explosion sound).

David Martin: Those are your babies.

Chester Gillmore: They were. That was a tough, yeah, they were.

David Martin: How long did it take to get back to normal?

Chester Gillmore: We didn't even skip a beat when that happened, didn't lose a day.

On the day we visited Planet its satellites were beaming down 1.2 million pictures every 24 hours.

Robert Cardillo is director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, NGA for short, the organization which analyzes satellite photos.

David Martin: So this really is ground zero for all the intelligence coming in from space?

Robert Cardillo: That's correct. It's– it's where we bring in all of our sources, whether they come from space or any source. But, correct, it's ground zero.

Because 60 Minutes was allowed into this secure operations center, top-secret high-resolution pictures taken by spy satellites are nowhere in sight.

Robert Cardillo: Across the center. You see one of the outposts that the Chinese have developed in the South China Sea.

Cardillo says lower resolution images like this one are taken by commercial satellite companies are changing his world by giving him more and more looks at the Earth, especially places U.S. spy satellites are not zeroed in on.

Robert Cardillo: I'm quite excited about capabilities such as what Planet's putting up in space.

Planet is a small company with just over 400 employees, many of them in San Francisco. NGA is a government bureaucracy with a workforce of 14,500 and a 2.7 million square-foot headquarters south of Washington D.C. But Robert Cardillo knew a revolution when he saw one.

Will Marshall: This is not a scale model. This is the real size.

When Planet's Will Marshall unveiled his small satellite at a 2014 Ted Talk, Cardillo showed the video to his work force.

Will Marshall: It's going to provide a completely radical new data set about our changing planet.

And a radical new culture. Planet openly markets its images. NGA's spy photos rarely see the light of day. The intelligence analyst who leaked these photos of a Russan shipyard in 1984 went to prison. What NGA can see from space is top secret.

David Martin: How many of these high resolution satellites do you operate?

Robert Cardillo: I'll not comment.

But much of what Cardillo won't talk about is common knowledge to Ted Molczan, who is a household name in the obscure world of amateur satellite tracking.

David Martin: How many photo satellites does the U.S. have in orbit?

Ted Molczan: Currently there are three.

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