A company that pioneered the U.S. private space market

Planet Labs, an American private satellite company.

This company is evaluated as having pioneered the satellite industry, which had been closed for some time.

Existing artificial satellites were manufactured individually to suit the space environment in order to perform long-duration missions, making them too heavy and inefficient.

Because of this, very large costs are incurred to operate it, so no one other than a national agency such as NASA can even think of handling it.

NASA scientists are thinking about ways to reduce the cost of these satellites…

They focused on smartphones, which were just beginning to become popular at the time.

Smartphones had better computer performance than the satellites launched by spacecraft at the time.

Not only does it have a variety of functions, it is durable enough to withstand everyday life and is inexpensive due to mass production.

Scientists thought, “Would it work well if we launched a smartphone into space?” and this became an experiment under the name of a project called ‘PhoneSat.’

A small satellite was created by assembling a smartphone, an auxiliary battery, a long-distance communication device, and a cube set to contain it.

It only costs about $3,000. The price is very affordable compared to the hundreds of billions of won that existing satellites cost.

The Poncet satellite, which was launched into space and placed into orbit, produced better results than scientists expected.

First of all, launch costs were innovatively saved. This is because it was much lighter than artificial satellites that weigh at least several tons to tens of tons.

Pictures were taken well in space, the software ran without problems, and the battery life lasted longer than expected.

NASA evaluated this successful PhoneSat project as ‘the cheapest new way to use space in history.’

The three scientists who led the project (Chris Boshuizen, Will Marshall, and Robbie Schingler) even thought about commercializing it.

Launching several small satellites such as PhoneSat to take satellite images and selling the information contained in these images to customers.

This was the beginning of a company called ‘Planet Labs’.

The amount of information that can be obtained from satellite images is greater than expected.

Crop performance, number of shopping mall customer visits, monitoring of deforestation sites, tracking illegal trade, observation of Antarctic glaciers, etc…