Right after Planet Labs sealed an agreement to supply NATO with its remarkable satellite imagery, which tracks rockets and cosmodromes, ships and submarines across the globe, Planet’s founder said the rising NewSpace outfit aims to bolster the alliance while countering the threat of war – for all time.
Operating the greatest constellation of imaging satellites circling the Earth, Planet grabbed the global limelight two years ago with its incredible photographs – sent back to Earth in near real-time – of Kremlin tanks massing along the Ukrainian border, of missile-targeted cities, cathedrals and cultural centers, and of Russia’s pillaging massive grain supplies to starve the besieged populace.
Across a sweeping interview, Planet co-founder Will Marshall told me the threat of war upending life and civilization across Europe and beyond likely impelled NATO to seek out the San Francisco-based group’s expanding treasure house of photographs, which are continuously captured across the continents and seas worldwide.
Marshall calls Russia’s attempt to annex Ukraine “The Most Documented Invasion In History,” and says Planet Labs has been at the forefront of the campaign to end the war by chronicling its atrocities.
The new pact with NATO, he says, was reached during a time of escalating global conflicts, and is aimed at bolstering the North Atlantic Treaty Organization while protecting its one billion citizens.
Marshall says he hopes Planet’s new compact with NATO will push forward peace around the world by shining a luminous spotlight from space on the movement of tanks, troops, missiles and warships across the Earth’s surface.
All the world’s a stage that can now be photographed in high resolution from low Earth orbit, where Planet’s 200 satellites now fly, which will ultimately eliminate the potential to launch a surprise invasion of a neighbouring country.
“With imaging of Ukraine and Russia everyday,” he says, “you can’t hide these military build-ups.”
This shrinking ability to camouflage preparations for a lightning attack on an unsuspecting target populace could cut into the prospects of war across the globe and into the future, Marshall told me during the interview.
After Planet flooded the World Wide Web, along with leading newsrooms and television broadcasters across the globe, with its photographic chronicles of Russia’s storming of Ukraine, Marshall says, “Our imagery is allowing everyone to follow what’s going on.”
“European and U.S. support for Ukraine is continuing partly because everyone can see what’s going on via this satellite imagery.”
An early advocate of preventing space wars by outlawing the deployment of weapons systems in orbit, Marshall predicts that cutting away at the possibility of staging thunderbolt attacks in terrestrial wars could suppress war-making in general.
“Around the world, this will have a big effect.”
Under the new alignment with NATO, Planet’s spacecraft will be integrated into the alliance’s burgeoning “virtual constellation” of national and commercial satellites, NATO leaders say.
The “largest space project in NATO’s history,” they add, “will transform the way NATO gathers and uses data from space, significantly improve NATO’s intelligence and surveillance, and provide essential support to NATO’s military missions and operations.”
Planet’s co-founder and CEO said during a recent earnings call with Wall Street analysts that: “The [NATO] governments have committed up to a billion dollars to that program over five years,” and added that Planet’s pilot pact with NATO has the potential to rapidly expand.
Planet’s defense-sector contracts have soared this year, and accounted for 49 percent of revenue in the latest quarter, he said.
Yet Planet Labs PBC was listed as a Public Benefit Corporation, which means the company might pursue social, environmental or human rights missions that supersede the pursuit of optimal financial results.
As part of its quest to safeguard rights around the world, Marshall told me, “We work with human rights organizations, and give human rights organizations our imagery.”
Even as it charted skyrocketing expansion by launching its leading-edge miniaturized satellites into orbit, Planet formed an early partnership with Human Rights Watch, supplying its world-scanning imagery in a series of rights investigations.
“Satellite imagery plays an increasingly important role in exposing abuses, especially in countries where access for human rights investigators is blocked or heavily restricted,” the director of Human Rights Watch explained while unveiling the rights alliance in 2017, when Planet’s photographs of burning villages across Myanmar helped HRW investigators track the Burmese army’s genocidal attacks on ethnic minorities.
“Planet’s generous arrangement with Human Rights Watch, with access to its vast collection of high-resolution satellite data, will help provide timely evidence of unfolding abuses in some of the world’s most dangerous spots,” he added.
Andrew Zolli, director of Planet’s Global Impact Initiatives, explained: “As one of the first satellite companies to originate entirely from the civilian sector, Planet is uniquely suited to support Human Rights Watch’s mission of documenting rights abuses wherever and whenever they occur.”
Planet and HRW expanded their joint rights missions by enlisting chip-maker Nvidia, which contributed its advanced graphics cards and expertise on artificial intelligence to speed the search for violations of international law captured by satellite imagery.
After its initial success in deploying Nvidia’s GPUs and cutting-edge AI in tracking army ambushes on settlements across Myanmar, one Nvidia scholar predicted: “A deployed deep learning model that analyzes satellite or social media data could one day identify potential human rights abuses automatically from text and images and alert Human Rights Watch and humanitarian agencies.”
These days, Human Rights Watch has been chronicling rights violations and war crimes across Ukraine, parsing through Planet’s photographic archives for evidence that might one day be presented at Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s trial at the International Criminal Court.
The ICC has already issued an arrest warrant for Putin, and for two of his top generals leading the war on Ukraine.
“Russian forces committed a litany of violations of international humanitarian law, including indiscriminate and disproportionate bombing and shelling of civilian areas that hit homes and healthcare and educational facilities,” Human Rights Watch investigators said in a recent dispatch.
“Russian forces’ countrywide, repeated attacks on Ukraine’s energy and other critical infrastructure appeared aimed at terrorizing civilians and making their life unsustainable, which is a war crime.”
“The June destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station in Khersonska region, reportedly by Russian forces, devastated livelihoods and caused lasting environmental damage,” they added in report on violations across 2023.
“Russian forces repeatedly shelled vital ports and grain facilities in Ukraine, with serious implications for Ukrainians and millions facing hunger worldwide.”
Will Marshall says Planet teams have collaborated on “war crimes investigations” and on providing photographic evidence of “mass graves” in areas of Ukraine that were occupied by the invading Russian forces.
“We have captured images of deliberate attacks on Ukraine’s heritage sites,” he adds. “Planet Labs is now working with the UN on building damage assessment across Ukraine.”
“We are making repositories of Ukraine invasion imagery,” in an ever-expanding database that can be searched using the latest AI technology, Marshall says.
“AI is making it easier to search throughout our imagery across space and across time.”
Linking up cutting-edge leaps in satellite imaging and AI, and an ad-hoc coalition of space scientists and human rights monitors, in the pursuit of justice for the perpetrators of this war might prevent the next war war from ever breaking out.
Across its myriad missions, Marshall says, “Planet aims to have a positive impact on peace around the world.”
