Spaceq

My guest this week is Mike Safyan, Senior Director, Launch and Global Ground Station Networks at Planet. Planet, previously known as Planet Labs, is an Earth Observation company which has launched a fleet over 200 satellites to monitor the Earth. This podcast was recorded at the Canadian SmallSat Symposium which was held last week in Toronto.Planet has become the largest operator of satellites in orbit with 148 active imaging satellites. It should be noted though, unlike the large school bus size satellites in geosynchronous orbit, nearly all of Planet’s satellites are microsatellites weighing in at under 100kg and roughly the size of a microwave oven and are in low earth orbit.Mike and I discussed recent news at Planet with an eye to the future, along with a discussion on their ongoing ground station problem in Canada which led them to announce at the Canadian SmallSat Symposium that they were going to pull out their ground stations in Inuvik after June 1 if they’re licensing issues aren’t resolved by Global