Bloomberg Businessweek cover story on Planet

Ashlee Vance did a deep dive into the Planet story, and went with them to their record-setting satellite constellation launch in remote India. Here is the article and a very cool insider TV segment that goes with it.

I especially liked the closing paragraph… 😉 “For New Space’s true believers, the competition will be part of one glorious show: the ultimate expression of humankind’s manifest destiny. “You’ll have the space economy integrating with the terrestrial economy like it never did before,” says Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist invested in Planet Labs. “That will cause a bloom of activity, which will make the path to Mars and colonizing other worlds that much more believable and affordable. When that happens, which is, like, within our lifetime, it’ll be one of the watershed moments of humanity. I mean, this is up there like the discovery of fire or evolution’s greatest hits. It’s the point when we become a multiplanetary species.””

And this satellite is quite special having survived a fireball CATO. The morning after the dramatic airburst explosion of the Orbital Antares rocket, this Dove satellite from Planet Labs caught the sun on its solar panels and found a terrestrial x-band station, and reported to duty, from the beach of Wallops. It was perfectly functional, and tweeted out “Yo” to the mystified engineers at Planet. Perhaps the first satellite to successfully launch suborbitally en route to orbit. =)