[kumarvvr]

That is a pretty cool engineering feet. Never knew a shoe box sized telescope can give such detailed pictures.

They have sent about 200 satellites, cost "six figures" each, so an estimate of 200,000 a piece, they have spent about 40 million dollars, excluding the price of launches.

The data collected is definitely worth the price IMO. Imagine the ability to monitor storms and hurricanes, analyze their data and update our climate models.

They have about 80 million in funding alone, which is incredible.

I wonder what else is possible with so many eyes in the sky.

[Shivetya]

Another way to track animal and eventually bird migrations when resolution is high enough. Better coverage of large scale disasters, think earthquake and your mentioned hurricanes, but also fires in remote areas and possibly detection of avalanches. Perhaps even revealing ancient civilizations that haven't been identified yet? There is a lot of area on this planet not of interest and not extensively photographed to where its generally available.

[westmeal]

Global surveillance networks.

[659087]

"Google/Facebook: Please step outside and look up for 10 seconds to verify your identity"

[ant6n]

This does seem reminiscent of some Bond movie: some young company/genius supposedly wants to save the world via a fleet of satellites tracking all sorts of environmental issues, a company called Planet (a logo written in greenery in their office). Then it turns out there's actually a nefarious reason for all this, like total surveillance of everybody etc.

[shawn-butler]

I'm not sure if this includes the Skylabs-TerraBella launches?

Skylabs had seven high-res SkySat satellites that Planet got via acquiring Skylabs/TerraBella complementing its existing fleet of medium res satellites.

Planet’s existing network could only get three to five meter resolution, while Skybox’s satellites could manage “sub-meter" accuracy.

80 million in funding seems low. The price of the Skybox/TerraBella acquisition from Google alone had to be in the hundreds of millions.

[lorenzhs]

There was substantial uncertainty about the cost of TerraBella's acquisition, see https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/25/google-satellite-planet/ which says "We’ve not heard a firm price. Aside from the $300 million figure we heard, another described Terra Bella as essentially being “donated” to Planet."

As of April 2015, Planet had raised $183M according to https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/13/planet-labs-rockets-to-118...

[eeZah7Ux]

feet?