February 2020
Debunking the myths on space patents
... impact on new space companies has yet to be seen. Planet’s new state-of-the-art satellite manufacturing factory in San Francisco, opened in September 2018, is six times the size of its old factory. Planet claims its engineers...
June 2020
Saving Earth – time for a new cooperative framework
... about 40 m in size (or about a tenth the mass of a 140 m asteroid) can wipe out a region the size of the San Francisco Bay area. So clearly, we need better tools to detect and track the asteroids and comets and...
May 2022
Using space data to improve life on Earth
... What started as a thesis evolved into a kickstarter campaign and led to three guys building a satellite in a garage in San Francisco. Now we have the world’s largest multipurpose constellation in orbit and one of the world’s largest constellations...
October 2024
Spaceport America’s road to the future
... of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. This silver route connected Mexico City, more than 2500 km, to the San Juan Pueblo in northern New Mexico, almost five hundred years ago. Just 50 km north of the basin is the...
October 2024
Simplicity is the space industry’s secret weapon
... type we need. Planet co-founders Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler hold a model of a Dove satellite in Planet’s headquarters in San Francisco, California. In 2002, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos issued his apocryphal ‘API Mandate’ memo (where API...
April 2025
Racing to the Moon
... that the West is not well-placed to win. About the author Donald F. Robertson is a freelance writer based in San Francisco and has published articles on many aspects of space exploration and development. He is also an angel investor or small...
