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Space Invaders
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Space Invaders

30 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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A new kind of space race is playing out not between governments but between companies racing to blanket Earth in tiny satellites. This report follows Planet, a San Francisco startup founded by Will Marshall, whose shoebox-sized "Dove" satellites weigh just 4 kilos apiece yet photograph the entire planet's surface every day, a scale of coverage that would have required a fleet of bus-sized government satellites a decade ago. Micah Walter-Range of the Space Foundation lays out the numbers driving the shift, predicting the population of orbiting satellites could quadruple or quintuple within a few years, almost entirely through commercial launches rather than agencies like NASA. Marshall walks through how his team shrank satellite technology built for buses down into packages cheap enough to mass-produce. The film raises the problems that come with this boom without settling them: growing orbital debris, and who gets access to daily images of any spot on Earth, from climate scientists tracking deforestation to security agencies with different uses in mind.