Space sector: Remote sensing firms frustrated by red tape.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Industry Viewpoint

* Space startup Planet builds 20 shoebox-size satellites in just one week--and its growing constellation soon will be able to map the whole world, in just three days.

"This will change the way people make decisions," says Robert H. Schingler Jr., co-founder and chief strategy officer at Planet's European division based in the Netherlands.

Leaps in technology and investments by corporate giants like Google and Facebook have taken the concept of faster, cheaper satellite imagery to levels that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

But while the industry is buoyant about the possibilities of this new technology, executives are sounding alarms about archaic U.S. regulations that may drive investments elsewhere. Commercial remote sensing companies also worry that red tape will slow innovation and deter entrepreneurs from starting companies in the United States. "That's a national security issue, to cultivate an entrepreneurial space and aerospace ecosystem," says Schingler.

At Planet's U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, a lean crew of three operators manages 63 satellites. A much larger team is assigned to write software, an illustration of how the commercial Earth-observation industry is less in the business of selling images than in providing "actionable" information and insights, Schingler tells National Defense during an interview in Washington, D.C.

A former NASA engineer, Schingler started Planet Labs, later renamed Planet, in 2010. His company is one of an expanding cadre of venture capital-funded space enterprises associated with the so-called small-satellite revolution. He points out that small satellites are not new, as NASA spearheaded the movement in the 1960s.

What is actually new--and definitely not possible in decades past--is the industry's knack for mass-producing and operating satellites at very low cost. "We build 20 spacecraft a week because every three months we rebuild our satellites," he says. Not knowing when satellites will be launched next--it depends on availability of slots aboard crowded commercial rockets--"we had to develop a responsive manufacturing capacity to build things when we know they're going to be launched."

Planet and its peers in the micro-satellite sector have their eyes on the U.S. government and defense agencies as lucrative customers. They offer subscription-based services, which gives the government more flexibility to download the data it wants and takes the government increasingly out of the business of building and maintaining its own satellites.

The new commercial players do business differently than traditional remote sensing companies that...