Planet Labs leading-edge imaging satellites track military moves and war crimes across Ukraine and … [+] around the world
Image courtesy of Will Marshall and Planet Labs PBC
While Kremlin commissars have fired off a volley of threats to begin shooting down Western satellites aiding besieged Ukrainians, the cofounders of one potential target of the Russian space attacks – Planet Labs – have played an important role in preventing a Space War I between the superpowers.
After Russia’s last anti-satellite missile test created an orbiting minefield of shrapnel that nearly ripped through the International Space Station, Planet co-heads Robbie Schingler and Will Marshall wrote an open appeal to the White House urging a radical response.
They counselled the U.S. to circumvent – rather than enter – a space arms race by spearheading “an international effort to prohibit the use of debris-creating anti-satellite weapons.”
The utopian founders of Planet issued their appeal even as waves of Russian missiles blitzed Ukraine, and as President Vladimir V. Putin threatened to deploy Russia’s massive nuclear weapons arsenal against any NATO nation that directly entered the fray.
Even as Moscow’s missiles blitz Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has threatened to unleash his nuclear … [+] weapons on any Western ally directly intervening in the war (Photo by Ramil Sitdikov – Host Photo Agency via Getty Images )
Host Photo Agency via Getty Images
After SpaceX raced to beam broadband internet connections across bombarded Ukraine, and Planet flooded the World Wide Web with its satellites’ incredible imagery of Russia’s invading tanks, Putin’s lieutenants began warning they could target these Allied spacecraft.
Rather than engage in a war of words with the Kremlin, the White House, and Vice President Kamala Harris, countered with a proposal for celestial peace.
Harris, who heads the powerful National Space Council, appointed Schingler and other space-peace advocates as elite advisors to the Council as she deftly moved to deescalate tensions with Moscow. At the UN headquarters in New York, the American delegation introduced a resolution in the General Assembly that called for a universal halt to anti-satellite missile tests.
Despite opposition by Russia and its clique of confederates, more than 150 UN states backed the ban on ASAT testing.
Both inside the National Space Council and beyond, Schingler says, he’s still pushing for creating a binding global agreement to outlaw surface-to-space missile launches.
“I continue to advocate across both formal meetings and informal forums for the extension of a ban on direct ascent ASAT testing,” Schingler told me in an interview. He adds it’s been an honor to be integrated into Vice President Harris’ sphere of counsellors on the Space Council.
While surrounding the Council with a constellation of rising NewSpace stars like Schingler, Harris has also persuaded dozens of allies around the world to join the anti-ASAT movement.
The overwhelming win at the General Assembly on freezing space weapons tests represented a remarkable victory for the U.S. on the world stage, in a contest with Russia to shape the future of space exploration, and on the question of whether the globe’s citizenry favors space war or peace, says Victoria Samson, Chief Director, Space Security and Stability at the Secure World Foundation.
Members of the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a ban on anti-satellite missile tests, just … [+] as they earlier voted to condemn Russia’s attempt to annex Ukraine (Photo by Ed JONES / AFP) (Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Samson, one the top space security experts in the U.S., told me in an interview that Secure World, a prominent Washington-based think tank, is now urging the United States to follow up by drafting a universal treaty banning ASAT missile testing.
A test-ban treaty, if agreed to all the world’s space powers, would not only protect astronauts aboard the International Space Station and the Chinese space station, but also create a long-term sanctuary for the expanding rings of satellites lofted by Planet Labs and SpaceX, and set the stage for the launch of a flotilla of independent space stations now being developed across the U.S. and Europe, say Samson and other space security scholars.
“Halting destructive anti-satellite tests,” Schingler adds, “would be beneficial to all actors today and in future generations to come.”
The twin creators of Planet Labs originally met two decades ago, while writing and presenting papers that called for a preemptive global ban on introducing any weapons systems into orbit around the Earth.
They began teaming up to co-author appeals to ward off a clash of missiles in space that could threaten the entire future of human spaceflight.
“The United States and former Soviet Union spent many billions of dollars seeking to develop space weapons over the past four decades,” they argued in one study.
“Unlike previous nuclear arms control efforts, the challenge (and opportunity) of space weapons is to prevent them from being deployed in the first place and to maintain the non-weaponised status of space.”
“Both the US and Russia have the capability to deploy advanced space weapons in a matter of years,” they presciently warned in another appeal.
“The stakes are high,” they added, “since once deployed, it may be impossible to eliminate space weapons, even if they prove unsuitable or destabilising.”
Both landed highly coveted positions at NASA Ames Research Center, the space agency’s freewheeling beacon of experimentation in Silicon Valley – a haven for radical freethinkers and scientists across the NASA complex.
It was there, in the info-tech capital of the world, that they were struck by the epiphany that the cutting-edge technology and design breakthroughs of the newly crafted iPhone – a miniaturised computer and transceiver – could likewise be applied to reinvent the colossal satellites that then dominated the orbital zones above the Earth.
They set out to build microscale but high-resolution cameras, processors and transmitters inside cubesats that would soar through low Earth orbit while beaming their remarkable imagery of the globe back to their creators.
When their first prototype began transmitting crystal-clear images of emerald forests and cerulean waterways, it signalled the start of a revolution in building scaled-down satellites and in democratising the mapping of the Earth, along with the birth of what would become Planet Labs.
Planet’s remarkable photographs reflect a revolution in creating independent imaging satellites and … [+] in democratising the mapping of the Earth. Shown here is a rocket launch site on Kodiak Island, Alaska
Image courtesy of Will Marshall and Planet Labs
Planet’s Dove satellites, named after the bird of peace, were originally designed to help the United Nations push forward its Sustainable Development Goals, Marshall told me in an interview.
Flocks of Doves constantly circling and scanning the globe could detect wildfires threatening Amazon forests, ships crisscrossing the seas to feed the world, and rocket cosmodromes set to launch capsules to the ISS.
But it turns out the same satellites, observing the globe from above like cyber-angels, could also speed images back to Planet of Ukrainian cities and cathedrals afire from incoming missiles, of Russian ships carrying off looted grain, and of invading armored brigades moving across the embattled democracy.
Planet has a longstanding alliance with Human Rights Watch, Marshall told me, to team up with its investigators worldwide to search through Planet’s treasure house of images in order to chart rights violations.
The San Francisco-based Planet has mapped potential war crimes across Ukraine – from the Red Cross medical centers and Orthodox churches battered by Moscow’s missiles to the grain silos pillaged by Kremlin soldiers – and is collaborating with journalists and rights monitors on deeper investigations based on its astounding archive of images.
Planet Labs has chronicled virtual every step Russia has taken during its invasion of Ukraine, … [+] including the Kremlin’s military build-up just before crashing across the border
Image courtesy of Will Marshall and Planet Labs
“Planet Labs is now working with the UN,” Marshall says, to chart treasured Ukrainian religious outposts and wonders of ancient heritage that have come under attack – all potential war crimes – and to lay a foundation for the post-war reconstruction and revival of the devastated culture.
Relying partly on Planet’s expanding database and super-speed AI search tools, Human Rights Watch experts have been charting suspected crimes against humanity committed across Ukraine.
“In areas they occupied, Russian or Russian-affiliated forces committed apparent war crimes, including torture, summary executions, sexual violence, enforced disappearances, and looting of cultural property,” HRW monitors reported in one despatch – part of a long-running chronicle on wartime violations of international law.
Marshall says Planet’s photographs of mass graves left behind by retreating Russian troops will be handed over to human rights groups gathering evidence of atrocities amounting to war crimes.
This evidence could one day be presented during Vladimir Putin’s trial at the International Criminal Court.
The Court, specifically created to try crimes against humanity and located at The Hague, has already issued an arrest warrant for Putin, and for former defense minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, the two generals who have led the invasion of Ukraine, in violation of the UN Charter.
The International Criminal Court in the Netherlands has already issued arrest warrants for Vladimir … [+] Putin and two of his top generals leading the invasion of Ukraine (Photo by Alex Gottschalk/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
DeFodi Images via Getty Images
Professor Jack Beard, one of the world’s leading experts on the mosaic of international treaties governing space defense and on war crimes, told me in an interview: “I am not aware of satellite imagery being used in war crime trials at the ICC before.”
“But I think that is likely to change, given the quality of the imagery of Russian war crimes and Russian statements denying war crimes, which are inconsistent with imagery showing bodies on the streets during Russian occupation and mass graves,” adds Beard, who is director of the Space, Cyber & National Security Law Program at the University of Nebraska College of Law.
Professor Beard, who recently published the globe’s first comprehensive “Manual on the International Law of Military Space Activities and Operations,” says that if Russia’s long-persecuted democrats somehow managed to gain power – perhaps the liberal coalition headed by Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of the slain opposition leader Alexei Navalny – the Kremlin’s new leaders could hand Putin and his generals over to the ICC for trial.
Will Marshall says while Planet Labs will continue collaborating on war crimes investigations with human rights activists across the continents, he hopes his ever-expanding constellation of satellites, outfitted with super-high-resolution cameras, will become so adept at tracking and exposing military moves across the globe that surprise invasions – or any attack by stealth – will become completely impossible.
The ultimate goal, he muses, is to end war worldwide.