Planet launched hundreds of cheap cube satellites for daily photos of the whole Earth

Planet was founded in 2010 in San Francisco by NASA alumni Will Marshall, Robbie Schingler and Chris Boshuizen to make Earth observation cheap. Four prototype Doves flew in 2013; in 2014 Flock 1 put 28 nanosatellites in orbit, at the time the largest Earth-imaging constellation ever launched.

Each Dove is a 3U CubeSat about 30 cm long and 5 kg, built largely from commercial off-the-shelf parts, capturing 3–5 m multispectral imagery. Launched as secondary payloads and iterated quickly—13 builds in under three years—the constellation reached 100+ operational satellites in 2017 and by 2019 had more than 150 instruments providing daily global coverage.

The 2019 Remote Sensing paper used 18 Dove images to map coral reef habitats in the Dominican Republic, validating the constellation's practical value: daily revisit means cloud-free scenes and time-sensitive change detection that mid-resolution satellites cannot match.

Many cheap satellites beat one expensive one

COTS parts and the CubeSat form factor slash per-unit cost

Piggyback launches avoid buying a dedicated rocket

Losing one small satellite does not lose the service

Daily revisit creates a product: always-fresh imagery

Reliability can be bought with redundancy instead of perfection: when units are cheap, you can design for occasional failure and still deliver the service.

Planet kept expanding, adding SkySat and RapidEye, and its daily global imagery became a commercial and research staple. The flock approach became the largest Earth-imaging constellation of its time, and the 'agile aerospace' model of rapid iteration spread across the small-satellite industry.