Will Marshall

speaker

244 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Will Marshall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

So in that sense, we think of ourselves more like a Bloomberg terminal, but for Earth data.

People set up their data feeds.

It helps them make smarter decisions day to day.

And the satellites are a back end.

Now, they're pretty cool and sweet, and I can geek out on that because that's my area.

But in the end, they're a back end to those services.

Well, yeah, we figured this out when we left NASA.

We would need about 100 imaging satellites.

We've actually got about twice that number in space.

It's the largest Earth imaging constellation.

And basically, they act as a line scanner for the planet.

So imagine the orb of the Earth.

You have a line of satellites in a ring,

that are going in a polar orbit, so over both poles, and the Earth ends up rotating underneath that line.

The line actually stays fixed with respect to the Sun, and the Earth rotates underneath, and each one takes a strip of images, but the Earth is rotated slightly by the time the next satellite comes down, and therefore you end up systematically line scanning the Earth once every 24 hours.

So let me start with the customers.

We service customers in civil government.

So that's agencies like NASA that buy it for science research, or it's the Brazil federal police that are trying to stop deforestation.

We work with commercial applications.

So insurance, for example, after disasters, instead of sending a person out to see if that farm or that

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