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SPACE 2: Wait, Why Are We Going To Space?

Robert Smith/NPR

Planet in San Francisco has agreed to send up a satellite with our logo on it and take some pictures for us. In a way, we're in the spying game now. Back in the 60s, satellites would take photographs from space and then send the film canisters back to earth--literally drop them into the atmosphere, where they were caught in a net attached to an airplane. There was only a limited number of pictures you could get that way. And they still took a ton of time to analyze. Now, digital images are beamed back to earth in such high quantity and with such high speed that the government has no choice but to teach computers to analyze them.

Even tiny Planet announced on November 9th that they'd reached their goal of photographing the world's landmass every single day. A company called Genscape uses satellites to take photos that contain "market intelligence:" information that their clients can use in business. Genscape's images monitor the progress of oil wells being drilled in South Sudan, or a pipeline being built across Ohio.

On today's show, what can Planet Money's satellite show to give us an edge in business? Robert hits upon an idea that could provide important intelligence to the American public.

Music: "Blue Eyes" and "Through the Looking Glass." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

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Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.
Elizabeth Kulas is a producer on Planet Money. Before that, she produced shows at WNYC, Gimlet and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2016, she was part of the NPR team that reported on the Wells Fargo banking scandal. That reporting won a George Foster Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Before falling in love with making audio, she studied Art History and German, with a focus on life in the former East Germany. She graduated from The University of Melbourne in her native Australia, with stints at Barnard College, New York and Berlin's Free University. Right now, she's entirely obsessed with space.
Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.