Palantir Secures Another US Space Force Contract
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Palantir Secures Another US Space Force Contract
PLUS: Indonesia launches national internet connectivity
Good morning Earthlings 👽️🖖
And…we’re back!
If you didn’t catch our last newsletter, we’re shaking a few things up. The Earthlings newsletter is on mission to endorse founders and companies taking the bold step in solving real problems in the physical world. We are committed to wield our virtual megaphone to champion the national interest, highlighting and learning from sectors that strengthen the North American heartbeat. We won’t just cover the business of space - we will also cover the business of defense, manufacturing, supply chain, transportation, energy, and more. Inspired by Andreessen Horowitz's vision of "American Dynamism", we will cheer on founders daring to solve important national problems that support the flourishing of all North Americans.
We here at Earthlings want to be proud of the future world our children will inherit. We’re quickly learning that optimism alone is not enough. We need to build. So Earthlings will be here with you, one newsletter at a time, cheering on the businesses shaping our future. We’re excited to have you onboard 🚀
With all these changes brewing, we're also shaking things up with our newsletter frequency. Rather than overwhelming your inbox, we'll be dropping in semi-weekly with the latest developments from the industries mentioned above. The cherry on top? A “Spaced-Out Saturday” special will be docking into your inbox every weekend packed with the most important developments in the space business.
But for now…
Today’s edition of Earthlings:
🤑 US Space Force extends Palantir’s contract
🤔 How Palantir became the “Seeing Stone” for government
🛰️ Indonesia launches 150GB/s national internet connectivity
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US Space Force 🤝 Data
The US Space Force awarded data analytics company Palantir $110.3 million in contract extensions for the company’s cloud-based data services. For those unfamiliar, Palantir largely serves government agencies by integrating their data into the cloud and achieving real-time collaboration between their data, analytics, and operational teams.
Palantir is best known for its work with the US government, and has had officers from all levels of government salivating to get their hands on the product. Palantir previously won a contract with the Army to develop a new intelligence interpretation platform, worth an estimated $823 million.
They’re the ultimate surveillance tool. Named after the “Seeing Stones” in The Lord of the Rings, the technology is capable of consuming and analyzing troves of data gathered by soldiers, spies, and police - we’re talking about fingerprints, signals intelligence, bank records, and even tips from informants. Palantir enables its users to spot hidden relationships to uncover terrorist networks and even anticipate future attacks. There’s no question why the US government has been a happy buyer of their products.
Under a project called Warp Core, the Space Force has used the company’s cloud platform and analytics services to aggregate large amounts of data from disparate sources since 2021.
The one-year contract extension includes:
$58.4 million for the ingestion of personnel, equipment, planning, health and other data from across the Air Force.
$32.7 million for commercial software licenses in support of Space Command and Control (C2).
$19.2 million for data services to ingest data from across DoD and combatant commands for joint all-domain command and control.
Under these data-as-a-service contracts, the Space Force is transitioning legacy data stovepipes into the Warp Core platform. Every contract Palantir signs is just another signal of that the relationship between the US government and the Silicon Valley surveillance titan grows stronger each year.
🤔 A Dive into the Origin of Palantir
In mid-2000, after PayPal had survived the dot-com crash and had been growing quickly, they faced a mission-critical issue: losing upwards of $10 million to credit card fraud every month. Leaders at PayPal realized software alone wouldn’t solve this problem given that fraudsters easily averted the software-only solution. So PayPal re-wrote their fraud detection software to ingest all of the company’s transaction data, flag the most suspicious transactions, and allow human operators to make the final decision on their legitimacy instead of the software itself. It worked magically. The FBI caught a whiff of this new tech and asked PayPal if they could use the software to help detect financial crime. This is when PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, had a light bulb moment: a government agency wants to be a buyer of private sector software - a practice quite atypical at the time. Thiel pitched Alex Karp and Stephen Cohen the idea to use PayPal’s security system to help identify terrorist networks and financial fraud.
Flash forward to May 6, 2003: Palantir was founded, and the rest is history.
To carve deep inroads with government, rather than focusing on lobbying from the outside, Palantir initially introduced its product from inside the military, creating both internal demand and a network of pre-trained users. They basically contacted soldiers and said, “Hey, I’d like to give you some training on this tool that’ll help in the field. Would you like to get trained on it?”, recalled Heidi Shyu, then the Army’s chief weapons buyer, according to Intelligencer.
The Intelligencer reports that Palantir quickly made inroads in Afghanistan with both the Marine Corps and the Army, and it didn’t take long for word of Palantir to make its way up the chain of command. In Afghanistan, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were the leading killer of American troops, and Palantir allowed users to quickly track and predict where the attacks would take place. Strong product development calls for being close to your customers, so Palantir deployed young “forward-deployed engineers” to work with soldiers in Afghanistan understanding any problems with the software and educating the frontline users.
Palantir’s sales campaign not only worked, but the Pentagon was essentially picking up the tab for this sales strategy. With the Pentagon secured as a customer, the company’s commercial relationship only blossomed stronger over the years.
🛰️ Indonesia's SATRIA: A Sky-High Solution for Broadband Connectivity
SpaceX and Indonesia have launched a satellite aimed at bringing high-speed internet to remote areas across all of Indonesia. Over one-third of Indonesia’s population do not have access to the web, especially in far-flung areas over the country’s 18,000 islands - of which the government says 6,000 are inhabited.
Deployment of PSN SATRIA confirmed https://t.co/mEUehzvfKc
SATRIA's mission? To bridge Indonesia's digital divide, delivering over 150 gigabits per second of connectivity across the country’s vast archipelago, the fourth most populous country in the world. The satellite aims to bring around 90,000 schools and 40,000 hospitals into the digital age. The connectivity will also be the lifeline for regional government sites currently beyond the reach of satellite and terrestrial networks.
With SATRIA's 150 Gbps capacity, it's packing the punch of more than three times the national capacities currently in use into one powerful spacecraft. Dubbed the SATRIA broadband satellite project and initiated by Indonesia's government, the project cost $545 million to get off the ground.
Here are the key players:
Operations & Spacecraft: Thales Alenia Space, a French defence electronics company, has been developing the Ka-band spacecraft and has been received partial financing for its work up to this point. Then you have Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN), a domestic satellite operator, which pitched in the equity component of the funding. PSN is part of the PT Satelit Nusantara Tiga consortium, set to steer the Satria-1 satellite under a public-private partnership with the Indonesian government.
Financing: About $431 million of SATRIA’s $545 million funding package is debt, with the rest financed through equity. The loans for the project are being guaranteed by Bpifrance and are provided by Banco Santander, HSBC, and Korea Development Bank (KDB). KDB, a South Korean state-run entity, has committed $126 million to the project. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has also committed $150 million.
Let’s not count out foreign low Earth orbit broadband operators yet either. SpaceX’s Starlink is also chasing this opportunity, and is slated to be available in Indonesia in 2024, according to its availability map, following its commercial launch in the Philippines.
🐦 Tweet of the Day
This Ride 4 footage on PS5 shows the first-person perspective of a rider racing through a suburb on a rainy day and demonstrates the special phenomenon that can occur when a game passes a 'reality detection' threshold
[read more: https://t.co/fBoe8ObUET]
https://t.co/uqpgGgndYF
🤖 AI Art of the Day
That’s it for today, Earthlings.
Thanks for reading - we’ll see you next time! 🧑🚀 🏭️