Investing in Space: How the Pentagon is making use of AI with spy satellite data

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Last week I had the opportunity to take part in venture firm Space Capital's NYC summit, which gathered investors and portfolio companies and included a number of panels on key industry topics such as Starship and China.

The conversation I moderated was on "Big (Geospatial) Data & AI," with the goal of exploring how the two rapidly evolving worlds of satellite data collection and artificial intelligence interact. I was joined by Nathan Kundtz, formerly of satellite antenna company Kymeta and now leading a synthetic data startup called Rendered, and Rachael Martin, the Maven Office Director at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It's rare to hear from someone like Martin, who's deep within the intelligence community and has a front row seat on the intersection of classified information and cutting-edge technology.

Martin leads the Department of Defense's flagship AI program, Project Maven, from within the NGA, which is effectively a sibling agency to the National Reconnaissance Office. Simply put, Project Maven at NGA is working on how AI can use satellite imagery and data to detect objects and activities around the world.

Or, in Martin's words, the NRO will "launch them and we tell them where to go."

The introduction of AI into the satellite data realm is one of necessity, Martin emphasized, because "we have billions of geospatially-referenced data points," so "how do we understand them