Aspen Ideas: Vantor CEO Dan Smoot Explains its 25-Year Archive of Space Imaging

Well, thank you for having me today. I greatly appreciate it.

We spend a lot of time talking about defense and intel inside of our business and go to a lot of those types of forums. But what's really exciting about this is about thought leadership. This is about talking about things like AI and the implications it's going to have on the future of not just business but of course humanity. And these are things that we're working on every day. It's also recognizing what's going on inside the United States and across the entire supply chain and all the different debates we're having. So it's a great way to step out of the shoes of the daily rigor that we live in and really start to interact with peers and other industry leaders about what's evolving.

We live in a world that is just filtered with mass amounts of information and every single day we're trying to figure out what are the sources of truth. Vantor is a company that has been around 25 years actually taking imagery of the whole world every single day. So if you can imagine it, we've got a massive archive of history about what's been going on on this planet. We take about 6.5 million square kilometers a day of the world. The nice thing about it is we do it in really high fidelity. So we can see a lot of detail what's going on. That gives us a capability to have one of the strongest foundations in both 2D and 3D data on what this world looks like. And those applications could be used in consumer like how you do mapmaking. Some people play golf and they wear wearables. They want to know the accurate information on the ground all the way through defense and intel and we support the US and many of its allies in relation to that. So really supplying true ground truth what's happening on this planet and then applying new applications like how do we fly drones or how do we look at what's changing on the ground. If you're a civil society you want to understand what's new in buildings and roads. If you're a defense you want to understand what objects and vehicles are moving around on the ground. And those are the type of capabilities we deliver every day.

I think what we've recognized is we live our world every single day. We all do. Based on applications that come from space, it could be the way that we communicate, the way we use our phone to navigate. But it's also how do we actually make decisions about what's going on on the ground. And I think that that has been recognized now, from the international community as well as US community that this is a critical domain. General Saltzman of US Space Force has actually talked about this as the next defense domain because if you think about the way that even modern warfare is fought today, it's actually done through capabilities that are delivered through space and geoint with electronic warfare. You can disrupt certain capabilities, but you really can't disrupt the communications that's happening from space. And so you see the large infrastructures that are now being built out. You have endless energy so you can build day energy. There's so much potential still to be done on space that I think that people are recognizing that this is truly the new frontier.

Where Vantor really fits in is we are a source of truth. If you think about today's world, there's a lot of misinformation. And unfortunately with data, you can actually apply new models and you can actually expand information for more disinformation. Where we really play is we are truly a single source of ground truth coming from space. These are satellite capabilities that have really clear view and more importantly very accurate views of what this world looks like. And so what we play today is how do we actually expand that across the enterprise and people and how they use their mobile devices and then of course what are we doing from the defense and intel communities and really enabling their capabilities. And so you take this information now and you distill it into applications where you're monitoring what's actively going on the ground. You're monitoring what is being built. And what this also goes to is if you think about the importance of humanitarian needs. We are around helping people in times of need such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes. Recently there was an earthquake down in Venezuela and we've actually been taking imagery and trying to help from a humane and support perspective. We do that on a global level. And so these applications about how we actually support all sorts of industries are becoming more and more day-to-day interactions and what kind of data you get from space.

This has actually been one of the biggest changes we've seen in the last 16 months. The US and the geopolitical landscape has changed dramatically. And if you think about the new administration's rhetoric in regards to looking about spending 3.5% of GDP against new capabilities, they're really looking for the international community to really drive their own sovereign capabilities. And this goes from everything from how they rearm themselves, which we're seeing in Europe, the rearmament, all the way through to how they drive sovereign intelligence capabilities. Over decades, the US has been providing a lot of that information to its allied nations. And in today's environment, the allied nations are now trying to build their own capabilities, but trying to put big constellations up in orbit is expensive and hard if you've never done it. So commercial companies like Vantor actually fill that gap for these nations to build that sovereign capability. So they can actually download information, put it into a sovereign data set, and really have their own new defense capabilities. We're seeing this really proliferate massively across the industry and that's also why you're seeing space-based companies expanding quite quickly.

This is the debate we have every day. And if you think about the importance of AI, we use AI in just about everything we do. We use it from application development and modernization and speed of development. We're actually introducing AI into almost every function inside the company just to drive productivity. I think there's a misnomer that oh you drive that and you drive reduction in workforce is actually what you're trying to do is drive speed decision making. Where AI gets a little tricky is when you actually start to apply AI into critical human decision-making and this is something we take incredibly seriously. If you think about capabilities that Vantor can deliver, there are things like targeting or things like defense capabilities where it requires human in the loop for critical decision. I can now get information to a soldier on the front line about something that they may need to address in a kinetic form. But there has to be the moral factor that that human has to make that decision. And I think that companies will continue to deliver things at speed, but we have the moral factor of the men and women in uniforms who have to actually make those decisions. And these are things that we in the industry have to constantly be thinking about because AI is going to be here. It is going to continue to advance at paces that people have never seen before. But we have to always have the human factor in there because it can have cascading impacts. That's not just my industry. That's also in finance and healthcare and anybody who's got critical decision-making that they're making on automation. But that's the human, that's the morality of the human in the loop.

We're about the mission for the Americans. I mean, if you look at our company and we support so much of what United States does from a defense and intel perspective and actually civil perspective as well. It's given us this freedom to be able to build companies and build on this capitalist environment that we have. And I think that we're here to really celebrate the accomplishments of the country and its position, not just here, but also the influence it has on an international level. And I think that what it means to me is really celebrating, taking the time, but also reflecting what got us here, the sacrifices and the challenges that American citizens had to go through to keep our liberties and to keep our independence and the role that we and companies play on that to continue to expand that I think is really really important. And it's, we live year to year in these daily grinds, but we never really step back to sit there and say, this is what we need to celebrate of how we got there, but more importantly, how do we protect it and keep moving it forward?

Well, thank you for having me today.