For nearly four months this year, high-resolution commercial imagery of Iran was effectively off the public market. Planet Labs notified clients on April 4 that it would indefinitely withhold high-resolution imagery of Iran and adjacent areas, retroactive to March 9, and moved its Middle East holdings behind a managed access model that released imagery case by case. Planet was not the only one. Vantor, formerly Maxar Intelligence, enforced its own restrictions over the same stretch. The archives came back quietly in July. The executive who spent his last federal posting making the government’s case for commercial imagery now chairs the federal arm of the company that went quiet, and he takes the MilSat Symposium stage on the final day of Silicon Valley Space Week.
Robert Cardillo is Chief Strategist and Chairman of the Board of Planet Federal, the wholly owned subsidiary Planet Labs established in 2018 to sell into the U.S. government. He has held both titles since April 2021. Since September 2025 he has also served as executive chairman of IonQ Federal, the quantum computing company’s government arm, and he sits on IonQ’s board.
He was the sixth Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, sworn in on October 3, 2014 and departing in February 2019. He came up on the analytic side. Cardillo joined the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1983 as an imagery analyst, led analysis and production at NGA from 2002 to 2006, and served as Deputy Director of DIA from 2006 to 2010. In 2010 he became the first Deputy Director for Intelligence Integration at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he managed and delivered the President’s Daily Brief to President Obama and Vice President Biden, more than 1,400 editions of it. That is 35 years of federal service, most of it spent deciding what a picture is worth. He moved into the commercial geospatial sector within months of leaving.
His NGA tenure sits at the center of the question the panel takes up: how much of the imagery mission the government should buy rather than own, and on what terms. This spring is the working example. There is a formal mechanism for restricting a licensed operator, and it was not used. The Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992 requires operators to run their systems “in such manner as to preserve the national security of the United States,” and successive administrations built shutter control on that hook, first by presidential directive in 1994 and now through a 2020 Commerce rule that calls it a limited-operations directive. The authority has never been used. When the Pentagon wanted commercial imagery of Afghanistan off the market in October 2001, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which became NGA two years later, bought exclusive rights to Space Imaging’s IKONOS collection instead. This year the White House made a request, and as SatNews reported in May, the imagery went behind managed access within days.
That is the premise of Cardillo’s session. He joins “Commercial GEOINT for the Battlefield” on Thursday, October 29 at 11:15 a.m., alongside Scot Currie, Senior Vice President of U.S. Government Engagement at BlackSky, and Dr. Didi Kuo, Principal Deputy Director of GEOINT at the National Reconnaissance Office. Dr. James Crawford, Chief Strategy Officer at Privateer Space and the founder of Orbital Insight, moderates. The program puts it plainly: commercial satellite photos are entering military decisions, and the session asks how they are being used and by whom. It runs 45 minutes and is followed at 12:15 p.m. by “Space Control as a Market,” which takes up the limits of commercial combat support from the operations side. Both are in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
