Sourcery
00:09:38 · S0
[00:09:38] S0: It didn't need to cost a billion dollars. Phones work just fine in space. Now this first test did not work, but amazingly, all of the the phone electronics have survived. We managed to get all the data, and and this just showed the case in point that even though this is a failed launch, these things are incredibly robust. They're designed exactly for you to drop it on the floor and it not break because people do shit like that. So, it actually was a surprising example of just how robust consumer electronics are. See what happened back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, NASA was pioneering all this technology because it had to. To go to the moon, you had to put a capsule with humans in it, you had to have computers, so they had to sort of develop microprocessors in order to get a computer that's small enough because computers were the size of a building. They had to pioneer solar panels and various other technology in order to get it done. So they're used to the idea of building everything themselves because they couldn't go down to, you know, fries or whatever and get the component. They didn't exist. You couldn't buy batteries that they needed. You couldn't buy computers that they needed. They couldn't buy solar panels. So they invented it all. So NASA had a mentality of inventing everything. Now it did incredible things as a result, but now the consumer electronics, the electronics that we have in our back pocket, are far superior to what they had. And the dominant R and D is being spent by Apple and Google and whoever on developing these electronics to be better and better. So we took the attitude of instead of developing all of that, let's take the best stuff that's already being developed commercially and use that for space. Learning to follow the consumer electronics industry rather than trying to pioneer everything. And that whole approach, use cheap electronics that we can buy online, and then, by the way, throw up a few more than we need, and if one or two of the satellites breaks, no big deal. Totally different risk attitude to what NASA did. And that also enabled us to just reduce the cost by about three orders of magnitude, which is, you know, a big deal for any sector. I do. You know? It's a bit like the mainframe computers to desktop computer revolution.
00:11:56 · S0, Molly O'Shea
And all the applications we have with desktops now are completely different than what we did with a few mainframes, one per country or whatever, you know? So I [00:12:06] S1: have endless questions. I guess before I get to all of them, what is the biggest difference between, okay, v one, we're putting a phone up into space to one of these going up there to what we're about to see right now? [00:12:19] S0: Okay. So one way to think about it is how much data they're producing and getting down to the ground. When we first launched the first satellite, some of which are here, various parts, they would produce... Get data rates down about a megabit a second. So we take lots of pictures, we dump it down with a radio that's going about a megabit a second. Well, if you're taking 47 megapixel images, you can't get very much data down at that rate. In fact, the cut... So now our data is about two gigabits a second, so about a thousand times better. That means we're roughly getting a thousand times more data than the first ones per satellite, per unit time. So huge increases in the amount of data. And that's what enabled us to get to this first mission one, we called it, of imaging the whole earth every day.
00:13:07 · Molly O'Shea, S0
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00:14:43 · Molly O'Shea, Molly O'Shea, S0
Ad[00:14:43] S2: zonefrontier.com to learn more. [00:14:47] S1: Let's let's go take a look inside. Yeah. I know you and your team work very closely together between manufacturing, testing, production, all that. So how how do they communicate with one another? What's the flow here? [00:15:03] S0: Well, we build all the satellites here. You'll see some of it. We're actually gonna first go into the place where we build the biggest satellites. Now, all of this is done on these sort of automated test stands. This gentleman here is working on them. These guys here. And they they build all the subsystems. That all comes together into this main clean room area, which you see here, which we can actually put our hair nets on and go in, so that we can actually see one of the satellites. They're a bit bigger than the... Those first ones because these ones, as I was mentioning, trying to get to a much higher resolution on the ground. So... And I don't know if you were asking about how they communicate with each other, but we can talk about that. But basically, each satellite dumps its data to the ground stations, but we've got 48 of those ground stations all around the world. You have [00:15:48] S1: your own ground stations?
00:15:48 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:15:48] S1: your own ground stations? [00:15:49] S0: Yes. We built... Basically, no one had that either. You can't get that So basically, we built about... I think it is 48 or so of these parabolic dish antennas Yeah. Doing dual SNX band in a a few dozen locations. We often have four or eight of these ground stations at any one location because we have so many satellites. There's many to look at at any one time, even in the same spot. And we're... So we're... And they're in Alaska, Northern Canada, Northern Norway, Southern Tip Of New Zealand, Southern Tip Of Australia. So basically, the highest latitude locations because our satellites are mainly in polar orbits, and so they get much more contact points than closer your station is to the pole. So we put them as far north and south as possible with an Internet connection because we have to get all that data back, obviously. [00:16:44] S1: Okay. So as we go and we look through these, I want to address one thing. All of these satellites are named after birds.
00:16:44 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:16:44] S1: Okay. So as we go and we look through these, I want to address one thing. All of these satellites are named after birds. [00:16:52] S0: Yes. Why? Okay. This is actually a space tradition that precedes us, and we were, like, in NASA, there was the Eagle that landed. Obviously, a lot of military missions, like Kestreli or... And we wanted to name ours after birds that were a part of our mission. So Dove's trying to inspire how we're trying to help peace and security around the Earth. Tanager is our hyperspectral satellite, and that's because these are looking out for biodiverse areas. Tanagers are some endangered birds with a lot of different colors in the tropics, so we can track ecosystems. Pelicans are highest resolution systems. That's because they fly really low. They fly so low. Pelicans fly really low because they get a bit of lift off the water when they fly really low. They get a little like 10 or 20% more lift. We can do the same sort of across the top of the atmosphere. So we fly these satellites really low so that we get better resolution on the ground. So we named them after Pelicans because of that. So we'll continue you to name them after cool birds. Oh, our next one is gonna be called Owl. Oh, yeah. So we're launching all these Owls because they've got bigger eyes and they're wise because they have a huge amount of compute on board. So we're naming them after Owls. So we'll keep on doing that. It's just for fun. [00:18:14] S1: Amazing. Okay.