Telecom Satellites | Ryan Mclinko

All right, let's talk a little bit about telecom satellites specifically. So what do telecom satellites do? I described before, you're basically taking information from one point and sending it somewhere else, whether that's taking it from a place that has internet, sending it to a cell phone tower, and then people can all then access internet through the cell phone tower, whether you're just taking it point to point from one business to another, giving people internet, doing a direct broadcast, Giving people Wi-Fi in an airplane, all these different types of things that revolve around getting data from one place to another. These all actually use the same sort of standard in terms of— so you can use actually the same satellite hardware in order to provide all of these different services. And yep, covered all those. So let's talk a little bit more about the technical bits of how you build telecom satellites. So A, this is just showing the electromagnetic spectrum that you guys are probably all familiar with. Radio waves, microwaves, which are the types of waves that are in your microwave, but are also what are used for nearly all communication, the same wavelength, going up to visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays. So high frequency is really difficult for us to be able to deal with with our current technology. Certainly doing anything other than light is difficult to do at visible. So we're really looking in the microwave, the radio spectrum for anything that we do communication with. And generally speaking, we've been going from low frequency to high frequency as technology has been advancing. So a lot of remote control type things, radio, when you're like in your car, which I don't know, maybe you guys have heard of that. It's not really being used a whole lot lately. Cell phones are all relatively low frequency. And then a lot of this satellite communication is being done at somewhat higher frequency. And then you kind of keep going up from there. And this is really where a lot of satellite telecoms are being done. The reason for that is that although path loss, the amount of loss that you incur by going from point to point in space, increases with frequency, also does the gain. The amount of energy that you can— the amount of directivity that you can get out of a dish of a given size will increase linearly with frequency. As a result, if you have a pointy dish on one side, a pointy dish on the other side, then you can get linearly increased data rate as frequency increased. So kind of more bang for your buck for a certain amount of power. I'm just zooming in here to satellite frequency. If you're looking at satellite telecoms, you'll hear terms like L, S, C, X, Ku, Ka band. Those are— all these are are delineations for different ranges of frequency. So for example, L, S, and C are typically kind of telemetry data downlink type frequencies for different satellites. Things like Ku, Ka are generally more for the sort of internet-providing, TV broadcast, things like that. Geostationary satellites, like I said, are on the geostationary arc. And the only reason I put this up is I wanted to show kind of the regulation. So these are— satellites are assigned a specific slice of the geostationary arc, which is defined actually by the frequency they're using. So as frequency goes up, it becomes more directive, which means that you can pack satellites closer together. Again, this has a radius of 35,000 kilometers, so the satellites physically aren't touching or anywhere close to touching each other, but it's all about the energy that you have to get up to them. So if you have a dish on your roof, you want to make sure that that energy on your dish that's broadcasting up to the satellite is only going to hit the satellite that's intended. You don't want to hit the neighbors. And so that's what drives how close you can pack the satellites together on orbit. Just a little bit about the satellites themselves. So just to give a kind of a picture of what relay looks like, you have one ground station, a destination ground station or user terminal. You take energy up— traditional satellites, what they do is they take in one set of energy, one set of frequency, and then they just turn it back around. They have literally a pipe. It's called bent pipe. Because they take energy from one place, they amplify it, and they shoot it back down. What we're looking at doing is actually a little bit different. It's about cleaning up the noise, then amplifying it, and then shooting it back down, which has a lot of advantages. But traditionally, it's as simple as that, that it's basically a pipe that's just turning it around. This is an example of— SSL is one of the satellite manufacturers. I just saw this diagram on Google Image Search, so I know it's okay to show. So basic ideas of telecom satellite, power, you're basically turning power into microwaves is what a telecom satellite does. Solar panels to collect a lot of energy, reflectors to take in energy from the ground, amplify it, and send it back down to a different part on the ground. That's the short version of how a telecom satellite works. So traditionally, like I said before, you have a gigantic satellite that a contractor builds, Somebody like Boeing or Lockheed Martin or Space Systems Loral. Now these are really big— these are really, really expensive satellites, half a billion dollars to build it and then another couple hundred million dollars to launch it. So it's— people don't generally have that sort of money lying around. So what you typically do is you have this middle group called a satellite operator. That satellite operator basically goes in and finances the whole thing. They pay the manufacturers to build the satellite, And then they run a whole bunch of different statistics and decide that this is the right investment to be making for the right market and things like that. And then they own the satellite after the satellite manufacturer builds it, put it on orbit, and then customers are able to use it, and then the operator just kind of rakes in the money. So this is really the only way that it can make sense when you're dealing with things that are the better part of $1 billion to put up a single unit of spacecraft. I mentioned before there's different ways that you can provide internet. You can provide telecom services. Geostationary satellites is obviously one of them. Fiber is another one, fiber that's just laid in the ground, laid under the ocean to go from point to point. But a lot of the world doesn't have that. There's a couple other concepts that are being used. There's low Earth orbit constellations. There's 2 of them, one called OneWeb, one called SpaceX— or OneWeb. one that SpaceX is also putting up, that are looking to put up actually a couple thousand satellites per constellation, which is a lot of satellites. It's— there's a lot of technical challenges with that. It's not really worth getting into too much, but it's another concept that's out there. And then the other one is to put things closer to the ground. Drones, balloons. You guys have probably— might have heard about Google Loon or the Facebook drones. That Facebook drone test flight was pretty recent, I think a couple weeks ago. But these are all the different options that you can use to provide telecom services. So talking about kind of Astranis or any other of these new space companies, Planet Labs, where I used to be, how SpaceX works, anything like that, how do we do things differently? It really comes down to 2 different things. Number one, using nontraditional components. Traditionally, when you need to have a microcontroller, just a tiny little device that's actually way less powerful than what's on your phone, You buy this component that is rad-hard, meaning that it's a space-grade component that's been designated to be proven to work in radiation. That little microcontroller, which is again an order of magnitude, or actually probably about 2 orders of magnitude less powerful than your phone, costs $200,000. However, it's equivalent to something you can buy on any just normal electronics website, if you're familiar with like Digi-Key or something like that, and that costs $20. So you have things like this that are many orders of magnitude cheaper to use an off-the-shelf component. Now it's not designed for space, but if you're careful in how you pick it, how you use it, how you shield it, you can actually use these components in space, and that is a game changer for cost and what things can make sense and doing things in a different way. Second one is assembly line. Satellites are traditionally— every single satellite is a very special snowflake. It's completely different. So you might think these traditional, like a Loral or Boeing or whatever, Yes, they build these different satellites and they have a bus that's sort of similar, meaning the thing that supports the payload supports the dish, but the payload, the dish, the transponders is completely different. It's like artwork every single time they do it, and that makes costs stay really high. And so the sort of approach that we've been taking, the sort of approach that Planet's been taking, that a lot of these companies have been taking, is doing these sort of data storage or RAID approach. RAID is a term for hard drives where you put multiple hard drives in your computer and they both have all the same data, so it doesn't matter if one of them craps out. So you can use lower quality hard drives and you have redundancy in the system. So the idea is that we build lots of smaller satellites and that because they cost so much less than the big satellites, we can then take different risk profile with them. It's okay if some of them fail, and because it's okay that some of them fail, we can now make them sufficiently cheaper. The exact opposite of this is how space is so expensive. You build something that's going somewhere hard, it's hard to get there, it's expensive to get there, and then therefore it has to work, and therefore it has to get more expensive and more risk intolerant and things like that. So if you turn that on its head and you go with lots of smaller things, the game changes dramatically. And so that's essentially what we're doing is taking the big satellite, replacing it with lots of little ones. I think I mentioned before, basically what makes this possible, commercial off-the-shelf electronics. Battery technology has been growing by leaps and bounds lately. Solar cell technology has been improving dramatically. Thruster technology, propulsion, has been improving dramatically. And then shared payloads is also a relatively new trend that's been going on. So that's another thing that makes putting up these smaller satellites possible. So what this means is that— can basically crash a lot of these telecom markets, provide internet services, telecom services in a way that has not been provided before for much less money. And that enables us to A, serve new markets, B, create new markets, C, serve areas that just couldn't have afforded it in the past. I'm going to actually skip through these ones.