The Importance of Space | Ryan Mclinko

Thanks, Maxie. So why is space important? Why do we care? Space seems like it's pretty far out there. It's hard to get to. It's expensive to get to. But why do we care about it? So I just wanted to show a few pictures here of things that are relevant, at least terrestrially, things that actually could matter a great deal to you guys, and that that's part of what is currently being used in space. So the first one on the top left is actually not something you guys are really using all that much, but it's just exploration. People going out, learning things, science, or even national or company or whatever pride of putting something into orbit. But there's a lot of actual science and things that people are learning in a microgravity environment that's actually important for bringing back down to terrestrial life. In the middle here, shown— basically agriculture, there's actually a lot that you can learn from looking at kind of large scale of what's happening to crops, and looking at different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, visible light in particular, infrared light, and using that to track how things are going, and then you can decide how you're going to change your crops based off of that, whether you're not watering them enough, whether you need to feed them better, things like that. And it's much easier to do that from orbit, because you have a much bigger scale than if you're doing it from, say, drones or balloons or anything like that. On the right, TV truck. It's actually most TV trucks or any other people that are putting up any sort of high-bandwidth data, they actually do that directly to satellite. They don't plug into a fiber on the ground or something like that. It's just easier to actually shoot it all the way up to orbit and then back down to somewhere else. TV, satellite TV is a big thing in many parts of the world. Obviously, your navigation, GPS, is something that uses satellites so you can actually know where you are. Knowing where even bigger things, tractors, ships, anything like that, all of their navigation is done not only using GPS, but also their communication is done using space, because you're in the middle of an ocean. There's nothing around you. As a result, the only way that you can communicate is through satellites. A huge amount of telecom, a huge amount of internet service is provided via satellites. Again, when you're in areas that do not have access to fiber or other access to internet. And then just kind of satellite phones as well. So currently there's a number of what are regarded kind of hot commercial sectors for space, and that's what I've shown here. So that when you— if you go and look in the news and see what is space doing, what kinds of products are being made, what sorts of things are done with space, these are likely to be the 4 things that you'll hear about. First one is space tourism, is on taking people, putting them into suborbit. So if you remember, Whoops. If you remember this line, this is actually a space tourist sort of trajectory. We're just going up into space. You're spending maybe 5, 10 minutes. And that's in a kind of microgravity-type environment. You're able to see space. You're able to see the curvature of the Earth. You're able to spend a little bit of time in microgravity, maybe do some experiments, maybe just experience it. It's kind of like flying in a zero-G airplane, but more extensive. So that's one of these big things that was projected almost 10 years ago to be this big thing. It actually hasn't really taken off all that much, partially because, A, there's kind of a limited number of people that are willing to pay a huge amount for it, and B, there's all these kind of smaller companies, particularly in what's called the Mojave Desert, that there's essentially a spaceport there and a whole bunch of companies that have actually mostly shut down. The only one that's left is actually this guy. Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's company. But still kind of a relatively hot topic. Second one is launch. So launch vehicles, we'll talk a little bit about that more in a little bit, but launch vehicles is how you get to space. Obviously it's very critical to any sort of space activities. Particularly with SpaceX lately, this is something that's been undergoing a great deal of disruption. There's also small rocket launchers as well that are aiming to provide services that didn't exist also. The third one is remote sensing. So most notably known as visible sensing, so taking pictures of the Earth and then sending those back down, the sorts of things that you see on your satellite imagery on your phone when you look at Google Maps. That's actually not only from satellites. other above-ground things, airplanes, drones, balloons, things like that, but a lot of it's from, especially the lower resolution stuff, is all from satellites. And then furthermore, what I mentioned before about agriculture, looking in other bands, whether you're talking about radar to look at the heights of things, look at the profile terrain, even below ground you can actually do that with sufficiently long wavelength waves, or looking at infrared, looking at ultraviolet. There's different things that you can see on different parts of the spectrum. So that's a big industry. And then the final one is telecoms. So taking data from one point to another, whether that's internet, whether that's TV, whether that's one of any other different things, telecoms has always been essentially the largest, other than perhaps launch, but certainly the most profitable of the space industry sectors. So let's talk a little bit about satellites. So satellite is actually a relatively generic term. All that satellite actually means is a body that's orbiting another body. So the moon, the moon, is namely the moon around Earth, is a satellite of Earth. Here's a picture in the middle that's actually all of the existing satellites and space debris, obviously not to scale because space is big. These are all actually, you know, they might be big, But zoomed out to this level is actually— you wouldn't see any of this. So it's false rendition, not that we're taking a picture of that anyway. But every single one of these things, whether it's a discarded rocket stage, whether it's a pen that some astronaut let go, which somebody did on the astronaut station, did let go of a tool bag not too long ago, and just floated away and became another satellite. So any of those intentional satellites, anything like that, are all satellites. And then just to show kind of the biggest range of scale, probably the biggest satellite, biggest man-made satellite of Earth is the International Space Station, which you see up on the top right, and then on the bottom right is the, among the smallest of satellites around the Earth, at least intentional satellites, which are CubeSats, and so those are actually Doves, some of the CubeSats that Planet Labs, where I used to work, had put up. Now to give you a feel for satellite form factors, as I mentioned before, CubeSats are a relatively inexpensive satellite that you can build and launch versus the traditional satellites, traditional telecoms in particular, also true for traditional imaging satellites or anything like that, are huge. So I've got a scale here to put you guys in perspective. So we've got people. And then the rest of these pictures are actually to scale, roughly, that I could do by eyeing it. So you've got traditional telecom satellites on the right, size of at least a large car, if not a small bus, and you can see the people there. These are what are called microsatellites. This is the size of spacecraft that Astranis is going to be building that we— well, we started designing. We've built this as a demo satellite. And now we're building these for our production payload. These are also the sorts of satellites that a company called Skybox, that you guys may have heard of, an Earth imaging company, has built in order to do their imaging. These are relatively popular because it's easy to get what are called rideshares, meaning you don't have to buy a whole rocket yourself. You can actually get a hitchhiker slot on somebody else's rocket and use that to go up into space. and take you to orbit. So these are roughly 1 meter cubed and less than— and a couple hundred kilograms. So very small compared to the 4 metric ton and, I don't know, 6 by 3 by 3 or something meter traditional satellites. And then this is a CubeSat. So CubeSats are 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters. Seems very small. They're something that were considered toys for the longest time, or things for students to be able to learn, and then technology advanced, and it actually became possible to put enough power, put enough computing capability, put attitude control, put all the things that you need in a satellite into this form factor that's this big, and then they took off, and that's why there's now a lot of different companies, particularly remote sensing companies, that are using CubeSats. It's much harder to use that for some sort of a telecom satellite, So when you're doing telecoms, whether it's the people that are doing it in low Earth orbit or people like us that are going to be putting them into geostationary, generally go for something a little bit larger. Thank you.