Ryan McLinko defines outer space at the von Kármán line (100 km up) and explains why spacecraft face extreme temperatures, radiation, and atmospheric drag. He uses scale models to show planetary distances, then contrasts tiny CubeSats with Astranis's dishwasher-sized satellites that deliver global telecom services at lower cost.
Chapters
All right. Good morning, everybody. Good to be here. Can we get a show of hands, just so I can get a feel for what the audience is? Who's familiar with space or anything kind of along those lines? Nobody is here. OK. How about engineering, building things? OK, cool. All right. So let's go ahead and get started. All right. So like we talked about, what I'm going to talk about is a few different things here. I'm going to talk about space, space in general, then talk about the space industry, kind of what different things people will do with space, then talk about telecoms specifically, so how you communicate from point to point, how you use satellites or other things in order to do that. And then I'm going to talk about how to get involved. So how to get involved— whoops— with— perhaps? There we go. How to get involved with whether it's space, whether it's new space, whether it's telecoms, anything like that. I already went through my background here, but currently co-founder at Astranis. Previously, I'd worked at Planet Labs, and then worked at a bunch of other names that you guys may or may not be familiar with throughout the space industry, building rockets, things that launch things into space, building various different other types of satellites and other things that do serve different markets in the space industry. So first of all, just a little bit more about Astranis. This is actually a picture of our demo satellite. This is what's called a CubeSat. I'll get into a little bit more later what a CubeSat is versus what other types of satellites are. But it's basically a small satellite that you're able to use to— that's relatively inexpensive to be able to launch, and it's very small, meaning it's also relatively inexpensive to build compared to traditional satellites that are very big and incredibly expensive to launch. I'll actually show you guys later a little scale factor so you can get a feel for what a CubeSat looks like, which is about this big. So not that— pretty much to scale here versus what a traditional satellite is, which is the size of a school bus. So what is the difference between CubeSats and traditional satellites? So Astranis is building lots of these, lots of the slightly larger satellites, actually about the size of a dishwasher, in order to serve telecoms applications, basically dramatically reduce the cost of providing access to space, or providing access to space and telecoms. But I'm not going to talk too much, at least at the beginning here, about Astranis specifically. I want to go through and tell you guys kind of some background. What is space? What do you use it for? How do you use it? Things like that. So I'm a big fan of kind of starting from first principles and giving people a feel for kind of the why of things, as well as kind of where all that came from. So I'm going to step back quite a bit, actually, and start to tell you guys a little bit about space. Specifically, I mean outer space. Obviously, space means Lots of different things. The air that is between us, things like that are all space. But outer space is specifically things that, as is generally defined, things above what's called the von Kármán line. The von Kármán line is this kind of imaginary line that's 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface. And above that is called outer space. Below that is, I guess, just the atmosphere. Cool. So what you can see over on the right is just a view of the different Kind of what the atmosphere looks like going up, different weather, where aircraft— aircraft will generally fly around here when you're flying in planes, and then significantly above that is 100 kilometers. Above that, space. Just for reference, here's where the space station is and where the shuttle used to fly to take people to the space station, so something that you guys are probably familiar with. Generally, quite a bit above that is actually where most satellites operate. And I'll show you guys a little bit more about that in a little bit. Can you repeat the question? What space actually is, the environments are pretty extreme. You generally— well, A, there's very little atmosphere. There is actually not no atmosphere. Atmosphere decays exponentially as you go up in altitude. And so there's a little bit there. And actually, there is drag. So the Space Station, for example, actually has to keep boosting its orbit every few years or so. Otherwise, it would come in and reenter, because there is actually still drag up there. It gets very hot. It gets very cold. Now, temperature is actually nothing more than the motion of molecules in the air. As a result, there is no technical temperature of space. There's only the temperature of a thing that's in space. So if you have, say, you, a person that's in space, you're getting irradiated. You're getting sunlight put on you from the sun. and then your body is then radiating energy out to deep space, and then there's a balance of energy that happens to you, and then that determines your temperature, because you are made of molecules. However, in space, there isn't a temperature in the same way that there is air in this room that has a temperature. That said, any of these particular bodies can experience extreme swings, easily in excess of 100 degrees Celsius, easily below -100 degrees Celsius, whether you're in orbit, whether you're on, say, the moon, or any other bodies that don't have atmospheres that are able to provide regulation of temperature. Let's step— kind of zoom out a little bit here, talk about what is the scale of space. So when you're used to seeing pictures of things like the Earth, or planets, or anything like that, you're used to seeing things kind of lined up, like, say, this, where you've got the planets that are just next to each other. It actually looks quite small. In real— and similarly, you'll see the sun kind of sitting next to planets. This is actually the planet sizes to scale. This little guy right here is the Earth. So all of everything that we're on is this guy relative to some of the larger gas giant planets and then the sun, which doesn't even fit on this picture. So just to give you kind of a— it's nice to sometimes step back and get a feel for what is the scale of space. Similarly, if you look here, this is showing you the relative distances of the planets. So again, here's where we are. Here's where the sun is. Seems kind of very far away to us, but it's actually— if you look at the solar system, it only scales down to this, and then the other planets are all the way out here. Again, taking the size of the planets into perspective of this, if you guys can read this, you'll notice that the sun on this scale is 0.2 pixels. So even the sun, which is huge, is less than a pixel. Like, you can't even show the size of it on this scale. So we'll zoom back in on this in a little bit and show the size of orbits, and even when you're talking about things that are orbiting the Earth, it's still very large, which is something important to consider when you're dealing with space, particularly when you're dealing with space exploration, and we'll talk about that as a future industry in a little bit, about going to Mars, going to the moon, going to asteroids, things like that. So Zooming out, a little bit less practical for our purposes, because it'll be a while before humanity is doing really a whole lot out here. This is what's called a logarithmic scale, which means that it's actually the exponent. So instead of having 1 meter, 2 meter, 3 meter, it's actually 10 to the 1 meter, 10 to the 2, 100, 10 to the 3, 1,000 for every one of these that's going out. And again, you see Sun. And because the Earth is looking much farther away, because this is logarithmic, And then just going out to all the planets, and then just what's outside beyond the solar system. Similarly, where we are in the galaxy.
