Thanks for your thoughts Jackson! I wanted to take a moment to respond to a few of these things, and would love it if you’d ask follow up questions, or I’m happy to give you my #.
#1) Good news, we have already built the first 2u test satellite, and paid for the launch, that came in at about $230k (hardware and launch). Obviously there’s a lot of free/unaccounted labor in there, and some choices that we would not make on the production units, which would be more in the $500k range most ideally. These have LoRA radios, SDR, VHF, etc
#2) We have an independent report by a bench test auditor that suggests its both possible and legal, but ultimately that’s why we are launching the test sat, to demonstrate its capabilities and limitations with greater nuance. In general the power budget is aided by algorithms that trade data throughput for lower power via redundancy. Happy to connect you with the tech lead there. We have done prior projects with very small antenna receivers and been successful so we are fairly confident in this area. A phone app and relatively newish cell phone are necessary if the cell phone is the target (rather than the base stations).
#3) Very good question! The satellite works with low cost independent/open source ground stations, which we also designed and will be testing (though they are relatively normal gear). We are going to have several in addition to more standard iridium backhaul etc. The plan is to make 10 satellites, have some in the air, and some at Astra, LongShot, Space X and other launch providers if the project is fully funded. We’ve met with the CEO’s of the first two.
#4) We have a regulatory filing with the ITU that allows us to broadcast with unlimited power from LEO on 25mhz of L band, including about 5mhz that corresponds with an LTE Channel, that is allowed in more than half the world (and most of our target areas) and in the rest we have to do coordination. We’ve already completed that with the US succesfully. It’s also going to be allowed in an emergency in most of the rest of course.
#5) Militaries and governments do have ways of leadership staying in touch via satellites, and we are supporting offline nodes and synchronization software that can use things like starlink and other connections as a backhaul. This satellite is meant to be additive to all that and not a replacement—it is basically a repeater that can connect any nodes that are up, with the ability to store and forward broadcast to a large number of humans with cell phones but without working cell service in disaster areas. It’s just one currently missing component in a system of new space based technologies that will work together in a disaster.
#6) I have actually had a brief chat with US Space Command leadership on this topic! They thought it was interesting and reiterated to me how many basic things like financial transactions depend on GPS timing coordination which would go down in major great power conflicts and how the goverment and society are not prepared for it, or terrestrial internet separation. They were very encouraging and asked to be kept apprised of the results of the test platform.
Re: Rocketlab, I would love to have a connection to them. I had a similar discussion with Astra in Alameda CA which is one of their competitors I believe.
Re: Price, you are right—a modest constellation of what we are talking about is more on the order of $10m, and $30 would be a reasonable final production budget. However we are open sourcing the plans, software, and tools, and believe that there are a number of organizations that will want their own / or joint satellites, and that meaningful capabilities start at less than that. The main goal is to reduce the entry costs of these kind of capabilities to the world in order to increase resilient systems, and enable us to press off switches without major humanitarian outcomes.
The cyber war plan in many countries involves cutting undersea cables and turning off civilian internet, and we’ve already show that major internet outages are hard to recover from with internet backhaul on everything from phones to radios. One of the current UN goals is to get emergency warning systems more widespread—about half of all countries don’t even have one, and they have a huge humanitarian and financial protection ROI.
The idea of this design is to fulfill a basic early warning system functionality in normal times, and to enable additional store capabilities to emergency systems, and to add some additional robustness in high risk lower probability scenarios like solar flare, nuclear war, great power conflict, major cyber event, etc.… However the satellite system is just one part of that, most of it involves offline synchronization tools, and other backend tooling where we are putting most of our efforts..
Our hope is that for a relatively low cost this project can inspire other institutions by showing what is possible on a minimal budget with open source tools and recently reduced space access costs (falling even further with starship).
We will be launching a website at some point so you can follow along with our test launch this summer.
Thanks for your thoughts Jackson! I wanted to take a moment to respond to a few of these things, and would love it if you’d ask follow up questions, or I’m happy to give you my #.
#1) Good news, we have already built the first 2u test satellite, and paid for the launch, that came in at about $230k (hardware and launch). Obviously there’s a lot of free/unaccounted labor in there, and some choices that we would not make on the production units, which would be more in the $500k range most ideally. These have LoRA radios, SDR, VHF, etc
#2) We have an independent report by a bench test auditor that suggests its both possible and legal, but ultimately that’s why we are launching the test sat, to demonstrate its capabilities and limitations with greater nuance. In general the power budget is aided by algorithms that trade data throughput for lower power via redundancy. Happy to connect you with the tech lead there. We have done prior projects with very small antenna receivers and been successful so we are fairly confident in this area. A phone app and relatively newish cell phone are necessary if the cell phone is the target (rather than the base stations).
#3) Very good question! The satellite works with low cost independent/open source ground stations, which we also designed and will be testing (though they are relatively normal gear). We are going to have several in addition to more standard iridium backhaul etc. The plan is to make 10 satellites, have some in the air, and some at Astra, LongShot, Space X and other launch providers if the project is fully funded. We’ve met with the CEO’s of the first two.
#4) We have a regulatory filing with the ITU that allows us to broadcast with unlimited power from LEO on 25mhz of L band, including about 5mhz that corresponds with an LTE Channel, that is allowed in more than half the world (and most of our target areas) and in the rest we have to do coordination. We’ve already completed that with the US succesfully. It’s also going to be allowed in an emergency in most of the rest of course.
#5) Militaries and governments do have ways of leadership staying in touch via satellites, and we are supporting offline nodes and synchronization software that can use things like starlink and other connections as a backhaul. This satellite is meant to be additive to all that and not a replacement—it is basically a repeater that can connect any nodes that are up, with the ability to store and forward broadcast to a large number of humans with cell phones but without working cell service in disaster areas. It’s just one currently missing component in a system of new space based technologies that will work together in a disaster.
#6) I have actually had a brief chat with US Space Command leadership on this topic! They thought it was interesting and reiterated to me how many basic things like financial transactions depend on GPS timing coordination which would go down in major great power conflicts and how the goverment and society are not prepared for it, or terrestrial internet separation. They were very encouraging and asked to be kept apprised of the results of the test platform.
Re: Rocketlab, I would love to have a connection to them. I had a similar discussion with Astra in Alameda CA which is one of their competitors I believe.
Re: Price, you are right—a modest constellation of what we are talking about is more on the order of $10m, and $30 would be a reasonable final production budget. However we are open sourcing the plans, software, and tools, and believe that there are a number of organizations that will want their own / or joint satellites, and that meaningful capabilities start at less than that. The main goal is to reduce the entry costs of these kind of capabilities to the world in order to increase resilient systems, and enable us to press off switches without major humanitarian outcomes.
The cyber war plan in many countries involves cutting undersea cables and turning off civilian internet, and we’ve already show that major internet outages are hard to recover from with internet backhaul on everything from phones to radios. One of the current UN goals is to get emergency warning systems more widespread—about half of all countries don’t even have one, and they have a huge humanitarian and financial protection ROI.
The idea of this design is to fulfill a basic early warning system functionality in normal times, and to enable additional store capabilities to emergency systems, and to add some additional robustness in high risk lower probability scenarios like solar flare, nuclear war, great power conflict, major cyber event, etc.… However the satellite system is just one part of that, most of it involves offline synchronization tools, and other backend tooling where we are putting most of our efforts..
Our hope is that for a relatively low cost this project can inspire other institutions by showing what is possible on a minimal budget with open source tools and recently reduced space access costs (falling even further with starship).
We will be launching a website at some point so you can follow along with our test launch this summer.