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And quickly, once you’ve finished this video
there are two others to watch, both where
I appear on camera for the first time—a
behind the scenes video on my brand new personal
channel and my appearance on StarTalk with
Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Both are linked in the description.
“Suppose we’re in a cave right now.
This is a cave, and there’s maybe 10 of
us, we have a mini family tribe and I say
“you know, I want to go out and see what
on the other side of that mountain.
We can see it from here,” and you say, “no,
no we have cave problems we have to fix first.
Fix all the cave problems first, then you
can go out on the mountain.”
And that’s what it sounds like to me when
I hear people say, when we talk about exposing
space, we have problems on earth, let’s
fix those before we go into space, and here’s
Earth, a speck of dirt orbiting an ordinary
star and there’s this vastness of the Universe
that is waiting for us.
It beckons.”
The commercial space industry is heating up.
Fifty years ago outer space was reserved for
the most powerful of nations, the most dominant
governments, but today there’s a democratization
of space.
Commercial industry is inching us closer to
the cosmos, and in the process, there’s
a growing interdependence between what’s
happening hundreds of miles up in space and
down below on earth.
The commercial space industry, using multi-million
dollar satellites and rockets, is increasingly
playing a part in our everyday lives.
You may think of this industry as a new phenomenon,
you may have only started hearing about profit-seeking
space enterprise in the past few years, but
in reality, this has been going on for decades.
“Our founder, Walter Scott, founded the
company in his garage in Palo Alto 25 years
ago.”
This is Dan Jablonsky.
He’s President of one of the commercial
space companies that you might not have heard
of—DigitalGlobe.
They might not be as flashy as SpaceX or as
exciting as Virgin Galactic, but they’ve
been flying satellites since before Elon Musk
even graduated college.
In fact, they were the very first American
company to be granted a license to take high-resolution
pictures from space and that is essentially
what they do—they take pictures from space,
but it’s a lot more complicated than it
sounds.
To take those images from space, you need
satellites, and DigitalGlobe has five of them.
“So the five satellites we have on orbit
are GeoEye 1, WorldView 1, WorldView 2, WorldView
3, and you’re noticing a trend here, WorldView
4.
The first of those was launched in 2007.
The most recent was launched in 2016 and they
have an expected life of over ten years each.”
And these are really good satellites.
WorldView 4, for example, DigitalGlobe’s
newest satellite, has a pixel size of 12 inches.
That means that this satellite, orbiting 383
miles above earth, can clearly see a single
sheet of paper placed in a parking lot.
Horizontally, that’s like if a camera in
Toronto took a picture that could identify
the individual eyes of Statue of Liberty in
New York.
It is insanely high resolution.
“With a 30 cm pixel you can actually pick
up road markings.
You can see the lines on the roads, whether
they’re straight or dashed lines, you can
see whether there are turn arrows there, whether
there’s a stop word on the road markings,
you can even pick up some of the traffic signs
and traffic light sizes.”
The potential uses of such high quality imagery
are endless, but how do the satellites even
work?
“Well first off its good to know that our
satellites are in a low earth orbit which
means that they actually, they’re not like
a geo satellite which sits up in a fixed orbit
and sits over one place in the planet.”
Some satellites are designed to stay directly
over one position for their whole service
lives.
Their orbits are significantly higher above
earth so the time it takes them to complete
an orbit is exactly the same as the time it
takes the earth to make a full rotation so,
relative to earth, the satellite doesn’t
move at all.
This is incredibly useful for certain uses
like communications.
When a communications company launches a satellite
to broadcast TV or radio or internet, they
want that satellite to stay over their particular
service area.
DirecTV, for example, the American satellite
TV company, want their satellites to stay
over the US because that’s their service
area.
If they weren’t able to put their satellites
into geosynchronous orbit, they would have
to launch enough satellites to cover the entire
world even if they were only broadcasting
to the US.
So, DirecTV want their satellites to stay
over one area because they’re broadcasting
to one area, but DigitalGlobe, on the other
hand, want their satellites to move because
they’re imaging the entire world.
“Each of our satellites right now are in
sun synchronous orbits.
So what that means is that the orbital plane
that the satellite is flying around in stays
in the same orientation relative to the sun
all the time.”
Simplified, that means that any given satellite
passes over any given location on earth at
the exact same time every day.
WorldView 3, for example, always orbits above
the points on earth where it’s 10:30 am.
When it passes over Denver, it’s 10:30 in
Denver, when it passes over Paris, it’s
10:30 in Paris, and when it passes over Tokyo,
it’s 10:30 in Tokyo.
How this works is that essentially, with each
pass over the light side of earth, the orbit
advances relative to the earth at the same
rate as the sunlight advances.
This orbit type is crucial because a lot of
what satellite imaging is about is detecting
change from day to day, month to month, or
year to year and an image taken at 10:30 am
is going to look very different than one taken
at 6:00 pm.
This orbit type allows the satellite to pass
over the entirety of earth, once per day at
the same time so the light conditions look
the same.
The satellites do, of course, need to be told
what to do and that all comes down to four
people in one room.
“So this is our mission operations control
center.
This is where we fly the five satellites on
orbit and really inside this room is what
we consider our time-dominant, real-time activities
from choosing, making the final choices of
what images we’re going to collect in the
next several minutes to the next several hours.”
These four individuals are controlling billions
of dollars worth of satellites.
This whole company, the thousands of employees
and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue
all exists to organize and fund what these
four individuals are doing—sitting and piloting
the satellites above in space.
The mission operations center is, of course,
staffed 24/7 since, while it’s nighttime
in the US, it’s daytime in Asia and Australia.
The satellite vehicle operators’ main task
is to load plans onto the satellites of which
images to take when, to monitor that the satellites
are operating correctly, and and to assure
that the satellites won’t collide with other
satellites or space junk.
These central screens at the front show the
current location of each of the five satellites,
while the one to the left displays other information
such as the total number of times each satellite
has orbited around the earth and how much
time they have until the satellite loses signal.
You see, in order for satellites to function
they need to be able to communicate with the
ground and that’s done with ground stations.
These antennae communicate to satellites using
what are essentially super-high powered wifi
signals.
The ground stations DigitalGlobe use are able
to receive about a gigabyte of information
every second from the satellites.
“Each of those antennas around the world
see each satellite several times a day so
as we go through the day we accumulate about
seven terabytes of raw imagery through that
gigabit connection.”
Satellites can only communicate with ground
stations while they have a line-of-sight with
the antenna so, due to the curvature of the
earth, in the view of any given ground station
the satellite will eventually dip below the
horizon.
Therefore, each ground station only has a
limited operating range.
The exact locations of ground stations are,
understandably, kept secret but if there was
one in Germany, for example, it would communicate
with the DigitalGlobe satellites exclusively
while they passed over Europe.
The fact that these satellites have to, by
nature, pass over the entire world is actually,
however, quite useful.
Not only does this let DigitalGlobe map the
entire world, but they also use this extra
capacity for humanitarian efforts.
“It’s actually easier for us on the humanitarian
global development side because we have much
more capacity over these areas.
There’s a lot more demand for our satellites
over developed countries, for instance, right,
so people are typically for commercial applications
much more interested in the US or Europe or
some of these more developed areas versus
sub-saharan Africa where we just generally
have much more ability to task the constellation
and to collect those imagery so it’s actually
an opportunity for us to support those use-cases
much more than others.”
For instance, DigitalGlobe partnered with
the Gates foundation to map every single building
structure in rural Zambia so aid workers now
know things like how many bed nets, vaccines,
or food to bring to communities that were
previously unmapped.
There are few companies the size of commercial
space companies that rely on so few assets.
What makes DigitalGlobe, for example, run
are those five satellites and, to get these
to space, to the place where they make money,
they had to put them on rockets which tend
to, from time to time, blow up.
“It’s always a bit of a nail biter as
you come up to a launch.
We put an enormous capital investment into
the satellites, the launch vehicle, and it
all comes down to a one hour event lifting
off from the ground and going on into orbit
and that can be a little bit of a nerve-racking
period but certainly very exciting at the
same time.”
An average of one in twenty rocket launches
fail and then on top of that, some satellites
fail once they reach orbit which makes the
space business risky.
Companies like DigitalGlobe will therefore
purchase enormously expensive insurance policies
on their satellites in case the launch or
the satellite itself fails.
If they didn’t, one bad launch could spell
the end for the company.
Of course, some launch providers are much
more reliable than others.
United Launch Alliance, the launch provider
that DigitalGlobe used for their current five
satellites, has not had a launch failure in
its 11 year history.
Insurance rates for ULA would be relatively
low while insurance rates for a newer launch
provider, such as Orbital ATK or Blue Origin
would be comparatively high.
Nonetheless, the cost of newer launch providers
with insurance included is now often less
than the older, more reliable launch companies.
But how does DigitalGlobe fund their exploits,
what keeps those satellites flying, how do
they make their money?
“Our largest customer is the US government
and we have been very proud to be their mission
partner for over a decade and a half coming
up on two decades now.”
It used to be that the commercial satellite
industry was essentially focused on one major
customer—governments.
In the past the US government has been the
single largest customer of the few commercial
space companies there were thanks to its enormous
defense spending, but today as commercial
customers contract commercial space companies,
the business is spreading globally.
Over the past decade, the customer base has
become more international and more diversified.
“Our other customers are international customers
who may be US allies or may be technology
companies across the world.
We go deep in the communications infrastructure,
online mapping, energy industries, mining
industries, forestry applications…”
There’s really a huge variety of customers,
but the most obvious ones are those mapping
companies.“If you’ve ever used Google
Maps you’re using our imagery, if you’ve
ever used Apple Maps you’re using our imagery,
if you ever look and do crowdsourcing projects
in OpenStreetMap you’re using our imagery
as well,” but perhaps the single most promising
use of earth imagery is with autonomous vehicles.
Having good, solid, current satellite imagery
is an integral part of how autonomous vehicles
work.
These vehicles can’t just rely on their
internal sensors to understand their surroundings—they
need a view from above.
“As we think about autonomous vehicles it’s
not ok to update the image once a quarter,
once a year, even once a week.
It needs to be, they really need imagery that’s
coming in much much faster than that to deal
with changes in traffic conditions, changes
in roads, crashes, etc.”
Uber, which is developing autonomous cars,
is already a customer of DigitalGlobe for
navigation purposes and as more and more companies
move into the autonomous vehicle race, the
competition between earth observation companies
for their business is likely to heat up.
There are plenty of other emerging uses as
well which, as an ensemble, are growing the
demand for earth imagery day by day.
It is a tremendously fast growing industry.
But satellite imagery by itself really isn’t
worth much.
You need something more.
“I would say that our customers are demanding
more actionable information faster than ever.”
Translation: customers want data.
They want the information embedded in the
images.
For that, there’s another company—Radiant
Solutions.
“So today customers, the big challenge is
around, where it used to be more of, ‘hey
we just need to get an answer now,’ now
it’s more of ‘how do we deal with all
this data’ and ‘how do we deal with the
more complex questions,’ because they are
getting more complex and they’re getting
even harder to answer nowadays by virtue of
being inundated with data.”
Radiant Solutions would describe themselves
as a geospatial analytics company—they take
satellite imagery and translate it into information.
“We're able to take in vast amount of data
and make sense of it to produce insight.”
They answer big questions.
A logging company might ask a question like,
“what’s the density of trees in this particular
region of Canada,” before purchasing new
land and Radiant would be able to look at
hundreds or thousands or millions of square
miles of imagery to tell them how many trees
there are.
Now, with so much imagery and such a big world,
you can’t just do this all by hand, at least
economically.
For that reason, there’s been a huge shift
in the geospatial analytics business towards
using artificial intelligence.
“We hear more and more now that data is
kind of like the new oil.
Well that’s sort of true but the data has
to be reliable, it has to be high confidence
in the data."
So the AI has to be good.
To train a machine to find a red car, for
example, you need to show it thousands or
millions of examples of what a red car looks
like, but “It’s very different for a machine
to look for a red car in an urban environment
as it is to find a red car in snow.
So not only are you training those models
on how to find the object, you have to train
it on where to find it regionally.”
It is hugely complicated, but that’s why
these guys are in business—to answer complicated
questions.
Some data, however, isn’t in the visual
spectrum.
Some data is hidden, but luckily, there’s
a special satellite just for that.
“In the old days it was just please get
me good, solid image pixels to use, and I’ll
go figure out how to use them.
Today, particularly in commercial space, it's
all about information.”
That’s Paul Kennedy, Vice President of Ground
Systems at MDA.
They’ve been in business since 1969.
Their most visible project was on developing
the Canadarm for the Space Shuttles and International
Space Station.
As a long-time player in the industry, they
serve a variety of functions from developing
space robotics to building satellite ground
stations, but one of their most valuable assets
is that special satellite—Radarsat-2.
While most earth observation satellites image
using the visual spectrum, what we can see
with our own eyes, Radarsat-2 uses radar.
“Radar is an active pulse so the satellite
actually sends a beam of energy to the ground
and reads back what it gets back from the
earth and that gives us a couple of interesting
advantages in SAR.”
For one, radar can see through clouds and
darkness.
It doesn’t matter what the light and weather
conditions are, it’s all the same for Radarsat-2.
Now, MDA is a Canadian company, and it’s
no coincidence that a Canadian company operates
this satellite.
Just like the US government is a major customer
of DigitalGlobe, the Canadian government is
a major customer of MDA, and here’s the
thing about Canada—the weather is terrible
and it’s always dark, quite literally in
Northern Canada where the sun stays down for
the entire winter.
It’s no coincidence that the company that
works so closely with the Canadian government
operates the satellite that can see through
clouds and night.
Without Radarsat-2, the Canadian government
would be blind—they would have no way of
monitoring huge swaths of their territory
in the high arctic for months out of the year.
With new launch providers emerging such as
Blue Origin and RocketLab and SpaceX, the
cost of launching material into space is plummeting.
Now, this is useful to these companies, at
least in some ways.
With lower launch costs, DigitalGlobe and
MDA can launch more satellites which means
more data for Radiant solutions, but that
also makes it easier for competitors to launch
satellites.
The earth imagery business is growing, but
so is the competition.
The best known earth imagery start-up, Planet,
is launching a constellation of small satellites.
While DigitalGlobe’s satellites are the
size of a bus, Planet’s smallest are the
size of a toaster.
With the smaller size, development and launch
costs are lower.
While in the past starting a space imagery
company required hundreds of millions or billions
of dollars in funding, the emergence of small-sats
means that it’s enormously easier to break
into the satellite imagery business nowadays.
But there is a key difference between these
two companies.
DigitalGlobe’s satellites capture imagery
with a pixel size of 12 inches while Planet’s
primary satellite constellation captures imagery
with a pixel size of 10-15 feet at a much
lower cost.
There are certain uses for high-resolution
imagery and there are certain other uses for
low-cost imagery so in some ways, these two
companies aren’t even direct competitors.
Nonetheless, the space industry is changing,
growing, and becoming more competitive so
the established companies needs to adapt.
United Launch Alliance knows that, Airbus
knows that, Arianespace knows that, and DigitalGlobe,
MDA, and Radiant know that too, so they made
a change.
These three companies are now one.
Along with a forth company, a spacecraft manufacturing
company called SSL that will be covered in
a future video, these are the entities that
make up the newest powerhouse in the space
technology business.
This merger wasn’t necessarily in response
to heavy competition, but rather, at least
from an outsiders perspective, a preemptive
strike to establish themselves as a major
international player before the commercial
space industry truly lifts off.
“Increasingly, the more traditional aerospace
and defense companies that have been supplying
technology in space have been able to provide
the performance but the cost has been extremely
high.”
Maxar is now a fully vertically integrated
company.
In the earth imagery space, for example, they’ll
do everything from building satellites, to
operating them, to extracting data from imagery.
By performing all the steps in the process
internally, Maxar lowers its costs and this
also puts them in the same league as Airbus
as one of the very few end-to-end integrated
space companies.
The commercial space industry as a whole is
doing a phenomenal job of making access to
orbital space commonplace.
“The routine steps of space activities are
slowly being ceded to private enterprise that
can do it faster, better, cheaper.”
We’re now at a place where launching a satellite
to low earth orbit is unexceptional.
That’s exactly what we want, easy access
to space, and, for near space, that exists
right now.
Getting beyond earth’s orbit, though, outside
our cosmic neighborhood, into deep space,
that’s still tough.
The problem is that private enterprise, by
it’s very nature, needs to make money.
Companies and their leaders are beholden to
their investors to make money.
If they’re not, then they’re not a company.
Companies can and do make money with deep
space but only through developing and building
technology for NASA and other government agencies.
There is zero commercial demand for deep space
technology today.
Going to new planets, to new solar systems,
exploring space—that really doesn’t make
money.
“Many people who think about commercial
space, I think they’re over predicting what
their role will be.
They’re imagining commercial space leading
a space frontier, but to lead a space frontier
is expensive, and it’s not an obvious return
on the investment.
You might do it as a vanity project, there
are enough billionaires that could all pool
their money, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon
Musk, they could do a vanity project and send
humans to Mars, let’s say.
But it’s not a business model and it would
get a lot of attention but, is that something
you can sustain?
No, it would be a one-off.
When people imagine a future of space and
industry they’re imagining a sustained business
case.”
Of course, you could’ve said the same about
the space-race sixty years ago—that was
exploration however, in the long term, it
was an investment that paid off because space
now makes money.
“Space today is an integral part of what
we know and what we can do on the planet.
Communications, imagery, climate science,
defense and intelligence, and security applications—all
of those are seamlessly enabled by space technologies
without most of us going about our daily lives
even thinking about it.”
The difference between commercial enterprise
and governments is time.
Commercial enterprises need to think about
investments that pay off within the lifetime
of their shareholders.
“So you’re always thinking about, what
is the return on investment you’re making,
how long will it take you to achieve the returns
on your investment, and what’s the probability
that the R&D that you’re putting in will
be successful.”
“If you take cues from history, the government
does what hasn’t been done before and private
enterprise does what’s routine.”
While companies look at investments in terms
of years, governments can look at investments
in terms of decades or centuries because governments
transcend generations.
The innovation that will occur by bringing
humans to Mars and beyond will absolutely
make money in the very long term, but right
now, it would take an enormous amount of money
that few people want to risk.
You could point to Elon Musk as an exception
to this rule, he more than anyone understands
the value of super long-term investments like
going to Mars, but he also understands that
he’s alone in that.
Individuals don’t want to invest in something
that won’t make money until after they're
dead.
Musk has stated that he has no plans to take
SpaceX public until after a successful mission
to Mars which means that, for the moment,
the company is almost acting more as an organization.
He’s funneling the money from launches,
which make money, into exploration, which
doesn’t.
“Governments need to lead the way because
they have the longer time horizons that they
can think about and monetize.
When they do that, once they lead the way
they have now quantified the risks, and you
know the cost, and where the friendlies are
and where the hostiles—whatever are the
things that would compromise your mission
they’ve already figured this out.
Then if they do it right, you then hand that
to private industry that makes a buck off
of it then the government can tax that if
they so choose.”
Maxar Technologies and its four businesses,
meanwhile, absolutely innovate including in
deep space technologies, but they’re not
going to put the pieces together to go to
Mars by themselves because that’s not a
good investment.
One should be careful to realize that this
coming era of commercialized space does not
necessarily translate into a renaissance of
space exploration.
Commercial industry is not a substitute for
NASA or the ESA or any other government institution.
They are collaborators, they can make the
government’s job easier and cheaper, but
they cannot replace those whose jobs are to
go where no human has gone before.
The next few decades and centuries can be
the era of space exploration, but for that,
you need a public, you need an electorate
that understands anything good, anything truly
worthwhile takes time.
There are so many thanks I have to give for
help with this video, but one is to Away not
only for making this video possible through
sponsorship, but also for literally carrying
my possessions over the 15,000 miles I travelled
while making this video… and unfortunately
that number is not a mistake.
I’ve now owned my Away suitcase for almost
a year, have travelled all around the world
with it, and I love it.
The suitcase is just solidly built, you can
feel it, and has a built in yet removable
battery, a laundry bag, a laptop sleeve, and
a compression system so you can pack more
in a smaller space.
Best of all, for how good it is, the Away
suitcase is sold for an amazing price and
its at an even more amazing price if you go
to awaytravel.com/wendover and use the code
“wendover” at check-out to get $20 off
your Away suitcase.
They’re so confident you’ll love the product
that all Away suitcases have a lifetime warranty
and 100 day unconditional return policy.
It’s quite literally no risk and they made
this enormous video possible so if you need
a suitcase for life, check out awaytravel.com/wendover
and use the code “wendover” at checkout.
I also have to give a huge thanks to Maxar
Technologies, especially Kristin Carringer
and Turner Brinton, for letting me film this
video, as it takes an enormous amount of work
to allow cameras into such a high security
environment.
Lastly, as I mentioned at the beginning, I
appeared on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s show StarTalk
and also launched a new personal channel where
I made a behind the scenes video for that
appearance.
Both are linked in the description and on-screen
now.
Thanks again for watching and I’ll see you
again in three weeks for another Wendover
Productions video.
