Closing Bell - Manifest Space: New spaced-based tools for fighting and preventing fires with Fire Alliance Executive Director Brian Collins & Muon Space CEO Jonny Dyer 1/30/25

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Public-private partnership Earth Fire Alliance includes Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, The Minderoo Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund—and Muon Space. Fire Alliance Executive Director Brian Collins & Muon Space CEO Jonny Dyer join Morgan Brennan to discuss using space technology and AI to detect small fires before they become large and devastating, helping incident commanders make better-informed decisions about resource allocation. 

In the wake of California's devastating wildfires, new technology is emerging that promises to transform the way blazes are monitored, fought, and ultimately prevented. The Earth Fire Alliance is a public-private partnership that includes Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Mindaroo Foundation, the Environmental Defense Fund, and a startup called Muon Space. Executive Director Brian Collins says the alliance was created to address the increase in high-severity, high-intensity fires using new innovations. bring space-based capability to the wildfire resiliency issue. And we did that in partnership with Muon Space, who was the technical lead to bring the capabilities of the modern space industry to bear on a problem that is increasing in intensity across the world and specifically in the western United States today. The first of the Alliance's Firesat satellites will head to space via SpaceX in March. More are expected to be launched early next year, and with those, initial operational service for

early adopters. Johnny Dyer, CEO and founder of Muon Space, worked at the first venture-backed new space company, Skybox, and when it was acquired by Google, helped implement satellite data into Google Maps and other apps. He says the drop in costs coupled with the increase in capability are making the service possible now. One of the core kind of thesis for Muon when we started the company was that there's going to be this TikTok feedback mechanism with AI and things like satellite data. So we're now at a place where we can build large constellations of mission-targeted satellites and collect massive quantities of new and important data. But we're also in a place where the technology with things like AI is set up to enable us to

make use of that data in a much more effective way than I think has been possible in the past. On this episode, Earth fires Collins and Muon Space's Dyer discuss the Alliance, the technology, and what they hope to accomplish when it comes to combating the world's future wildfires. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Brian Collins of Earth Fire Alliance and Johnny Dyer of Muon Space. Gentlemen, it's great to speak with you today. Thank you for taking the time. Yeah, nice to be here. So I just, I really want to sort of start at the beginning here. And Brian, I'll go to you first

on this, but Earth Fire Alliance, what is it? Why did it start? And what does it hope to achieve? Thanks, Morgan. Well, Earth Fire Alliance is a non-profit public and private partnership. And Earth Fire Alliance was originally originally the idea came about about three years ago as the community got together uh both uh the technology community the space community and the and the wildfire community looking at what we could do to address the increasing in the increase in high severity high intensity fires that are happening and start building a building up the resilience of our communities to withstand those and to mitigate them or prevent them from happening

or respond to them. So Earth Fire Alliance was stood up to lead that initiative and bring space-based capability to the wildfire resiliency issue. And we did that in partnership with Muon Space, who was the technical lead to bring the capabilities of the modern space industry to bear on a problem that is increasing in intensity across the world, and specifically in the Western United States today. And Johnny, I guess outline for me what Muon Space brings to the equation, what you're doing at your startup and how it speaks to the capability that space-based infrastructure can bring to this problem. Yeah. So, I mean, as you're well aware,

Morgan, the space industry has really transformed over the last decade or 15 years. Things that were really very difficult to achieve or too costly 15 years ago are now much more in play. And so we see this opportunity in front of us to really bring these capabilities to a very large set of important global challenges, everything from, you know, fire to national security problems, to things like how we respond to increasing extreme weather events. And kind of Muon was really started with that in mind, this idea that the technology has gotten to a point where we can apply it for these entirely new kind of mission areas. And our focus is very much the mission. It's really being able to solve these type of problems working with, you know, expert organizations like EFA and others who really deeply understand the operational problems, but work to implement technology in support

of that end-to-end and kind of a full mission capacity. And so we are very excited about the Firesat system because I think it's a very good sort of case study of both the need for these type of systems moving forward as we enter a dynamic 21st century, but also the ability of kind of modern new space technology to address these type of problems in entirely new ways. And so what we're talking about here is a satellite constellation that has been designed and developed specifically to address monitoring and hopefully through that process prevention, I would imagine, of fires? Absolutely. The Firesat Constellation was designed, again, over three years ago,

we started talking across the community from fire science to climate impacts to fire responders and incident commanders and community groups and prevention groups of what a system that would allow us globally to see all fires on the planet, be able to see small fires before they get to big fires, and see how they dynamically move into our communities and what they affect. So we built a system, we are building a system that is purposely designed for the wildland fire problem. In the past, we have many systems that have supported wildly and fire response which is wonderful it's when i started uh in the fire business in 2007 in san diego uh then president bush gave governor schwarzenegger everything we had in order to respond to fires and it was extremely helpful but it wasn't purpose built for fire so we we did what we could with it fire sat is designed with the community purpose built to

understand what happens on a fire and see it. So we want to see small fires before they get big. We want to see, we will see those fires as they move through the landscape and change, and we'll understand which fires go into big high intensity fires that require a lot of resources and other fires, which may be manageable so that we can put our resources on the areas that we need to and then monitor and see what is happening on other fires before they get big. So with that purpose-built design, we will be able to affect how we look at fire when it moves through a community to build better communities. We will be, incident commanders will be able to see dynamically at the time a fire happens

where it's moving and what it's affecting so they can move resources appropriately. And the community will be able to see, the whole community will be able to have understanding and awareness of fires as they move around so that during these periods of high winds when we can't fly aircraft, the community is still informed of where fires are happening. It can make informed decisions on their own about what they need to do on a fire. Now, Earth observation satellites have been around for a while. And Johnny, you certainly were a pioneer in the small sat space and in this arena. So when we talk about purpose built specifically for fire satellites, what's different about the technology and the capability? Yeah, so I think a big part of it is that we're now in a place with the way the ecosystem has

developed where costs have come down, you know, heavily driven by things like the cost of launch, which SpaceX has been instrumental in driving, such that you can actually afford to develop systems for very targeted missions versus kind of the historical past for certainly commercial systems, a little less so on the national security systems, has been trying to develop, you know, things like a remote, like an imaging constellation, like we did at Skybox, that is designed to be general and solve 30 different problems and produce data for 30 different, you know, kind of domain areas. And that's very hard to do. It means that you're kind of not really meeting the specific needs of any one of those missions.

Whereas we're now in this world where we can deploy large numbers of very capable satellites at reasonable cost to go specifically address a very particular mission and optimize towards that. And that really is, again, what Firesat is, as Brian was saying. It's not kind of this, well, fire is an afterthought or we'll use some data from other systems for weather or whatever that have some applicability of the fire problem and do the best we can with it. It's really starting from first principles. If you want to go solve this fire problem or have a huge impact on solving it, what is the system that you would want? And now let's go deploy that system. So I think a lot of it really comes down to the technology trends, the cost trends that have happened in the industry over the last 20 years, as well as

sort of the ability to deploy these things very quickly and with technology that has moved and enables things like massive amounts of data to be collected at low latencies. And of course, Brian, we're watching in real time the tragedy and the heartbreaking loss and devastation that's affecting so many people in Los Angeles and Southern California with these wildfires right now. When do we start to see this technology deployed and how quickly can it get operational so that real-time data can enable first responders and others to prevent something like this from happening in the future?

Yeah, it's watching California and all of my friends and coworkers in the fire community, I mean, just watching the response and the types of decisions they're having to make at the speed they're having to make those decisions is shocking to watch. And it certainly brings an urgency to what we want to do. So there's two sides to bringing our capability to bear. First is the ability, is the amazing ability of Muon to build these systems fast. So our first launch will be in March of this year.

And so we're going up in March of this year with the full Firesat instrument capability, which will immediately be, we will start learning and seeing data from the system. We will follow that with our operational launches in quarter two of 2026, where we start building out the constellation. So we'll have a satellite in orbit very quickly within a couple of months. That's the first part of it, is the ability of Nuance Space to build and rapidly launch the systems with their partners. The second side, and the most important side, is for the community to get ready to use the data. So at Earth Fire Alliance, we like to say the big part of our name is actually the alliance part, which is our

assembling the community, and that is fire and incident response agencies to be ready to use the data as soon as it comes down from the satellites, as well as the fire science community to begin to look at our data and start coming up with new ways to understand what's happening on the fire. And then the emergency management community to see the data and begin coming up with new concepts of how to make decisions using the rapid and high fidelity data we're going to bring. We're going to bring data that no one has seen the quantity of data we have brought before on fire. One of the other things we say is the community and we understand, we know we'll be shocked at how much fire there is on the planet because we're going to pick up very small fires. So we need to prepare that community. And we've got an early adopter program with fire agencies ranging from California to overseas fire agencies that are already signed

up to begin getting data and learning from that data. And finally, with the large amounts of data, the other side is our partnership with the technology industry to begin to apply things like machine learning and artificial intelligence to look at the vast quantities of data we're going to collect. And again, help us come up with new ways to understand what fire does on the planet and what new decisions we can make to change our response to fire so that we can stay ahead of these fast moving, high intensity fires. I was I was exactly where I was going to go with you with my next question, Brian, and that is, is that something that Google brings to the table in this partnership? Exactly. So we hadn't talked a little bit about the partnership that got us here. And so the partnership is a public and private and technology partnership,

and it covers that broad swath. So we have organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund, who initiated a lot of the impact assessments that led us here. And we have funders who have come from the philanthropic community, like Gordon and Betty Moore, who have come forward to help us bring this capability as a philanthropic arm to bring it to bear fast, so we didn't have to work through a government budget cycle, so we could bring this capability to bear. And then we have our technology partners. Google straddles both. Google has provided funding for us at a philanthropic level to bring the capability to bear. And they are bringing their community, not just Google, but their collaborative community

to bring AI to the table so that we can be ready to use this data. Again, the alliance is really important. I think Johnny and I like to talk that the only way we feel that we would fail is if we collect the data and it takes two years for a fire agency to make it, to use it and be ready to use it. We want to make sure that when we launch the satellites and Neon is producing data from the satellites, that as soon as that happens operationally, fire agents, because agencies can use that data because fire no longer has a season. So we want to be able to, if we, when we launch, if there is a fire soon afterwards and we're producing data, we want to produce that data and have someone use it to make a decision and not just study it.

And I do want to get your thoughts, Johnny, on the Google piece of this, because I think a lot of folks would be surprised and maybe don't realize that they take it for granted when they open up their Maps applications and everything else. But Google has had a hand in using space data for quite a long time now. And you've had a hand in helping Google to do that in the past. Yeah, I think it's not really well known because people take it such for granted, but Google has a huge geospatial, what's called geospatial technology area that incorporates massive quantities of data from aircraft, from spacecraft to produce the maps that we all use every day. And more and more, as you look at those products, you see things like more and more real-time data showing up in those maps. Right. So there's traffic, there's weather. Google has now implemented fire sort of fire alerting in the Google map system all the combination of unique geospatial data collected from things like satellites with AI applied to it to do things like detection and monitoring and sort of extraction

of useful information from that data. And so Google's really the best in the world at solving these type of problems where you have, you know, a difficult, very, very large data set that has to be managed and understood and sort of insights extracted from it. And that's been, you know, already just the work that we've done with that team has been truly fantastic because we've been able to think about this problem end to end, not only from a satellite perspective, not only from an operational perspective, but also from a, how do you apply the cutting edge of things like AI to this problem to really move the needle in a big way. And it does feel like everything's sort of converging and coming together, Johnny, in terms of these technologies and these capabilities. You mentioned the fact that there

are that, you know, there's this opportunity to do this and deliver a public good when it comes to, you know, fire monitoring specifically, but that there are other applications for muon space as well. So if you could just walk me through it, especially since I've had conversations with other entrepreneurs who think that this is the GPS moment, for lack of a better term for earth observation. Yeah, I mean, I think one way to think about this is that, you know, and I'll go back to my experience at Skybox. So we, you know, Skybox started in 2009. We were kind of the first venture backed, you know, new space, space remote sensing company. And at the time, you know, we almost forget that neural networks were not a thing. I mean, I think AlexNet came out like a year later, which was sort of the first

really high performance image processing neural network. So we were in a world back then where, you know, satellites could collect huge amounts of data, but actually doing useful things with them was actually tremendously difficult because usually it relied on a bunch of humans manually going through data or very kind of old school traditional algorithms that were not very effective. You fast forward 15 years to where we are now, and obviously the world has transformed in its ability to incorporate these massively large data sets and then in an automated way using AI extract really important insights from it. And I think one of the core kind of thesis for Muon when we started the company was that there's going to be this TikTok feedback mechanism with AI and

things like satellite data. So we're now at a place where we can build large constellations of mission-targeted satellites and collect massive quantities of new and important data. But we're also in a place where the technology with things like AI is set up to enable us to make use of that data in a much more effective way than I think has been possible in the past. And we see these things feeding off each other. So sort of the hunger of the AI models for more data is going to drive the need for more and new types of data from space. And as those new types of data from space are created, it's going to improve the models and that's going to create this feedback mechanism. So I'm very excited about this. I think there's already lots of evidence in many places that this is happening.

I mean, one specific example that people are probably monitoring is this is happening actively with weather forecasting. So much more and more, we're seeing that there are AI-based weather forecasting models that are outperforming traditional models. And those models are inherently able to incorporate data in new and different ways than has been possible with the traditional models. And those models are inherently able to incorporate data in new and different ways than has been possible with the traditional models. And so that's driving the need for more data collected from space to feed them. So I'm very excited about that prospect. Brian, I know you mentioned this is a public-private partnership. I have to think that there's the public good, there's working with first responders and working with cities and municipalities and other players involved. But I would imagine that there are

going to be a lot of folks in industry and private sector and commercial players that are going to want to be able to access this too, whether it's insurers or farmers or whatever, whatever that potential market looks like. So how do you think about, I guess, the commercial applications of this as well? Right. We sort of see a couple of different pathways for our data. So first, sticking to our mission, our mission is providing transformative data for public safety for the wildfire problem and actions on a wildfire and the research community to build new strategies for it, to understand the dynamics of fire.

So we're committed to doing that. And that's part of our not-for-profit mission is providing that data to that community in open access. So equitable access for the community so that we don't end up with it being too expensive for an agency to access that. So first thing is providing that data equitably across the planet, not just in the United States, but across the planet. But you're absolutely correct. This data will be useful in lots of other ways. It could be useful for developing commercial products. You mentioned the insurance industry. There are secondary responders that may use the data. are one we want to make sure everybody has access to do research on that and then we are we as part of our alliance we we are going to provide that data to other industries to to spin off uses across industries and across the planet because there are things as we as john knows as soon as you collect you're going to find something that we can that somebody can do creatively with the data and that's something that we at the at a at a nonprofit level are encouraging the community to do because that can provide revenue back to make sure we expand the constellation.

So as a nonprofit, we're not here for a return on investment other than the mission. And we want to enable that community to creatively create new products and also help us sustain the system over time. We don't want to launch satellites and then have them sunset because we weren't able to operate them. So that's part of our public-private partnership is that whole life cycle of our system where we are fortunate to have, as part of that partnership, infrastructure money that is coming in from the philanthropic community to build up the initial constellation and provide that data for free for public safety and research. That lift means we don't have to worry about that return on investment. We can

focus on the community moving forward, and then we will work with the commercial community to make sure we're here to continuously provide that data for them. And I know you mentioned the first satellite is poised to launch in the coming weeks here. Given what we have been seeing in real time in Southern California, has Earth Fire Alliance been active in that process and trying to help there? We are not in the support process. We are in the learning process. So certainly we don't want to get in the way of the fire protection and the response activities that are going on, and certainly in the recovery aspect that's going on. But we have early adopters that are already signed up with us that are part of the fight today and part of the recovery. And we are working with them to make sure that the

systems we're building, because we're launching right away, but we have three more in the pipeline that we're going to launch next year. We want to make sure we're affecting that pipeline and making sure those systems are going to address any unique challenges that come out of this. So we are part of the lessons learned process, but we're not part of the response process because since we're not providing data today, we do not, we didn't want to, from our perspective, it's a fight that is happening today. We want to learn from that fight. And we have our partners that are with us that are in that response, and that we have already scheduled up meetings with them to make sure we're learning over the next several months, including after we launch, to make sure that what we launch now and in the future is responsive to

the lessons that they're learning today. Because there are many lessons. There's more than one fire, right? There is a whole series of fires just in the LA basin. Not all of them are the same, so we want to learn from all of them. And then we have other weather events, like in the San Diego area, those fires are slightly different. We want to make sure we're learning from every single one of those so that we can address the decisions that firefighters are making on the ground in a fire that is a fast-moving, wind-driven fire, a fire that comes from a wilderness area that moves into an urban interface, from fires that move within an urban area through channels and vegetation to other homes, and how embers can affect the fire. So we want to learn from all of those fires.

And that's one of the reasons we have our first group of early adopters are Western United States based, and they're already in the fight. So they're already providing us feedback as we go forward. And so you mentioned more launches coming in 2026. Is that the target timeframe, 2026, to see a preliminary service and access to data launch? Right, so we, and Johnny could address our timeline. Our goal is with our launch this year is the full system. It will provide data. We are using that to learn both us and our early adopters. So we will see some operational data on it,

but it doesn't have the throughput for us to continuously provide that data across the globe. 2026 is our operational year. And that's when we launch those satellites in 2026, they will be operational and providing operational data on a global basis. And so that is when we want the FHIR community to be prepared to use it,

to make operational decisions and to begin relying on us as one of their many contributors for their future. Johnny, final thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I just think this is an incredibly exciting project. I mean, you know, it's been heartbreaking, obviously, to see what's happened in Southern California over the last couple of weeks. And I think, you know, certainly everybody at our company is heavily, heavily motivated by this opportunity to kind of bring the technology that we love to bear against a really important problem in a way that I think we can see having a really tremendous impact. And, you know, as Brian was mentioning, you know, wildfires are a secular problem. They're only getting worse. All the projections are they're going to get worse for many reasons.

And and I think this is a unique, a truly unique opportunity for a technology solution to have the potential to really make a big impact on what is a problem for the Western United States, as we've been mentioning. But more and more is going to become a global problem. And I just think that's an incredibly inspirational mission to be working on. And I feel very privileged to be connected with the other folks like Brian and our partners at Google and more and others to be working on this project. Well, we wish you all the luck in the world and look forward to tracking all of your progress and success in this mission. Johnny Dyer and Brian Collins, thank you so much for joining me. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan

Brennan.