CyberWire Daily - CyberWire’s space correspondent, Maria Varmazis, interviews Anthony Colangelo. [Interview Selects]

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

This interview from September 23rd, 2022 originally aired as a shortened version on the CyberWire Daily Podcast. In this extended interview, CyberWire’s space correspondent, Maria Varmazis, interviews host of spaceflight podcast “Main Engine Cutoff,” Anthony Colangelo about the upcoming Apple iPhone 14 “Emergency SOS via Satellite” feature & what it means for satellite communications in the consumer sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. We are excited to welcome the newest member of the Cyber Wire team, our space correspondent, Maria Varmasis. She will be making regular contributions to our programs covering the security of all things, where no one has gone before. Here's Maria. Hi, listeners. Here's my full interview with Anthony Colangelo, who is the host of the spaceflight podcast Main Engine Cutoff and a satellite expert. He's also an Apple app designer and a self-professed Apple nerd. We spoke on September 14th, 2022, just after the Apple iPhone 14 was announced.

In this interview, we discuss and speculate a bit about the iPhone 14's satellite communications capabilities. Have a listen. So Anthony, I would love if you could introduce yourself to our audiences, give us a sense of who you are, what you do, and your expertise on SATCOMs. Have a listen. I focus a lot on the launch vehicles, the satellite industry, the business side of space, as well as the policy side tends to be where the things that I track anyway. You know, I'm interested in planetary science and astronomy, but those aren't my sweet spot, really. I like to look at the way the economy on this new space, you know, section of the industry is running and what that means in terms of how the industry might change in the future, how that reflects in the policy side as well. And then certainly times like this, when it actually gets down to real people's lives, are always cool to talk about as well.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm super excited to talk to you about all this. So what brings us together today is the iPhone 14 announcement about Apple introducing satellite communications for SOS, something that they termed, hopefully something people will never have to use. But if you need it, it's there. How familiar are you with this announcement?

Did you know about it beforehand? Yeah, well, it's been rumored forever. This is something that people have been talking about for two years. The info has probably been out, you know, floating around and people theorizing about exactly what it means. There was in early 2020, I think it was when the first couple of hires that Apple made had satellite in their title. And at the time, there was some speculation. You know, there was an application that Boeing had

into some different federal agencies to build out a small constellation of about 147 satellites, I believe it was. And people were like, okay, maybe Apple's getting into the satellite constellation game. And then, as time went on, GlobalStar, who the partner that Apple ended up going with, started submitting some filings that had this mysterious funder that was going to fund a couple hundred million dollars of investment

in return for services that they may take. And certainly when you start putting in a couple hundred million dollars and secret funding and people that don't want to be named, it's like, yeah, there's not that many companies you'd put on the top of the list of has hundreds of millions of dollars, doesn't like to be talked about a lot. Apple seemed to float to the top pretty quickly. And then last year around this time when the iPhone 13s were coming out,

the rumors hit that this feature was going to be a last year feature. That turned out to be wrong, but eventually they got it right that it did finally come out this year. So it's been interesting to track the full life cycle of the hype around this feature, really, and what things they got right, what things they got wrong. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, definitely going to stand up and pay attention when Apple starts moving that much money towards something. I saw your tweet about this announcement, and it really caught my attention because you said that it was sort of a bummer that they went this route,

that it requires a new modem that they put into the new phones that makes these phones communicate with the Global Star satellites as opposed to other existing satellites. Can you talk a little bit about what that means? Sure. So it's best to compare really and the way that they've architected the system to some competitors that are coming online now. They're testing satellites in orbit. Some are just launching. Some have just announced their plans. So there's a couple different ways to go about this kind of feature, which is trying to give you at least text message coverage in areas where you don't have cell coverage from ground-based towers and things like that, specifically around this emergency messaging kind of functionality, at least now while the bandwidth is quite low. So there's a couple of companies to take note of that are working on things today.

Link Global, their link with a Y, you know, spelled like a cool startup is. This other company with a weird name named AST Space Mobile. And then most recently, SpaceX NT Mobile announced a partnership. All of these systems are going to be using satellites, new satellites that they need to launch still. Some have test satellites up, as I mentioned, but these constellations all need to launch new hardware to do this. But the idea would be that those satellites that they put up

emulate the exact signals that your phone already uses. So it's creating a cell tower in space. Your phone does not know the difference. It doesn't know it's talking to a satellite. It doesn't even know anything about where the message is going. It just thinks it's got cell coverage. But again, that requires new hardware in space. Whereas the way Apple went, which was still use satellites that are up there, that there's tens of satellites up that Global Star is operating now. They are building some new ones out, but that requires

talking their language rather than having the satellites adapt to cell phones. And what they needed to do was this new modem that is apparently highly directional, the way this feature works. The software on the phone guides you to point your phone in the right direction so that you can communicate with the satellite. So a highly directional antenna, really,

that takes advantage of some of the satellite features and the ways that it communicates to be able to send messages up and down. So yeah, what I meant by being a bummer is that, I mean, it's kind of both a bummer and not, I guess. Because in Apple's mind, when they're looking at their product lifecycle, they needed to start planning this, as we mentioned, 2020. So two or three years ago, they were starting to work on

this stuff. At the time, it was not clear that any of these other companies were going to get to this point where they do have payloads in orbit that they can test and have been successful. So Apple needed to plan on something reliable because they have such long product life cycles. And if you're Apple, you like to find companies that are maybe not in the best financial situation, maybe not the best product fit that they could be in the market. Someone that you, if you're Apple, can push around. See also the music industry. See also every industry that Apple's rolled into in the last 10 years. They like to go in and use the weight they bring

to make the market fit their needs. So they can approach Global Star with a pretty attractive offer to fund a whole new generation of satellites to work with them on these services and assure that they are able to launch service at the end of this year on their current roadmap. Whereas these other companies are not going to really hit the commercial market

for maybe another two years, really. And again, there's nothing that rules out these iPhone 14s from using those services when they come online because they do talk the language that your carrier talks. So just because there's special hardware in iPhone 14 to talk to this kind of satellite does not mean it can't use the other satellites once they do get up there. So maybe not the worst balance in the world, but certainly those of us that like the iPhone mini for maybe reasons that they are very short people with tiny hands are going to be left out in the cold here

until the new satellites get up. Yeah, it's an interesting choice that Apple made. And I know that other providers are not far behind. Google's talking about doing similar things, although details are sort of scant on that front. But yeah, it's interesting to see that they decided to put control sort of in consumers' hands, literally, in this case, as opposed to sending it out into space and going, well, if we need to change something up there, it's going to take a long time. So yeah, let's dive into a little bit about how this feature actually works. Let's just start with Apple mentioned that they had to create a compression algorithm specifically for these messages that they're sending out. Now, what kind of bandwidth are we talking about with this kind of satellite communication? Do we have a sense of that?

I'm not sure in the exact bandwidth, but the other aspect is it's not just bandwidth, it's connectivity as well, right? If you are in a completely open sky at the top of a mountain, you can probably maintain a full connection with that satellite. But if you have any inclement weather, foliage coverage, you know, things that would happen when you're off the grid hiking through a national park, it's going are orbiting, so they're moving. So if somebody's hands jiggle in a little bit, the satellites move in the other direction and they lose contact for a second. It needs to be resilient to those kind of changes in the environment as well. A new satellite's coming over the horizon, so you've got to switch to that satellite. There's just all these different little scenarios that you need to be able to account for. And I haven't seen a ton of detail released publicly yet. And maybe we'll never get this stuff from Apple, maybe we will.

But I have seen that there's a little bit of a wizard experience when you go into this mode that it asks you to answer a couple of questions about your situation. I kind of assume that's to take what would be long text and condense it down to a number or an ID that it can send up to the satellite and what different scenarios or situations that you find yourself in,

so that they have a quick code to say, okay, this person was hiking, they broke a bone, and they are immobile, or something like that. That could be the scenario there, because the way this works on the back end is that this is going up to this Global Star satellite, it's then coming down to one of the gateways on Earth, which there are tens of around

the world. I think they're building out 10 new ones as part of this partnership as well. And that's going to relay on to the emergency services that are most helpful to you. Some of those places and certain locales will accept the text messages that you're sending directly. Some require somebody on a phone to be talking to them. And in those cases, there are, as they put it, Apple-trained specialists that would basically read the text that you're sending and talk to somebody on the phone and be the go-between between you and the actual phone service, since voice data is not being sent over these satellites yet. So it's a kind of weird architecture where you're jumping up to a satellite, down to a gateway station, over to a relay center, who eventually gets you to emergency services. But, you know, it's just kind of the nature of

these distributed satellite situations. Right. And Garmin's been doing something like this for a while. So this is not brand new, brand new, but it's definitely the first time we've seen it on a major consumer phone. Yeah. So when we're talking about that kind of messaging being relayed, I mean, as messages are, I keep wondering, you know, in an emergency situation, people are probably not thinking about the security of their messages necessarily. But I can't help but wonder, there was a hint from Apple about encryption. Do we have any sense at all about maybe how secure these messages are? Or is that just not even going to be on the radar in a situation like this? I think it would probably be one of those cases where you're relying on the nature of

the satellite industry today to provide that, right? You think of the satellites that are up there in orbit. You've got DirecTV, you've got TV broadcasts around the world, things that they probably don't want you to be able to pirate, right? They are particularly concerned about the privacy and the security of these things. Now, that said, there are satellites that have been up there for decades that people have figured out how to decode. And certainly there's a huge arm of US government

and governments around the world that build satellites to go up and snoop on different satellite communications. So I wouldn't say it's, you know, certainly not based on what we're seeing in the geostationary belt today. And even, you know, like I said, starting in the 80s, they had these satellites that would snoop on communications. Not a not a perfectly secure world up there, but then again, in this particular kind of use case, I don't really know if I, at a functional level, would be concerned that somebody was snooping on my emergency relay message, as long as they might also be able to

help out. I don't care if they overhear that. So maybe it's not the worst thing in the world. That's very true. Yeah, I mean, the context in which I'm actually more interested in the security of the messages is the other part of this announcement, which was the Find My app that they have. So they're allowing satellite connectivity for the sort of Find My iPhone app. That's the part where I'm going, okay, we're introducing some new hardware into the phone. We're introducing some really cool new capability. Unfortunately, with anything that tracks you as you're moving around on this earth, some people unfortunately don't have great intentions or they will, you know, commandeer a

phone or do something that they shouldn't. And I'm just wondering, okay, the phone industry is trying hard to sort of fill in those gaps for people's privacy, for example, about maybe bad actors trying to trace somebody with a phone. And now we're adding satellites into this. Now, obviously, GPS has existed for a long time, but I'm just wondering what... Different kind of thing. Different kind of thing, right? So we're introducing a whole new thing,

a whole new piece of hardware to a phone. I just can't help but wonder about risks there. Yeah, and this may be a scenario where Apple's architecture with special hardware that is very directional is a positive, right? Because I don't think, they didn't get into this in the announcements. And again, when the feature launches,

I think they said November, we'll be able to poke around with ourselves. But I don't think it's something that your Find My location is always going to be sent up to these satellites without you specifically doing it. Because again, you need to be in that very directional pointing mode, right? Where it's telling you where the satellite is. So I think it's more of a case that you need to specifically go into the Find My app, specifically send your

satellite or your location up via satellite. It's not something that can happen without you knowing about it. And that's, again, you know, the difference in architecture here. These other satellites that are going up from Link and AST Mobile and eventually Starlink, if they are connecting to your phone just like a cell tower, then yeah, there's surreptitious connections going on all the time between you and a satellite, whereas this is a very intentional interface. So in that same vein, could somebody track you because of the locations that you've sent up specifically?

Yes. Could they do it without you knowing that you've provided a location somewhere? No, based on what I'm understanding right now. So I'm not sure if that helps at all in the way that it is to think about this kind of feature. Yeah, the persistence of the signal was definitely what I was wondering about, but you make a great point.

Right now, it looks like it is very intentional, but I think it is definitely, as you said, a watch the space, especially in November, not just with Apple, but again, if the other competitors in this space are definitely ramping up to step up here. I'm just, I'm so curious to see what's going to go on in the consumer sector on this front

if we end up having, you know, persistent signal to satellites at all times. I mean, I don't know what on earth that would do to battery life, but I can't help but wonder on that one too. But I mean, things are always changing and improving all the time. So maybe it's in the realm of possibility.

Who knows? Who knows what we'll see? And this is the weird aspect of this feature that one of the tweets in the thread you were talking about that I said, I firmly believe based on the frequency that most people update their phones out there, that they're on three, four, five-year update cycles,

maybe even longer if you're somebody who still likes the home button that doesn't want to get rid of that. The cycles of upgrades of personal iPhones are surprisingly longer than the cycle that it is to launch all of these new satellites that I keep mentioning. So I think it's the case that the vast majority

of iPhone users will probably use a feature like this before they use the feature that Apple just announced. They won't know that they're using it. They won't know that they're connecting through a Link Global satellite. But if Link Global or AST Space Mobile signs a deal with the carrier that you use on your phone, you might be taking advantage of this by 2024 and not even know about it. And then, you know, it's just nice marketing from Apple at that point that you've got this other feature that you could use as well. Oh, interesting. So yeah, I was thinking if somebody was really very privacy-minded and going,

hey, I don't want that, I would say just don't be an early adopter of the latest iPhones. But again, as you said, if it's just a software rollout, then it may just happen without them. And again, it's not even that there needs to be a new version of iOS. There doesn't need to be a new version of Android. It is the phones that exist today are the ones that are able to connect to those satellites that are being launched and tested. And that's specifically the point of those companies. Link Global, over the last couple of years,

had a couple of announcements where they have done these tests. I think they sent a text from an Android phone in the Falkland Islands and received some texts there as well. And the point was, this was a completely unmodified phone. They went into a store, they bought it, they activated it, and they were able to use it connecting to their satellite as well. And the point was, this was a completely unmodified phone. It was, you know, they went into a store, they bought it, they activated it, and they were able to use it connecting to their satellite as well. So, you know, the point there is expressly that you don't know about it. You don't need to update. It just works for the phones that exist today. Interesting. So yeah, it's already here. It's already here. That's great. That's great. Well, that's awesome. Is there

anything else that you wanted to talk about regarding this update or anything that maybe I might have missed that we should cover? The only thing in my weird Venn diagram where I sit between Apple nerds and space nerds, when those rumors started floating around about Apple having something to do with the satellite industry, and at the time it was very early in SpaceX working on Starlink and seeing how that was going to play out architecturally, I can't shake the feeling that some sort of Starlink-like service is really up Apple's alley because they would be able to control pretty much the entire... In a lot of ways, it's almost like the best VPN you could have where you connect to a thing that talks to a satellite that you run, that talks to a gateway that you run, that talks to a gateway that you run,

that then connects to the open internet. It is a service that is, by design, private up until you want to make it not private. And that just feels so Apple to me. And knowing that they have a ridiculous cash flow and tons of money in the bank, I can't shake the feeling that it feels like a good fit for Apple, a company that cares about privacy, that cares about services revenue,

that wants to take on the creepy actors in the world. You see what they're doing with the ad industry, and I can only sense what they feel about the ISP industry and some of the data access that those providers have. There's something in my brain that can't let me shake that thought, that this just feels like a thing that Apple should do and could do. But again, it comes down to this industry being so weird

because it's not something that Apple could surprise announce. They would need to have filings with all these different agencies in the US government and around the world for frequency access, for spectrum access, for landing rights. It is such a massive endeavor

that unless they do go in on a partnership with Boeing or Amazon or somebody that is already in the process, it's not something we're going to hear about from them tomorrow. But I just can't shake it. I don't know. There's something about it.

I just can't get it out of my brain. Just watch that space, I guess, some more. Yeah, no, your point is well taken, absolutely. I imagine this is going to be the first foray of many, many. It is interesting to see an industry leader like Apple that does take these concerns seriously, and we've seen them make these fixes to privacy issues when they've been pointed out.

It's going to be very interesting to see, maybe after this feature rolls out or subsequent ones, what kind of fixes will come and what that might also sort of cascade into later down the road. So it'll be very interesting to see. And as you said, we'll know about it pretty clear ahead of time. Yeah, absolutely. It'll be great to see that. Well, Anthony, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.

This was super helpful for my story and also for my general understanding. So I really appreciate you taking the time and stilling to talk to you outside of hearing you in my headphones when I listen to your podcast. So thank you so much. Well, thank you. Thanks so much for having me on. It's great.