Main Engine Cut Off - T+115: Caleb Henry

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

Caleb Henry of SpaceNews joins me live in studio to talk about his trip to Kourou for the first OneWeb launch, more affordable antennas, the current spectrum wars, and more from the world of satellites. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 37 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, and six anonymous—and 230 other supporters on Patreon. Caleb Henry (@CHenry_SN) | Twitter Caleb Henry, Author at SpaceNews.com OneWeb's first six satellites in orbit following Soyuz launch - SpaceNews.com Caleb Henry on Twitter: “Just realized Twitter clipped the video BEFORE you can see Soyuz. Here is the actual video.” Average revenue per user (ARPU) Wyler claims breakthrough in low-cost antenna for OneWeb, other satellite systems - SpaceNews.com C-Band Alliance plan would require 5G networks to pay for eight new satellites - SpaceNews.com 5G trumps weather in spectrum debate - SpaceNews.com Satellite antenna companies divided on near-term feasibility of cheap flat panels - SpaceNews.com Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon Music by Max Justus

Caleb Henry, live in my very official studio here. Here we are, it's the real deal. You were in French Guiana recently. Yes sir, I was. Like what? A couple, two weeks back, three weeks back? Just about. Yeah. Beginning of March. Or no. I'm mixing up my time already. Late February for the OneWeb launch.

How was the trip down there? Like long flight? How did you even get there? Yeah. There's only two ways actually actually, to get to Karoo. Two ways ever? Two ways. From what I'm told, it's you either take a charter flight from Miami, which is what we did, or you have to fly direct from Paris. Really? Yeah, there's not a lot of traffic that goes there.

Is that some weird, like, French protectionism? Like, the thing that we can't ship cargo to Hawaii unless it comes from the U.S. kind of thing? I really think it's just the amount of people that are traveling to French Guiana is pretty small. It's low enough. They don't really need anything else. Yeah, I don't think that a business could justify direct flights to French Guiana. Could you fly nearby and drive in? Or is that not allowed?

Are there any roads to get in there? I mean, there's roads, but like... Once you're in south america could you get there yeah okay there's rivers that kind of form the the borders of the country but i mean it's largely it's a lot of amazon and you feel that as soon as you land like you're landing and like you see all the steam off the jungle like over the over the rainforest top and the buildings everything feels like it's just kind of fighting back the rainforest. If you just let this place go, if you turned away for a month or so, it would immediately start reclaiming it. They work to keep that place pristine and a modern, high-quality spaceport that's just literally in the middle of the Amazon. That's crazy.

This was not your first time down there, though, right? No. So this is my second time. The first trip was for an Ariane 5 launch down, I want to say that was 2017. Yeah, it was right after the protest ended, if you remember that whole fiasco. Oh, is there anything like,

okay, so you were there very shortly after that, and now you've got about a year and a half separation. Yeah. Is there any notable changes or any of that situation still lingering around? I didn't get a sense of it. I didn't have a whole lot of time, like, interfacing with locals or anything like that. Also, there's a pretty noticeable language barrier outside of the CNES staff. So if you're not working with, like, the french space agency or people there uh and you

don't know french which i unfortunately and even even then sometimes the webcast i i'm like what did he say i can't really understand him on that yeah it would be challenging but i i my understanding was that there wasn't any issue there you didn't see like massive amounts of security or something uh during when the protest happened because they went to the spaceport. It didn't look like there was any sort of scar tissue there. Everyone was happy. The mission went. Cool. Except

you had to stand like 25 kilometers away or whatever. I saw you uploaded some video to Twitter and I was like, what? How do they not have a closer spot to watch from? They do. They have a viewing spot. I chose to be at the Jupiter control room. You haven't been pumped about Soyuz lately? You're like, I'm going to pick the 25 kilometer spot. So the first time that I went down, I was at the actual viewing location that was close to where

the Ariane 5 goes off. And you can feel it. You see it. It's all pretty immediate. This time, I was like, they give you the choice of like going to the closer viewing spot and i don't remember how many kilometers away it is but uh there's that or you can be where the control room is and i wanted to do something different this time and also have a chance to possibly sit down and do interviews with people get immediate reactions following so i didn't want that drive in between um you know, Greg Weiler and Richard Branson and folks were all right there in the control room. So I just had to wait around for the right time to try and ask for them to talk to me.

It's also like beyond the first 30 seconds. That's where all the fun's happening anyway. So yeah, probably a good decision for this kind of mission. That little like kind of dinky video that I uploaded, like I had put my phone next to like a pole or something just so it could sit up.

And then I had like an actual camera where I was trying to take pictures and I got only one shot. I got literally one photo and then it disappeared in the clouds. And I was like, oh. Then I went and looked at the video and it's just like a little candlelight

that goes up into the clouds and it's gone. My favorite was that you uploaded the one that didn't have the rocket in it at first because it was so little you couldn't tell that the rocket wasn't in it. I was like, well, I guess he did say it was far away. I guess he really can't see it from there. Yeah, that was doubly frustrating when I looked and I was like, wait, what? It's not even there. I'm going to do this again.

Okay. But yeah, it worked out. Everything went well with it it was what six satellites right and did you ever find out like what the deal is with the missing four the yeah so that was um that was them taking an extra precaution because they were starting to get close to when their itu rights to the spectrum would have been jeopardized so they had to do what's called bring into use which means they had to put satellites in and to the spectrum would have been jeopardized. So they had to do what's called bring into use, which means they had to put satellites in and use the spectrum

and show the ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, that they were going to actually do this thing. Otherwise, the ITU doesn't want people to just hog spectrum by laying claim to it and then never actually launching anything. So in the event that there was an issue, they held back four and they could have tried to rapidly remanifest those somewhere else and still preserve their Spectrum rights that ultimately proved to not be necessary. It's also worth remembering that this was a launch that was supposed to happen in May of last year, and then they didn't do that. happened in May of last year, and then they didn't do that. So I guess the closer and closer they got to that deadline, it probably increased the amount of angst that they felt, and they took

as a precaution holding four back. That makes sense. I mean, it's a sensible decision. And so the ITU, that's the international stuff. Then we have the FCC rules about launching half your satellites in six years, and then another half in the next three years. So how do those things kind of interact? We've got ITU is merely like you've got to use the spectrum or else we take the spectrum away from you. Or is there any like you have to have a certain amount of satellites up for the international stuff as well? So for the international stuff, you just need one satellite. Just one.

Which is actually something that's going to be debated, I'm told, pretty intensely at this upcoming World Radio Communications Conference. It's a ton of jargon here. So that's the big... We've got Wikipedia. We'll put some links in the show notes or something. The WRC-19 conference is where all of your spectrum regulators will get together and debate rules for how Spectrum is used. And one of those debates this year is going to be whether or not you can bring your Spectrum into use with just one satellite and say, we're good, because that still might not prove that you can actually justify a business plan or that you have a whole business plan to back it.

So I'll be doing more research on that because I don't know all of the competing proposals. It'll certainly impact these mega constellations as they go forward. But for the time being, that's the way the ITU works. And then for the FCC, that's about market access for the United States. So it's narrower. It's just one nation. But it's significant because the U.S. is going to be an area where these companies, OneWeb and others, can find high ARPU subscribers.

The amount of money that they're going to make per customer is going to be materially higher here than it is for the school in Kyrgyzstan that they want to connect or wherever else in the world. If they're going to try and do this global connectivity thing, they've got to balance it out. Yeah, that makes sense. Plus, your satellites are over the US for a lot of the time period that they're in orbit, so you might as well get some cash out of that time.

Yeah, not worth it being idle. Yeah, right. So that's interesting that there's that big of a difference at this point when you have like FCC is like, no, you have to launch 2000 satellites in six years. And the other one's like, no, one's fine. I assume that they'll get closer to, I don't know. It's kind of weird though. Cause there's certain, I guess everything's just constellation these days. So it makes sense to bias rules towards it. Cause everyone's like, I'm going to do a constellation of four satellites or a hundred or 4,000. So it's, it makes sense that that's the way that things are heading.

I assume the other topic at that conference is going to be some 5G C-band drama that's happening right now. We can get back to OneWeb in a second, but is that been talked about as well? So these are kind of the two, I'm not going to hit the hot drama alarm, but these would be the two things that would fit that need. It might warrant a hot drama alarm in the future. Then, when that happens. One day.

But the general sense is that, yes, some C-band spectrum is going to be repurposed for 5G, and the impact is going to be felt differently around the world. So there's the debate that's being watched pretty closely in the U.S., where Intelsat put forward this plan with Intel to seed some of the C-band spectrum, which it's divvied up differently around the world. So I'll try to not go too far down the rabbit hole on this one. But so you've got 800 megahertz of spectrum generally. In the US, it's just 500 for satellite operators.

Other portions have been allocated differently. And so Intel originally proposed 100 megahertz. And then with SES, after other pressures, they changed it to 200 megahertz, of which 20 megahertz is a guard band. And then they would give that, well, they would sell it more or less to the mobile operators and people who want to use it. And then they would

use that to cover the cost of buying new satellites and putting in all the infrastructure in place to like prevent interference and all of that stuff but this is a battle that the satellite industry has fought at past wrc conferences and i think that the industry has been scared at the fact that they're smaller than mobile operators like everybody knows verizon the average person does not know intel sat and i think that so the power dynamic there is pretty noticeable just take that and bring that everywhere around the world but the satellite operators have been successful at showing that they really have had need uh and do need the spectrum for different purposes around the world,

in particular in rainy areas. The C band is much stronger compared to KA band. So you'll see it in places like Indonesia and Brazil and elsewhere. Seattle. Seattle. Seattle. Seattle. Places where, yeah, the precipitation is so bad that they've just,

they've kind of very gingerly gone into some of these higher frequencies where you do see a lot of broadband systems being deployed and a lot of the, like, you know, highest tech satellites being deployed. But C-band has been, like, old reliable. And to move away from that, it's still a process that people are still figuring out how to do that and how to do that in ways where it's going to be more than just television services that would be impacted you know it's not just like oh you might not be able to watch espn in the u.s like in the philippines if they're recovering from a disaster like they might not have communications for like a typhoon response if they're using that spectrum to aid first responders.

So it has different applications around the world. Yeah, and it's easy to sit here and say, well, the way we use technology today, phones are more important than satellites in some cases. So let's bias towards phones. Or my use case is I'd never watch TV, so I don't give a crap about TV broadcasts. Right. Like it's easy to bias yourself towards your own use of technology and relationship with space and all that kind of stuff. And you see like the SpaceX constellation. You see the stats of that and you're like, well, that's more attractive than, you know, the old guard of the geo satellites. So, well, I would add just the you might it might be biased

to the technology that you know that you're using right that's a good point because the satellite industry is like very constantly talking about all the ways that they're used that people don't realize like when the when indonesia had a satellite that went down i don't remember if it was c or ku or both my guess is both. But they had a satellite that failed, and it shut down like 15,000 ATMs across the country or something like that. You would not be pumped. A ton of their banking infrastructure just took a hit all at once

because the satellite died in orbit. And that's not something that people think about every day. So commerce is affected. TV is affected. that people think about every day. So commerce is affected, TV is affected, or TV is affected. The impact is much broader,

and just because we don't have it in our pocket doesn't mean you're not going to feel it. Yeah, and the same with this week, the drama around the FCC auction was that NASA and NOAA were saying, hey, we actually think these rules are going to cause extra interference in our microwave, weather forecasting, and stuff like that. So that didn't seem to really affect anything.

I think the auction started. It's going to go for some indeterminate length of time at this point. And we'll see. So the spectrum, I want to say it was like 24 gigahertz. That sounds right. It was around there. Some of those higher frequencies uh are also being looked at for 5g as well um that's on an itu level that i'm talking about uh i recall ka band was an

area that was being looked at but because there's much more ka band spectrum than there is c band it's been a less contentious issue uh and you do have satellite operators that are already starting to look at higher bands like q and v which like it's just it's its own alphabet soup but like you can you can keep going higher and if you can figure out how to like not let the signal get blocked by weather and and clouds and storms and you you can potentially do a lot with it as the technology evolves you'll hopefully see satellite operators moving into different frequencies and people figuring out how to make more of a finite resource yeah it's crazy when you think about it it's all invisible so we don't like think

about how densely populated it is or like you know pollution of frequencies is a thing you know like you've got areas that are highly polluted and very hard to get a signal and areas that are not super used at this point. It's going to be an interesting couple of years on that. Yeah, and you wouldn't think that it would shape the whole space economy, more or less. The number of launches that can happen, what business plans do and don't succeed.

It all boils back down the spectrum. Yeah, and then you have the C-band alliance. Part of their thing was like, hey, you got to pay us for this spectrum that we're going to give up and we'll use that to buy new satellites because we need more capacity on our satellites up there. So that will affect people like SpaceX and Blue Origin and Arian Space will be in favor of this plan because it's going to get a couple of launches for them. People that build satellites are going to be into it. So you have these kind of like secondhand effects of people that are going to say, well, that seems like a really good idea. And they could probably care

less about the actual frequencies, but they know that they're going to build some satellites and launch some satellites. Right. And you saw the manufacturers who are closer to that. They would be the ones to immediately receive business, voicing their opinions and telling the FCC like, hey, this is a good plan. Great plan. I'll take all $250 million of that for sure. There's a very clear interest there, especially since it was, I think it was only American manufacturers that voiced their opinion

and it's only American satellites that they would buy. It's very spirit of the age. Yeah. Jim Bridenstine-y. American satellites for American soil on American frequencies. Just figure out how many times you can put American in a sentence. Everything's American form. So back to this OneWeb thing.

I don't know if you have too much else on the actual launch experience itself, but we're going to start deploying their constellation at this point, it seems like? Or is there going to be some delay before their next satellites go up? Did you get any inkling on the schedule there? So the plan was for 60 to 90 days of testing after they launch. That includes some orbit raising for 200 kilometers using an electric propulsion system,

which means it's going to take longer. After that, then they would spin up the factories, get things underway. And the launch dates that I remember hearing in Karoo, there's a little bit of a range. I remember hearing anywhere from August to November, depending on who I talked to for the subsequent. Whether you talked to the engineers or the business people?

It was just different OneWeb executives. I think September was the middle ground, but maybe they were looking at different windows around that. That's the time frame for when it would start, and then they would be launching, I guess, either every

21 days or once a month. That's another thing that's a little bit nebulous, because I think the terms were, to some extent, used interchangeably. 21 days is once a month. That's another thing that's a little bit nebulous because I think the terms were, to some extent, used interchangeably. You know, 21 days is almost a month. But it's still a very fast, if they can do it. I mean, Iridium Next took two years. Yeah, they kept saying,

we're going to do it all in eight months or whatever. And it's not accurate. It was nowhere near happening. But with this, they say that they can do it. And Arian's boss has said that they're ready. They plan to do the vast majority out of Baikonur. I wouldn't be surprised to see a couple out of Visachny and maybe one or two or something out of Peru again

or French Guiana. I think the launch pad for Soyuz is actually in a place called cinnamori which is a little bit oh really hence the 25 kilometer distance it's like far enough away that it gets its own name the town has it's a different name but um that's the that's the big plan and then uh they would start building out service and since it's a polar system the coverage area would expand from each pole and slowly envelope and cover the entire Earth, which is the opposite of the way Greg Weiler's past company did it. O3B started and is around the equator.

And each satellite that they put up builds off of that equatorial coverage. So I don't know quite why they chose to change that up. It could again be that they are pursuing more high ARPU customers. You've got a lot in Canada. You'd be able to reach Europe. And there has been hot drama around Russia. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I forgot all about that. So that's official now that there's like a joint venture that owns part of OneWeb? Last I saw, there was a joint venture. There's a joint venture that would be, I think, commercializing OneWeb services in Russia.

And that entity, which is not OneWeb itself, has a lot of power there. Russia apparently wanted a significant stake. It's not something that I've written about directly, but from following other headlines and articles, I've seen that much. That's interesting. That's a weird setup. So they're basically, they're the commercially operating company that will take the OneWeb capacity and basically sell it within

Russia or operate it within Russia? That's kind of a curious... I mean, I get it. I understand what's going on there, but it's just like... I don't know. Do you think that there's going to be people that have reservations about OneWeb in general because of that setup? OneWeb is trying their best to downplay as many reservations as they can. And you can see that in the way that they have designed their system so that it doesn't spook other countries. One thing that they've been criticized, OneWeb has been criticized on, is the absence of inter-satellite links on their spacecraft. Because if you do that, then you can route traffic throughout the whole system. You don't need as many gateways on the ground, so you lower your ground infrastructure costs. And you can kind of have a faster system that can share the load.

But OneWeb has said that inter-satellite links spook countries with regulators that want to know where the traffic is coming from, want to know where the traffic is going to and from. And I think that that's more of a reference to like China, but probably also Russia. I was going to say, I think we would probably rather know what ground stations they're coming through than, you know, on our end of things. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah, Russia and China that want to be able to trace the route or block it. Yeah. And I mean, maybe even India. I don't know. I'm a little

out of my depth on that one. But getting into the Indian market has been notoriously difficult for satellite operators. And so anything that might spook them again, if OneWeb's goal is to connect the entire world, Russia, China, and India are going to be a big part of that. So they've got to find ways to design their systems so that the regulators there don't swat it down. And even then, there's some constellations that are underway in China. And there was talk of one called Sphere in Russia. I don't know the status of it,

but there are systems that have been proposed in these nations to do a similar service. So OneWeb has to be able to compete with ideas that they may very well have sort of inspired. Almost like a SpaceX effect, but instead of it spawning a million rocket companies, it's other low-Earth orbit satellite systems. They got a lot of balls in the air on this thing then. Yeah. I didn't really think of that.

It's a lot to juggle. Because they started this joint venture that has access to certain technical documents. And that's always the worry, right? Or are they keeping the technical stuff separate? I don't know. I would imagine that they're going to keep the technical stuff separate. Yeah. I would assume that they would want to.

Yeah. I don't know the granularities of it, but I believe, I'm pulling from memory, but I'm pretty sure Wyler told me that they have market access in 100 or more countries already, which is a good start. Don't know what all of those countries are, obviously. He didn't give you the list. He didn't give you the list. He didn't give me the list. We know that the U.S. is one. The number of countries,

some of them will certainly determine the percentage of the world that could access the system more than others. They've got a lot of market access, but each one, depending on their regulatory setup, will have different rules and parameters. It can be tricky. That's something else that they'll have to work through

for every individual regulator. Yeah, that seems like a crazy amount of work. I want to talk about flat panel antennas. But first, if I can get my note to unlock, I wanted to say thank you to the Patreon members because I've built out this. Look around here, Caleb. How's this studio look?

Does it look glamorous? It's an audio show, so you can lie to them. Glamorous. Expansive. It's expansive. It's seven feet by nine feet. We're sitting within two feet of each other. This is good. This is solid, right?

But I built this based on the support of these Patreon members. So thank you all so much for making this show possible. This episode was produced by 37 executive producers. You want to do this list? I can try. You're really good at it. You want to say it together? No, I'm just kidding. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson,

Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for producing this episode. And if you want to help support the show, make more

things like this possible, head over to patreon.com slash Miko. Flat panel antennas. This is the recent hot drama. If you're going to have some hot drama alarms in this. Because the last time you were on here we were talking about, oh, Kaimeta is getting to the market soon with their $36,000 flat panel antennas.

And then Greg Weiler, leading up to this launch, I assume, I think the tweets were the first spot we learned of this, right? He just started tweeting out photos and was like, by the way, this is 200 bucks right here that you're looking at, or the antenna part is 200 bucks. Were you able to pick up anything more on that, or is that still kind of rumored about

but not explicitly talked about yet? What's the deal with that? So the antenna, what Weiler had tweeted was that the antenna module itself was $15. Oh, $15, sorry, then the whole price would be closer. Yeah, built into an entire terminal would be $200 to $300, if it works. Now, the challenge here, gosh,

I should have gone back and read one of my own articles because there was a... Can you pull it up? I can pull something up. If you want to look for it, it was... What was the title? It was something like antenna manufacturers divided on feasibility of consumer antennas or something like that.

This is our behind the scenes. Do you write your own headlines? I write most of them. Is this it? That's it. Boom. All right. So if you go down or if you just like control F for like 250,000.

Yeah. If you just control F for 250,000... Yeah. That was an analyst that was talking about the prices that she's seen for O3B antennas. I don't believe I included it in this article, but she had discussed also at this event the price that she recalled for when O3B first started. It was drastically lower. It was not that figure.

It was not a quarter of a million dollars. So when O3B started, they were talking about much, much lower, maybe $10,000 or something like that, which is still a lot. Yeah, but not $250,000. It's not a house. Yeah, exactly. So there was a major difference between where O3B started and where O3B ended up. And that's because they could not get low-cost, electronically steered antennas.

They had to get dual-dish or dual-parabolic antennas, which it doesn't sound incredibly kind of like... I still struggle to wrap my mind around why that drove the cost up so incredibly high but anything that has moving parts is going to wear out it develops a shelf life you have to have replacements and fixes and all those things

and they've got to move as they track the satellites across the sky and those are for things in medium earth orbit so if it's in low earth orbit they're going to be zipping across the sky the antenna is going to be moving. You could watch it. The time lapse would not be very long. So it makes it even more paramount

that they have these flat ones that don't move, that are electronically steered, that do all of that on the inside. And if Weiler's pet project wafer can actually do that with their antennas it'd be a huge breakthrough it would be really really significant um that said there's about two dozen companies that are working on flat panel antennas and a lot of them are claiming breakthroughs that they say will change the game but even as you were talking about before with kaimeta thirty six thousand dollars uh and

the original figure that i heard was forty thousand dollars for their starting prices that's i don't think that's gonna do it no i don't think uh you know the people at the school in kyrgyzstan like you were talking about no i i don't think that's gonna the school in Kyrgyzstan, like you were talking about. No, I don't think that's going to do it. So we've got to see. Several have talked about $1,000, and that's in this article as well, as being a point where they can do meaningful business and they're shooting for a consumer grade. I still think that it's too early to tell. There's a lot of enthusiasm, and it would be exciting to see a wave on this front,

almost like what we've seen in rockets, where SpaceX drove down the cost, and now you've got everybody pushing to have much lower-cost rockets, and the result is an increase in business ideas, what people can envision doing in space and putting in space. The same thing can be said here with the equipment on the ground because satellites are evolving a lot faster now.

Internet access as a service, being proud of it. These guys are all really gung-ho about satellite internet, which no one has ever been excited about if you're an actual consumer. I had a friend growing up who had satellite internet and that just meant that we couldn't play xbox live it was just like well

like i guess halo's off the off the uh docket today yeah i was like all right well i guess we're gonna we can like play lan or something or play like offline while we wait for this youtube video to load for 30 minutes like that's that experience. But now, because of the technology advancing and potentially even companies like OneWeb, you know, OneWeb satellite, a single satellite, has 10 gigabits of capacity. And that's like, I think, the highest number that I saw for an Intelsat EPICS satellite,

and maybe they've published different figures, but at least at the start of the program, they talked about it. I won't say start. A figure that they had published was 25 to 60 gigabits for an Intelsat EPIC satellite. So not that it's a one-to-one comparison

because the EPIC satellites will cover the globe and it's different frequencies and blah, blah, blah. But that's six OneWeb satellites. That's six of them versus one geo. We're talking about an enormous jump in capacity. And that means incredibly high speeds compared to traditional satellites. So you are talking about completely redefining the way that's done. And if the ground technology, if the antennas, the terminals, once they're all completed, can unlock that, that's just as big, if not bigger than the rockets for a lot of these

companies. Yeah, I definitely think for stuff that, I mean, if it's like a couple hundred bucks for a terminal, people like me would start considering it. And I have gigabit Fios coming to my house, and I would still be like, well, it sounds pretty cool though. Do you have any idea? I heard the other day that the first Starlink launch is on the docket for SpaceX right now, that it'll happen in a couple of weeks or months or something like that. NASA space flight had that the other day. Do you have any idea what they're going to do for those terminals or have they just, obviously they've been super quiet about it because they're super quiet about everything right um do you think

they're working on their own thing or do you think that they're going you know gonna it doesn't seem like spacex's way to outsource anything so i assume they're going their own way but i don't know if you've picked up any tips on that i imagine that they are working on this internally they did file with the FCC for a large blanket license, I believe, of terminals that were phased array, which is almost code for electronically steered.

The more you get into the weeds with this, you'll find somebody that always doesn't fit the mold. You'll call it a flat panel and then Isotropic will come in and say, we're not flat. You'll call them all electronically steered. And then thin comm will come and be like, well, we're actually mechanically steered, but we're still a phase to write. Like somebody is breaking the rule every single time.

Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. We're talking about the same thing. You get it. It's not the dish. It's not going to look like the one you know. We understand what we're talking about. It's different.

It's like the term new space. Like, you know what I'm talking about. I can't define it for you, but it's like the term new space like you know what i'm talking about i can't define it for you but it's like the uh porn i know it when i'll know it i'll know when i see it you know it's just this amorphous term yeah i know when i see it but yes the spacex way is to do it in-house they um in order for them to maintain anything like the launch cadence that they had talked about in the past and you know it's i think that they did probably overshoot it in the past because they had this backlog of missions and they weren't really looking at the way the geostationary market had slowed down so drastically but um

you know in order for them to launch at a high rate it looks like they'll need to have their own Constellation launches to meet markers that they've talked about in the past. As well as the testimony that they gave to Congress in 2017 had talked about launches, I think, during this time frame, I think, 2019. Yeah, NASA Space Flight says in May, they've got clearance for a launch that doesn't have a customer and they've got some source that says it's the first Starlink

one and it's a drone ship landing which means it's got quite a lot on it. So it makes sense. It makes sense. It looks like they are about to get the show on the road. Do you sense that OneWeb had any, I assume OneWeb is, you know, if they were to list off their list of competitors, SpaceX would be pretty high

on that list. Yeah, SpaceX would be pretty high on that list. Yeah, SpaceX has to be high on it. Do you have any sense that anyone else, OneWeb or otherwise, has been assuming that SpaceX is still on target for launching now? Or are they going to be a little surprised if they come out, you know, in a couple of weeks and say, hey, we're launching 30 of our satellites? Is that going to be a shock? I don't think it would be a huge shock. I mean, there are older older filings if you go back

that spacex had talked about launching i want to say they envisioned six to eight demonstration satellites in like 2016 or something like that instead we've got two and then they stayed parked in that 500 something kilometer orbit which had people believing that they were dead in space spacex denied that, and then they got that contract with the Air Force to do testing with the satellites, which strongly suggests that they're not dead. If the Air Force is still paying you. Then they changed their paperwork to say,

oh, no, that's where we want them. Yeah, so it looks more like their own unwillingness to say something created a whole lot of speculation and confusion that they could have just cleared up by saying, we're going to try a different orbit. No, that's not their style. No, they're just... something created a whole lot of speculation and confusion that they could have just cleared up by saying we're going to try a different orbit that's not their style no they're just they'd rather keep people writing about so um i think that's exciting the ones that i you know following it's spacex oneweb telesat i think those are the big three leosat as well um but i would really like to see

more progress from them as far as showing material, capital raised. I'm also wondering if they're going to change the design of their system at all. I don't remember the aggregate throughput of their system, but this technology is changing so fast all the time. You've got OneWeb talking about their first and second generation satellites at the same time and um just like an interesting tidbit from the a recent spacex launch when they launched a satellite for um psn in indonesia uh they had mentioned that they wished if they could do over the geo satellite that they just launched they would have had 10 times as much capacity and that's in like well for them it them, it was a longer than usual time. I think it took them five years and that's because Eximbank shut down on them.

Right. So they had to go through this whole thing. But in five years, these satellites last 15 to 20. Right. And during the time from when they signed to have it built and got it launched, they were like, this is pennies. You know, this is peanuts compared to what we want it to be. Yeah. That's crazy.

That just goes to show how fast the technology is changing. And the fact that with constellations, you will be constantly adding more and building satellites consistently that allows you to iterate and add new tech and upgrade your satellites as you put them in orbit. It allows the satellite industry to move at a pace that's more familiar to the cell phone industry.

Yeah, the same kind of cycle. And then hopefully the theory is that that would help the people that have one-offs or very tiny constellations, if you can even call them that, that they'll take some of those wins from companies like OneWeb. And I think OneWeb still has this plan. And I know Spaceflight with their Black Sky constellation, they're going to take their production lines

and sell components or full satellites from their production line to people that want to order satellites, and they'll be the new producers of these things. I don't know how well that theory is going to hold, but maybe in five years we've got a totally different satellite acquisition model where you can say, I'll take one of those new buses that you got rolling off over there.

It could be. The old CTO of Intelsat used to talk about this. He would talk about his dream world was he goes into a manufacturer almost as if he's going into a Best Buy shopping for laptops. And he goes, which satellite do I want? Which one do I want? And he picks one off the shelf and goes, that one. And I'll tell it what to do. It'll be totally reconfigurable.

Put it on a rocket. Boom. Launch it. And that was before the whole Leo hype. That was just him rethinking the way GEO was done. And then you've had Martin Halliwell from SES talking about the same thing. Satellite operators have long been tired of having to do these bespoke, cumbersome, very customized satellites, even if it is their own creation. They have created this own...

They created the monster and now they're like, crap, we're stuck. Yeah. They're like, oh, this is the worst. But then created the monster and now they're like, crap, we're stuck. Yeah. They're like, oh, this is the worst. But then they'll still go back and be like, all right, how do we design our next satellite? Yeah. But I mean, in the same way, it's kind of similar to where the launch vehicle industry was,

where they enjoyed the fact that they're very one-off, very expensive things. You know, Orbital ATK didn't have a lot of incentive to make their satellites less than $250 million. There wasn't, like, that was the price of things, you know? So it's kind of almost the same mindset. Yeah. The level of change that's going on in the industry right now is really drastic. And it's fun to see across all the, you know, every part of it.

You've got launch with reusable rockets and, you know, additive 3D printing, additive manufacturing, making vehicles cheaper you've got the satellites themselves becoming smaller you've got even like photonics changing out um rf components i think that's going to be really interesting in time uh so you've got that on the satellite side and then we already talked about the antennas and the ground side uh it's like the whole chart. Everything is changing. That's why it feels like there's so much turmoil in the industry.

Seven geostationary satellite orders last year compared to 16 to 22 in the past. Everyone's freaking out because things have changed so fast, and this industry is so not used to it that they've got to learn. And tying it all back to OneWeb, I think it's safe to say that they were the ones who were the first to go all in on this and say, hey, we're going to build a huge satellite constellation. We're going to build satellites really cheap and in high volume. We're going to launch a lot of them and we're going to do this iteratively. And we're going to actually make it happen. And people scoffed at it and they continued to scoff at it.

But even as they were doing that, they kind of slowed their own roll. They're like, let me just see if this is going to work. And now that it's actually happening, you've got more people thinking about it. You've got business plans that are changing. And an industry that I don't think it really knows how long it can sit in a wait-and-see mode. But it knows that the future is not going to look anything like the past. Man, I feel like I need to end the show right there. Insightful as hell. It does feel like i need to end the show right there because i was like insightful as hell

it is it does feel like these these years are like the last couple years have been we can see the trends and i feel like from 2018 through 2022 we'll be like do the things actually work does this pan out and it feels like that's the stretch where now whereas like from even the just the post shuttle era it's been like there's a new way coming on all of these fronts we can do this new we can do this in a new way and now it's like all right well this is your time so do it or we're back to the old ways and yeah it's it's pretty awesome there's the end of it there's a reckoning that's coming and it'll be exciting to see i mean we are still talking about large sums of money spacex gwen shotwell did at one point say that starlink would cost 10 billion dollars

one web won't talk about their figures anymore they're at one point estimated to be 3.5 billion dollars i've seen an estimate of 5 billion dollars an analyst i talked to said no way it's 7.5 billion dollars intel set hasn't put out a figure for theirs either, other than billions. Their manufacturers are anticipating a $3 billion contract. Wow. Even that, and that's like 170 or something like that? Isn't that not too many satellites?

So they haven't... They've changed up how much information they've shared about the size of their system. Originally, they were talking about 117 satellites. And then they said, well, it scales and it starts, it scales from 112 to, I think it was 292. And then like even 512 eventually. But their sweet spot is 292. Okay. Even though their original FCC filing was for 117. Well, I still got to update the number in my head. There's too many numbers to keep track.

There's so many and to keep track of. There's so many, and they haven't said how many the manufacturer would build. So I don't know how many they're going to give for that initial contract. Part of me wonders if all of these companies are like, eh, we could do about half of that. And then they just file for the number twice what they actually want so that if they screw up and they don't get them all up in six years, they're like, eh, good enough. We got close enough. good enough uh before we get out of here is there any other stuff in the industry in general that you're keeping an eye on or

do you care to weigh in on this sls drama this is i know it's not your typical beat it's not i mean they can resist talking about it so just just, I mean, total opinion land. I just kind of watch SLS from a distance. For people who are news-based advocates, that is the poster child of everything that they want. I mean, it gobbles up billions of dollars every year, and the reward that you get for those billions is more delays it's like completely backwards uh so i don't want to say too much it's this is totally just my opinion there's others at

space news that follow sls much closer than i do i just see it happening and uh to me it just looks like a a very slow but enormous dumpster fire a slow but enormous dumpster fire. A slow but enormous dumpster fire. That is total opinion land from the man himself. And I'd hope that it would succeed. It's a massive rocket. I was listening to the last podcast with Eric Berger talking about what it can do for deep space and a lot of those missions.

It's exciting. And if it can do missions that the space and a lot of those missions it's it's exciting and if it can do missions that the commercial sector can't you even see with the um the eelv or now the nssl program you gotta get a better acronym than that i know well i was like saying those thinking of the third acronym which is the lsa yeah uh the launch services agreements all day so one of the things that changed the launch services agreements was the DOD wanted people to hit, the launch providers, to hit those nine reference orbits. And at least one of them, I never got out of the launch providers which one it was, but one of those orbits was so strenuous that it required them to modify their vehicles. So you saw this with Blue Origin and New Glenn, changing the upper stage of New Glenn. You saw this with ULA, with their upper stage, the Centaur V,

that they're going to use these expanded tanks so that they can accomplish more with the initial version of Vulcan to do all that DoD wants them to do. And some have criticized that as changing and morphing the commercial sector because they said, hey, these rockets were designed for the commercial world and you were supposed to benefit from it. Now you're influencing it in ways that the commercial sector never did. So will these be healthy? Is this the industry that we want or are you changing it?

And when I hear the debates about SLS being canceled, part of me wonders, if you canceled SLS, would you be imposing on commercial companies standards and things for their rockets that would never be commercially acceptable? And then you kill the golden goose. That's an interesting way to put it. Yeah. Do you want to do that? You would force somebody to start thinking of something in SLS size. Yeah.

That wouldn't necessarily be a commercial. You could strip it of its commercial value. Everything that you wanted, you could actually destroy. So destroy so again just opinion land this is just me thinking aloud avengers endgame stuff right there not to this isn't sponsored or anything but it sounds like one of those like epic superhero movie things everything you ever wanted you could destroy hey you could have peace in our time half the launch vehicles disappeared oh frightening alright Caleb where can everybody find you

oh you have something else I'll add so when Avengers the last one came out I had a rare non-space or non-pure space

related tweet I tweeted I tweeted if someone throws another moon at me I'm gonna lose it which was an Iron Man quote that's an amazing line when somebody threw the moon at me, I'm going to lose it. Which was an Iron Man quote.

That's an amazing line. Let's see how many tweets. So that was... Oh, you did. You did 3,500 tweets. All right, never mind. I thought it was going to be a much larger percentage of your tweets,

but it's not. You're stepping up the game. We're working on it. We're working on it. It's a lot of retweets. It's a good feed. Chenry underscore SN. Yeah, so you can follow me there.

I tweet out a lot of the things that I write, things that I find interesting following the space industry. Very satellite-heavy, SATCOM-focused. Like I said, there's a lot of change that's going on, so it's pretty fun. You can also find my work and the work of my colleagues at spacenews.com. We have the website and the magazine, my colleagues at spacenews.com. And we have the website and the magazine.

So we're covering this every day. Every link in Miko headlines. Pretty much. I feel like it's 90% that. Thank you so much, Caleb, for hanging out. This has been the first in-person interview. Hey, it's an honor. Not on location interview, in the studio.

In the studio. So this is like, maybe there's more of this coming i don't know others will have to come thank you so much thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week Thank you.