Not Your Father’s Data Center - Satellites & The Cloud with Doug Mohney

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Data has moved from the building filling mainframes of the 60's technology to satellite gathering machine learning and AI processing at the speed of light. Megabytes have turned into Petabytes, leaving businesses to absorb the paradigm shift of data collection. In this episode of Not Your Father's Data Center, host Raymond Hawkins and Doug Mohney, Editor-in-Chief of Space IT Bridge, look at the explosive growth of using satellites for data monitoring and collection. The intersection of space and IT technology offers an inexpensive and exponential increase in satellite data gathering capabilities. Ray and Doug explore the growth and use of satellites and assist everything from remote broadband communications to countries' infrastructure security. Businesses are collecting more data than ever before. And instead of mainframes, they're using the cloud and, in a growing number of cases, constellations of satellites for communication and tracking of transportation. As a result, there has been a shift from mainframes towards the rapidly expanding availability of satellite technology. The development of reusable rockets has assisted this shift to satellites. As a result, satellites traveling 400 miles above the earth provide capabilities and technology to deliver broadband to the entire world. "Satellite is going to help connectivity. With current satellite technology, there can be near fiber broadband technology anywhere in the world," Mohney explained. "This is promising because it allows [cloud services, technology, and communication] to developing countries."

All right, well, welcome again to another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center. I am your host, Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer at Compass Data Centers. Today, we are joined by the Editor-in-Chief at Space IT Bridge, Doug Mone. Also, thank you so much. Doug, thank you for joining me. And Doug, if you are willing, we'd love to hear you give us a little bit of background on yourself. I know that ultimately writing about data in space has been a bit of a journey for you going back to the IP day. So if you don't mind going back to the beginning, we'd love to hear your story. Yeah, well, hopefully we don't have to spend two hours on my story. I started out with an internet startup back in the mid-1990s that went public. It was DigX in

the Washington, D.C. area. And then after I got out of that internet startup, I went into another startup that dealt with the internet and satellites. So that kind of like meshed two worlds there for a while. And from there, the company, which started out as Skycash now and got renamed Sedera just before it was supposed to go public and then didn't go public due to the dot-com crash. I ended up at, I ended up switching careers from being in doing marketing and sales within companies to writing about companies. So I started writing about internet data centers and satellite stuff.

And then somewhere in my head, I got it. I got it in my head that, Hey, if I write about satellite stuff, then I can connect it to data center stuff. I could go to space launches and have an excuse to go to space launches. So that's kind of like where I ended up at Space IT Bridge today, talking about the intersection of space technology and IT technology, which not a lot of people are talking about right now. And I mean, people are starting to get savvy to the fact that there's a tremendous amount of data being generated by satellites today. And that number is, I don't want to say exponentially increased, but dramatically

increased through the next several years as more companies put up constellations of satellites to observe the earth and to do communications, to keep track of ships and planes, the IoT side of things. So there's a lot of stuff going on there. So, yeah, we're going to dig into all that, Doug. So before we get, because I'm with you, earth observation and shipping routes, all that stuff is going to be great stuff we'll get to. So do me a favor. Let's go back to Digix just for a minute what the business there was strictly ip managing ip circuits and those kinds of things uh digix well digix had two uh two main businesses they did connectivity that is

lease line lease lines um uh connectivity for businesses and then the other side of the DigX equation was web hosting, which evolved into the cloud today. So we were running servers for people like CIA, American Association of Libraries. Amtrak was one of our customers at that time. So there were a lot of good mix of government and commercial side people. Gotcha. So, yeah, Doug, we call it cloud today.

But, yeah, the concept of hosting your compute somewhere else is not new. And I certainly remember fondly the phase that we called hosting, web hosting and server hosting. So, yeah. Okay. So DigX was in the hosting business and the connectivity business. And then walk me through Sedera. I'm going to make sure I say it. Sedera Analytics. Walk me through that business. Well, Sedera, the company, used satellite broadband in order to deliver bulk information to the edge of the internet. Because back in, I'd say, pre-2000-ish, the big issue was moving larger bulk data from where it was located at, meaning data centers

and the like, to the edge, to what we now call the edge. And satellite broadband was a way to deliver data directly to the edge without having to move it through terrestrial choke points or connection points. So at the time, it seemed like a really great idea until dot com turned into a bomb. And a lot of the and then it was revealed that a lot of the hype about, you know, being there, an infinite demand for fiber kind of died off. There was an oversupply of fiber. And then satellite just proved not to have the bandwidth in order to deliver bulk data that fiber did, as more and more people got connected to fiber at lower and lower cost. Gotcha. Gotcha. And thus we see fiber everywhere today. it as more and more people got connected to fiber at lower and lower cost. Gotcha. Gotcha. And thus we see fiber everywhere today. So you can steer me away from this, but I'm going to have a hard time not asking you when you have the inquirer on your resume,

just got to ask, what was the working at the inquirer like? Well, this wasn't the national inquirer, but it was the UK Enquirer. I got you. Which, you know, UK Enquirer was a cheeky publication. They were fun to work with. And they would, you know, they have that British sensibility or flavor of being a little bit snarky when talking about IT issues. So it was really fun working there. But no, it wasn't the National Enquirer. Not that Enquirer. All right. I would be in recovery if I was working there.

All right. So a lifetime in technology, mostly networking, sales and marketing. As that business matured, decided, hey, this is fun to write about this stuff. So give me a little bit of the personal background of what got you fascinated because we make the jump from IT sales and marketing over to space, your personal interest in space. What was the first thing that you said, hey, that's cool? Did you see a launch? What got you fascinated with space? Well, like any child of the 60s and 70s, there was a big love of Apollo and a big love of going to the moon. And then, you know, and then it evolved into, hey, the space shuttle is cool and astronauts are cool. So a lot of people from that generation, sorry, TikTok kids, you know, we had a good foundation there. And I found that as the space shuttle program was winding down,

I wanted to go see a space shuttle launch because I'd never seen a space shuttle launch. So there was this interesting confluence with the government-sponsored, the government push for space systems, as it wound down, there was at the same time a start of commercial activities. Basically, how do you make money out of space without the space shuttle? Or how do you make money out of space with off-the-shelf data? So, I mean, there's been a, over the past decade, there's been this mind shift in terms of how people think about space and where pioneers in the sector realize that you don't have to send up

these big expensive satellites in order to make money. You can build smaller satellites, and smaller satellites mean that you can send them up cheaper. And if you can build satellites and launch them cheaper, you get into this, God help me, virtuous cycle that you can get more data. Basically, what it boils down to is basically you get more data back for less capital cost of launch and building satellites. So that's what a bunch of companies started to do. And then that whole ecosystem started developing, like a lot of people building small satellites

and building companies around them. And then today, now we have this proliferation of companies like Planet and Satellogic and Black Sky and, you know, tons of other people who have who are building satellites, building large constellations of satellites to collect data by photographing the Earth or whatever. And that got to be very interesting because now what they're doing is they're going public through SPACs and raising lots of money. So it's a very happening place to be right now. Yeah, Doug, there's lots of, of course, visibility and conversation.

I know our media darling billionaires keep shooting themselves into space and everyone wants to watch that. So you wanted to see a space shuttle launch. You grew up with the affections for the whole Apollo mission and how do we catch the Russians and Sputnik scared everybody. I'm dating both of us with those references. And how do we catch the Russians and Sputnik scared everybody. I'm dating both of us with those references. And how do you make the leap? Where does space IT come into your purview and you decide, hey, these guys are a great place where I can write about technology and write about space. How did that come about?

And then I want to get into a bunch of the subjects you've raised. Well, I think I got it. It just struck me, you know, I don't want to say once a generation, but once a decade, you see a paradigm shift. We saw this with personal computers, where blah, blah, blah. We had all these junky personal, well, not junky, but we had all these primitive personal computers. And then all of a sudden, the IBM PC came out. Bang! Business is all, they all had to get IBM PCs. And they all had to get, you know, and all of a sudden, everybody had a personal computer within, you know, I don't want to say overnight, within a three, five year period. It had to be the thing. Okay. Then from the 80s, we shifted to the 90s. And then you had that same phenomenon where the internet was this geek toy. And know where academics uh you know academics were sending an email and you know blah blah blah and then all of a sudden um when the internet went commercial um for whatever definition of

commercial bang three years later you went from nobody knowing about the internet to going to your local football stadium and they're buying www.redskins.com or, well, that's, you know, if you had companies, they all had to get on the internet in a very short period of time. And that was the 90s. Now we're in this period of a similar paradigm shift, if you'll forgive the analogies and buzzes, where we started off where satellites were very expensive. They were like mainframes, where it's very expensive to launch

a satellite, very expensive to build a satellite, very awkward to get information from that satellite. So it's very costly. So you had this whole mainframe situation where satellites were this holier resource. But the small guys, the CubeSat guys, the small set guys realized that, okay, I don't need to build this $500 million satellite. I can build a satellite for under a million dollars or less and get useful information out of it. So you all of a sudden have the shift from mainframes to cellular phones, in essence, where satellites from it for a decade or more and milked that cow for every single bit out of it to a cell phone mentality where you buy a cell phone. Three years later, you buy a new cell phone. In this case, you buy a small satellite.

Three to five years later, you throw it out and you launch the new one. And then the new satellites that you launch, since you're launching them rapidly, you get that technology refresh. You get a constant technology refresh as you put and update your technology in orbit. So those big earlier ones, am I putting those further out in orbit than these littler ones that you're talking about now? Do I want them out there further and sitting there longer? Is there a function? I mean, because we're talking about orders of magnitude of $500 million satellite and a million dollar satellite. I got to believe these have vastly different functions. Well, they do. And they do. But and part of that's physics. And when we talk about physics,

we'll talk about the physical physics of moving things from point A to point B. In other words, when you build that $500 million satellite, in order for it to sit over one part of the Earth, you have to push it out 22,000 plus miles. And that costs you a lot of rocket fuel and a big rocket. So if you're going to go put it up there and it's going to be up there for a decade or more, that satellite has to work perfectly. That satellite has to be tested perfectly. And, you know, and. So the service calls 22,000 miles up aren't very regular, are they? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, yeah.

Basically, fault tolerance and, you know, fault tolerance and things like that are built into those types of satellites. Now, the other thing about physics is that since you're 22,000 miles out, you have this thing called lag, right? Where speed of light starts taking effect. So to go up and back from orbits, half second or more better in terms of speed of light and in terms of all know, a little nuts and bolts and turn around stuff So that that half second lag that that's if I'm moving at the speed of light which radio transmissions or data transmissions don't but go Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. Well, yeah, plus you get the overhead from data and Second starts dragging out a little bit more but the other thing is that I need more power I need since I'm going twenty three thousand plus miles, if I'm using radio waves, I need a bigger antenna on the ground, number one, and up in the sky, I need a much larger, more powerful broadcast mechanism in order to get the signal down. So between those two things, again, that adds to I need to have a satellite that has big solar arrays because I need the power and I need bigger radios, so I need the power.

So all those things add up to a fact that geosynchronous orbit, those initial satellites were great in that you could put up one and serve a good chunk of the Earth, if not half the Earth, depending upon what radio frequencies you did. So putting up a a good chunk of the Earth, if not half the Earth, depending upon what radio frequencies you did. So putting up a small satellite closer to the Earth gives you a lot of benefits. And so 22,000 miles away from the Earth's surface, if you fly a small satellite lower at a couple hundred miles, you don't need the big radios. You don't need the big antennas on either end um all of a sudden you you can do useful work with a satellite that um uh you know 400 miles and is the size of a wine uh a wine a box for a wine bottle um you, 30 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. Oh, really? That small?

Well, that's kind of like the benchmark. And that's really big for some satellites. There are companies that are pushing that and going from that wine box size down to smaller. Like, for instance, Swarm Technologies has a satellite to do IoT stuff. We're not talking broadband or anything like that, but Swarm Technologies has a satellite to pick up data from IoT sensors that's a size of a piece of Texas toast. It literally is 10 centimeters by a quarter centimeter. And it's packed with radios and power and, you know, intelligence. Doug, anytime we can work Texas toast into a podcast, I think we've been successful. We've had a good podcast. So thank you for that. Okay. Now I just got to work in donuts and I'll be

happy. That's right. Exactly. So the thing is that, you know, to borrow from Jerry Pornel, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In low Earth orbit, the satellites are moving faster. They're not. So so if you're out of geosynchronous orbit at twenty two thousand miles, twenty two thousand miles away, the satellite moves in a rough orbit at the same time as the earth rotates so so you so it's always so there's the solution of a fixed position um if you're in low earth orbit those satellites since they're they're lower they zip around faster so a single satellite zips overhead and maybe you see it for you know five to minutes a day, twice a day for a single satellite. But since satellites are cheaper, you can build a bunch of satellites.

So you've got a satellite zipping overhead every time you need it, essentially, if you can launch enough satellites. So two big questions, just as a lay person trying to understand this, Doug, just help me with a couple of things. One, I got to believe that my field of vision, my field of view at 22,000 feet is radically different than my field of vision at four, excuse me, 22,000 miles than it is at 400 miles. So I'm getting a smaller slice. I'm getting a smaller picture. Is that, am I accurate in that? I've got to,

I got to be getting a much smaller view of the world at 400 miles than I am 22,000. Well, yeah, but I need a smaller camera to see the, just if we're talking about imagery, I'm a smaller camera because I'm, you know, I only have to focus on something that's 400 miles away versus 22,000 miles away if we're talking about imagery, right? Right. Earth observation, sure, right. And then you've used this term, and I've read it before, constellations. Is that literally what I think it means? So there might be a train of 100 of these that are flying in some sort of controlled format or fashion?

Is that what we're talking about, or is it bigger than that? Depends upon the application. I'll give you the four instances. The four instances that if you're talking about communication satellites, things like SpaceX Starlink or the OneWeb Constellation, SpaceX has over 1,500 satellites right now to deliver broadband to the entire world. OneWeb is in the process of filling out their constellation. They're at 300 plus satellites, and they'll scale up to about 648 or so satellites to provide broadband coverage to the entire world. But broadband is kind of funny in that you want to have it on all the time.

So you need a satellite you can reach all the time. For other applications, you can start off the time for you for the um for other applications you can start off with a few satellites and as more people get onto your service you launch more and then your coverage time you know and then your coverage time to take pictures of the world um gets a lot better so um you know like if i put up a dozen satellites in the world, I may to take pictures to, for, to collect imagery, um, I may be able to visit, um, places on the earth, maybe, uh, three to four times a day. But if I increase that number from that handful of a dozen or so up to 300, all of a sudden I could take pictures of anywhere in the world pretty much 24

by 7. Yeah. So, Doug, you used the term, you said they want to deliver broadband anywhere. So are we literally thinking that we're going to deliver internet services bouncing up into space and back all over the planet? So when I go to Sub-Saharan Africa, I can have internet service there via satellite? The short answer is if they have the licensing, you know, it's all about the politicians. I mean, you could do that today in Sub-Saharan Africa if they had landing rights. In other words, broadcast permissions to operate within there. Yes, you could have you could have uh depending upon uh what network you have you could have well we'll use you will use space as spacex as an example spacex could give you up to 300 megabits a second broadband into a one meter or less than one meter ish dish right and you can get up to 30 meg um upstream today wow but but that's that's that's

but remember that's optimal if i'm if i'm not quite yeah if i'm not perfectly aligned right i'm not perfectly aligned or there's trees that you haven't managed to chop down or other crap in a way then then that's going to go down but but if you go to reddit don't believe me believe reddit um yeah yeah if you go to reddit don't believe me, believe Reddit. Yeah, yeah. If you go to Reddit, there are users getting over 300 megabits a second upstream. I mean, downstream, coming down from the sky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And 30 megabits. So how does that get work?

Because I know we, you know, here in the U.S., we manage the spectrum via the federal, the FCC, I guess, right? Manages the spectrum and sells that spectrum is, is when we're going up in space, do they then take over the spectrum management once you get back inside the atmosphere, when you get over, how do they manage that? Cause you use, Hey, if there were the appropriate licenses. So I got to imagine I've set up this constellation, I'm spinning satellites around the earth. I got all this bandwidth. I can stream it down to guys who have my dish, but a guy in New Jersey and a guy in Nairobi are getting totally different experiences from a regulatory perspective. But conceptually could get the same experience from a bandwidth perspective.

Well, from a regulatory perspective, then it's legwork. SpaceX has to go around or whatever the satellite broadband carrier is, has to go around and do the legwork with the local authorities because the local authorities control the radio frequencies within that nation, right? So basically SpaceX has to go to that country and go, hi, I'd like to operate in your country and then, you know, work it out so that they get what they call landing rights. In other words, permission to operate within the country. Right. Landing rights. Yeah. So SpaceX has landing rights or the ability to operate and sell dishes.

Well, operate and sell dishes in pretty much most of Europe. Parts of Africa I've seen and definitely Australia and I think some parts of Asia. I'm not exactly sure. There are places where SpaceX will not operate due to government control, like Russia or China. China, I can think, yeah. Russia and China are very problematic. And, um, um, because, um, uh, I'm not, but, but who knows, they might get, they might get the, you know, you pay enough people and you have enough lawyers, anything's possible from a political standpoint. But for right now, I don't see SpaceX operating within China or within Russia. So because there's no desire, I think Elon Musk

likes things simple and having to deal with Russia would give him certain headaches since he's also selling to Department of Defense. Right. So, Doug, as I think through this, so I've been to sub-Saharan Africa. I've been to Kenya and Uganda and South Sudan. And my first trip ever there was really mind expanding for me. I walk into a village. there's no paved roads, there's no sanitation, there's no two-story buildings, there's not an inch of concrete sidewalk anywhere. And yet people were walking up to me with cell phones. And I was like, wait a minute, there's no infrastructure here at all. How do you have a cell phone? They would walk with me out to the edge of town and show me the cell phone tower that was out there running on batteries and running on a generator. And I was like, okay, that's interesting.

I get how the tower, how are you running your phone? And they had car batteries with this contraption set up on top of it. And they would plug their cell phone into a car battery. And, and, uh, and they just completely skipped over the whole landline delivery of telecom in those countries. They're like, Hey, we didn't, we had gotten so far down the path with cellular, we didn't need landlines. Is this the same thing when we think about delivering broadband to those places? Well, it's an interesting trap. And I don't want to say trap, but I want to address the meta point that you brought up about Africa. If you take a look at the different fiber projects Google is starting to run into Africa and the different fiber projects that are – there's like a big fiber loop, I think that was built by french telecom um that runs around africa and then you get spurs off going into each country's fiber sooner or later shows up and i'm not saying that you know that the place you visited in sub-saharan africa i don't know however many years ago or if

it was recently but but i'm willing to bet that sometime in the next 10 years or 20 years, that cell tower eventually gets hooked up with fiber because you're going to need more broadband in order to service the next generation of phones and to service the expanded services that you're seeing bootstrapped off of simple cellular services. So I'll leave it at that point for now. Now, let me shift gears here and talk about how satellite is going to help connectivity. Like that cell tower you saw in sub-Saharan Africa, it's being backhauled somehow, right? And that backhaul may be fixed point-to-point wireless today, right? And so in essence, you need a network or a string, right? A string of tower here, tower here, tower here that, you know, talk to each other.

The nice part about satellite, and there's two kicks to this. One is that you can use satellite broadband that's just coming out that's going to be low latency because it's close to the Earth. So instead of that half second plus of overhead you have with geosync, you have that tens of milliseconds latency delay because you're closer to the earth. So things like SpaceX and other people in the LEO space delivering broadband will give you what I'd say near fiber quality, although that's marketing, we're not really sure, but near fiber quality delivery of broadband to anywhere in the world. So you could, in a place in sub-Saharan Africa, set up a cell site outside of normal coverage.

And its backhaul is not fixed wireless point to point, but its backhaul is up to the satellite. And then you get connected into the cellular network via satellite backhaul. And that's really promising for, like there's big plans in, closer to here in Canada to use LEO broadband satellite to do backhaul, cellular backhaul in Canada. And then you've got folks like the Hardy Airtel working with OneWeb to do backhaul in India, Africa, Asia, and other developing world markets. So for my friends who don't know the acronyms for space, LEO is low Earth orbit, which is when you're talking about three four hundred

miles up it's it's low earth orbit stuff low latency close to the planet stuff yeah yeah yeah gotcha and geo meaning juice and geo geosynchronous very far away yeah yeah so so so doug um another thing that that that uh you know i don't know of a simpler way to ask it who's putting these satellites up there because i think of satellite stuff and I think about it from a government perspective. I think about it, you know, you referenced the shuttle program. I think of people putting things in space are government entities because of the sheer cost of the technology and the sheer cost of propulsion and the rockets and all of it is expensive. But that has changed in the last seven, 10 years. So who's putting satellites up there today?

And are we getting rockets lifted off the planet on a regular basis other than just the ones with William Shatner and Elon Musk in them? Okay. Let me deal with the hype and then we'll go with the reality. And I don't want to be hype. But the problem is that there's been a media obsession and media focus with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Richard Branson as the fighting billionaires to basically throw people up into space for a minute and a half and then bring them back down and then collect their $250,000, you know, $250,000 for a 10-minute joyride. And, you know, that's cool, but that's not where the money is being made.

SpaceX is launching rockets on a regular basis. Basically, they get ride share, they do a ride share where they get 20, 30, 40 companies and they put them on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. And SpaceX will is launching

three times at least three times a year these dedicated rideshare missions to throw out 20 30 40 50 south 20 to 40 20 30 40 50 commercial satellites at a time um uh in order to build out these constellations. And then, but all the money, but to answer your question, question, who's paying for it? It's a mixture of commercial investment and some subsidies from the government. Okay. But all those companies that get on that Falcon 9, They're all paying some fee. And the business model for SpaceX is we generate enough fees that we cover the cost of design, development, and deployment of the rocket. Yes. And right now, SpaceX is making money because they built the rocket. They know how to build the rocket. The rocket works. And oh, by the way, the first stage flies back.

So there's an initial cost. So they can refly it refuel it and then send it back up like you know a couple weeks or a couple months later so so they can reuse the rockets it's not like you know you used to pay you know if you want a shiny new falcon 9 and and uh off of the line um it costs you like 60 million dollars for a flight but spacex is now gets back that first stage so it costs them much you know it's much less to launch things up into orbit now because they're reusing the first stage and a first stage and the thing that that people um if you think the thing is a first stage since that's providing most of the power to get things moving fast the first stage has some very expensive engines in it and there's not like

the the spacex uh the falcon 9 has nine first stage engines very very expensive so if i get the most expensive bits back and i can reuse them then hallelujah, my cost to launch significantly goes down. For launch, SpaceX, for instance, they've launched the Falcon 9 first stage, or reused the Falcon 9 first stage, up to 10 times so far. So it's not, you know, they used to do it two or three times, and they'd be like, whoops, and then it crashed once. But now they're up to the point where, or they realize that they couldn't, you know, it's been evolution. You know, it's like the, you know, first we had our clunky PCs,

now we got our, I got my nice Dell sitting on here that does gaming. Similarly, you know, the initial Falcon 9s, you get two or three flights of them. Now the Falcon 9, they can get up to 10 flights out of them. And SpaceX has said that they may be able to squeeze more than 10 flights out of them

in future models that roll off the production line. That's awesome. That's an incredible change to the economics if you can use the thing over and over 10 times. It just fundamentally changes it. So let me ask you, and I may drive us down a ditch here, I apologize. Are we getting better at the fuel that we deploy in this? Because I've always understood that the fuel, the amount of propulsion compared to the weight of the fuel was always tough. Are we getting better at the fuel for these rockets? Well, I think that, yeah, the cost of fuel is a fractional.

Not from a cost. I mean, weight, the cost of how much propulsion we get versus how much weight, because we're moving every kilo you move out of Earth orbit, there's amount of propulsion you have to move. Well, some of that is the weight of the fuel. That's what I'm asking. Are we getting better at the ratio of the weight of the fuel to the amount of propulsion we get out of the fuel. That's what I'm asking. Are we getting better at the ratio of the weight of the fuel to the amount of propulsion we get out of the fuel? We've got some better optimization. Yes. And, and that's, that's, but, but, you know, I don't, you know, we can nerd down this, we can nerd down this for a while, but, you know, in a bigger scheme of things, when it costs you, you know, $60 million to build a shiny new Falcon 9, right? And that includes the launch cost.

Launch cost for the fuel is probably mumble, mumble, couple hundred thousand dollars of... Okay, so it's not a big part of the problem anymore. Couple hundred thousand, well, yeah, because you're talking about a couple hundred thousand dollars in basically kerosene, JP4, jet fuel, you know, basically highly processed jet fuel and liquid oxygen. Gotcha. Gotcha. So it's not a big when we're looking at the equation, it's not a big enough problem in the equation anymore for us to spend a lot of energy on. Got it. Or for us, for us, for it, for moving anywhere from from geo anything all the way up to geosynchronous orbit, it's not a problem. You want to go to the moon, then you start getting into refueling and mining stuff and mining asteroids for oil. Not for oil, mining asteroids for ice.

But right now, it's not a big deal in the scheme of things. Okay, that's what I wanted to hear. It's not a big deal in the scheme of things. Okay. That's what I wanted to hear. It's not a big deal. And so here's my next question. Talk to me about business applications. So I got why I need broadband and somebody's going to pay me for that broadband connection. I got that business model.

But that's just one of them. Give me a handful of other business models of why having satellites in space close by close by in Leo, uh, that allow me to make a real business case for what I'm doing up there. Okay. Um, the best example that I can give you brings in a bunch of stuff and, and I don't want to play the African card, but I got to play the African card. I was, I was at a conference a few, about a month ago, and there was a company that does data analytics. And they started talking about how they monitor pipelines in Nigeria for fat, oil pipelines, because, you know, oil is a big deal. Oil money fuels the government. So somebody coming in and sneaking in and pirating oil out of the pipeline is a bad thing forever. So the person telling this story says, well, here's what happens.

First of all, we tap into the commercial satellites that are available today to monitor radio traffic on the ground. So they have a trio of satellites operated by commercial company apply over the nigerian pipeline area and they listen for anomalous radio traffic what do i mean by that they listen for handheld radio traffic in the middle of nowhere essentially um because if you're in the middle of nowhere next to pipeline in nigeria if you're not a guy if they don't have people driving the pipelines up and down all the time so if they're are people doing, using VHF type of handheld radios near a pipeline, well, maybe there's something funny going on there. We need to have a closer look. So having that indicator or that,

that piece of information saying there's, there's some radio traffic here. We don't know what exactly what's going on, but we want to look for other pieces of evidence to indicate if this is legitimate or if there's something illegal going on. So that information runs from one computer model and there's a machine-to-machine communication or however you want to call it, where a message goes to a satellite tasking website and it goes, we need you to take pictures of this area of interest because we don't know what's going on there. So there might be messaging going to optical satellites that is visible. And there will also be message going to a radar satellite. So then the AI, and this all happens with magical AI. No, but this all happens via processes. So the satellites are automatically

tasked to fly over this area of interest where there's radioactivity. Not radioactive. Radio activity. Yeah. Radio activity. Got it. Yeah, yeah. Got it. Over the pipeline to look at it in radar and look at it in visual. Now the visual people are looking for well the visual and the radar satellites are looking for

two things. They're looking for a boat nearby because usually a pipeline is near a waterway or They're looking for a boat nearby, because usually a pipeline is near a waterway, or they're looking for a barge. Because if you're going to steal a lot of oil, you either need a freighter or you need a barge with a bunch of barrels on it. So what happens is the pictures come in, the AI looks for images of barge or image of um uh boat and if there's a boat nearby and there's and there's then you've got there's boat nearby and if this boat doesn't have its um transponder turned on meaning that it's a dark boat meaning it's it's doing something illegal all of a sudden it's like, hey, we need to call the authorities because somebody's stealing oil out of this pipeline.

And all from space. All from space. Yeah. Because you've got four different, because you've got the radar satellites, you've got an optical imaging satellite, you've got an RF satellite that's listening for radio signals. And then you've got a fourth pair of satellites that are looking to see if that boat is transmitting its transponder signal. And all this is automated via AI. And I

mean, there'll be alerts sent out on, you know, somebody will get alerts and at a certain level of activity, a human being will get involved and they'll basically take the data, the information and call the authorities and going, hey, we got some stuff, something that we think is going down here. Can you send out, can you send somebody out to drive out there or fly over there and see if there's theft? What a great real world example. And it bought- Pipeline security. And not only that, but the fascinating thing here is that, that, I mean, if you take a step back, is that it's a beautiful example, but it's also a beautiful

use case on you're doing multiple source information, right? You're using AI or machine learning to listen for or look for activity and process the imagery to actually look for boat, look for bar. And you're using AI basically to walk through that. It's all machine learning. It's all AI that's collecting the information up until the point where there's an email going out to the Coast Guard, the local Coast Guard in Nigeria or the local customs agency in Nigeria going, hey, there's theft here. You need to go. You know, we think there's theft here.

Here is the evidence we have. So, yeah. Fascinating example. Yeah. Data in space, saving pipelines everywhere. Well, I mean, but if we throw out the pipeline example, you know, we're only scratching the surface of what's going on. We can take multiple sources of data and mash it and apply it. I mean, this is equally applicable for, you know, looking at after a hurricane.

You can fly out and look at what infrastructure has been damaged using satellite imagery if you're getting satellite imagery every couple of hours you can fly out and see you know what telephone poles are down or what you know where the damage is in specific areas like insurance companies are going to be tapping into this information rather than send out agents they'll be able to do a before and after picture. They'll take, you know, they'll have imagery on file where they'll pre-hurricane, and then they'll be able to take imagery at post hurricane or post other natural disaster event and compare the two and go, aha, okay, these buildings are a total loss. We just need to write checks and not send anybody out there. And then these buildings, you know, we need to send out an agent to evaluate to see if they anybody out there. And then these buildings, you know, we need to send out an agent to evaluate to see if they can salvage. But, but I mean, again,

there's this whole, there's a lot of information that you can collect from the sky. And we just, we're just tapping into the individual, the individual bits and pieces of it. And the more information you get, you can meld them together, like a pipeline example, in order to do useful work. Yeah, fascinating stuff. Well, Doug, this has been super helpful. We really, really appreciate you joining us. Thank you for getting on the podcast and talking about space

and talking about data in space. And look forward to seeing as things continue to change as we get more constellations and more applications and it continues to change. I go back to the first time we broke the sound barrier and remember that and now think about where we are. It's been an incredible journey for what we do up there. Well, I think the thing that people lose track of is, I'll give you my two examples here. The SpaceX launch that was done over the summer, the satellites on board are collecting multiple terabytes of information a day, multiple terabytes of information per day.

So that means that by the end of the year, you've added a petabyte plus of useful information. And that only increases over time. That's just one launch. And as these people go from dozens of satellites in orbit, hundreds of satellites in orbit, you get this dramatic scale of information we're going to be able to collect about the rest of the world.

It's going to be very cool. Well, I'll just say this. As a guy who builds warehouses for data, the fact that we're collecting data from space is a good thing for me. So I'm happy about that. Yeah, you're gonna, well, what's, what's, what's fun too about that is that, that some of your customers will start tapping into that data. And all of a sudden it'll be like, oh, we need to buy more disk space. We need to build a hyperscalable AI in order to process this information. So you get a couple of those customers and you'll need a couple more warehouses plus.

Thank goodness. All right, parting question. Favorite Star Wars and favorite Star Trek episode? And I say episode, of course, I mean, the TV show. So favorite TV episode and favorite Star Wars movie. OK, you're hurting me real bad. All right. We're going to we're going to go with Star Wars first. You have to go with the original, the original Luke Skywalker Han Solo, because that set the universe, that set the character. Here, here. Absolutely number one. And it was a beautiful genre because it laid the foundation for everything else and just blew everybody's mind.

Yeah. Star Trek is a lot harder because you start – are you talking original series? Are you talking TNG? Are you talking Discovery? So there's all kinds – I'm going with the three years on television, original series, William Shatner. Best episode in Shatner's three years on TV. And there's several to choose from. I know, and it's really hard. I mean, Edge of Tomorrow, probably.

That one's good. Edge of Tomorrow and I can't remember the name of it. The one with Khan. Yeah. And I can't, you know, Space Seed. Was it Space Seed? Yeah, you got me on the name. And I'm not going to remember the one with President Lincoln where he's – the guy can make Shatner's voice and Spock's dying and there's – they have multiple historical characters. I can't remember that episode, but that's one of my favorites. I can't remember the name of the episode, but love the original Star Trek.

Yeah, definitely. But we could spend another like half hour talking about all this. We'll have a whole episode just on Star Trek you can come back and just do Star Trek I'm going to throw out my parting thought on your question that I have a really soft spot for Lower Decks

because it's funny as hell yeah that's good I really like Lower Decks I watched Star Trek as a kid and thought what are they doing? Walk around with these things that they talk into and they can hear other people. There you go. Doug, thank you so much for joining.

That's right. That's right, me. That's right. Live long and prosper. Good stuff. Thank you, Doug. We appreciate you joining us.