Tech Brew Ride Home - Space Tech With Bill Gattle of Harris Corp.

Episode Date: March 31, 2019

Today... another dipping of our collective toes into an adjacent tech space that we cover now and then, but don't know all that much about. Another episode where I learn more and hopefully you learn more. Speaking of spaces... Space! Space tech! The final frontier! Bill Gattle is the President for Space and Intelligence Systems at Harris Corp. We're gonna talk today about the state of the space industry, how soon will space tourism be a thing, and a revolution in space tech that I knew nothing about: small satellites, or small sats. Miniaturization and Moore's law comes for all our niche's I guess.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the TechMean Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough today. Another dipping of our toes into an adjacent tech space that we cover now and then,

but don't really know all that much about. Another episode where I learn more and hopefully you learn more. And speaking of spaces, we're talking about space. Space Tech, the final frontier of tech. Bill Gattle is the president for space and intelligence systems at Harris Corp. We're going to talk today about the state of the space industry. How soon will space tourism be a thing? And we're going to talk about a revolution in space tech that I knew nothing about.

Small satellites or small sats. Miniaturization and Moore's Law comes for all of our niches, I guess. My thanks to Bill Gettle of Harris Corp. I believe you've had experience all across the space industry for like a couple decades now or so. Can we start by just setting the stage of the industry? Like from the outside, I guess reading, you know, just headlines and things like that. I feel like there's been the surge of privatization over the last several years. And maybe that's true, more true in the U.S. than in other countries.

But generally, is the space industry, has it been going private? Or is that just me from the outside not knowing that it's always been sort of mostly private? So the last decade is probably been the most extraordinary decade we've ever. seen in both the commercial as well as the government space industry. So the acceleration we've seen is on both sides. And there's a couple of reasons for it. It's probably one of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. You saw a lot of budgets coming in right now. So it's got a lot of excitement around it. You're right. There's a lot of talk in the media about it. Part of it's because space is now an infrastructure that's critical. We absolutely depend upon it every day.

And if you think back a decade ago, we probably weren't talking about direct TV and Sirius XM radio that we needed every day. And it was connectivity. All the weather forecasts come through space. Every time you do Google Earth of your house, you're using a satellite, picture of it. All the financial systems across the world are using GPS and the clocks that are on GPS. So it's become critical infrastructure for the world. And as it has been doing that, people started to realize you could commercialize it as well and move it from a government-only kind of to something that actually could benefit a larger portion of the population versus things like

Internet for everyone. And so about a decade ago, you saw the rise of the opt-iners coming into the space market, the people like Elon Musk and Greg Gwiler at One Web and Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. And you saw Richard Branson come in on Virgin. They're all bringing in a lot of venture capital money. So we weren't so dependent upon the government. And that has shifted the entire marketplace. for space. And so at this point, what you're seeing is just as strong as a commercial market in space

as you did government. And you're also seeing a very different dynamic, which is space is not as dependent upon the government anymore. It actually has these other avenues by which they can go off and get capitalization at a venture capital market. So we are seeing an extraordinary shift, and it has truly transformed the space industry as we know it. Well, obviously the thing that gets the general interest headlines is the concept of space tourism. And on this show, I have a running sort of joke bet about self-driving cars, where I always heard we were going to have self-driving cars by 2020. Is that really going to pay off? Well, similarly, I keep, you know, have been told for years that, you know, actual space tourism, like in a regular way,

is just around the corner. So do I have another bet here? How far away is on the regular space tourism, you think? I don't think it's in the next couple years by 2020. I mean, I think that would be great if we could do it. You certainly are getting closer, if you talk about the automated cars, we're getting a lot closer with the GPS signals. You also have a lot of the abilities to steer through towns, but you still have a lot of things that have to happen before we have that be mainstream.

In terms of space tourism, it's a lot of the safety of flight, right? I think the wealthy can go up and have a flight these days for $20 million, at least get into space for a couple minutes. But after that, for it to be commonplace, we're probably, in my opinion, five to ten years away just because of the safety of flight, the proving of the technology that's necessary in order to get into orbit. Some of the things that we end up talking about on this show, again, to use the analogy of the self-driving car technology,

is, you know, who's technology, who's ahead, Who's got the best technology at any given time? So among the, maybe the names that I would know, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, Virgin, who's got the best tech? Maybe it's a name that I wouldn't know. But who's ahead in terms of being the go-to, maybe leader, the Waymo, if it were, of private commercialized space tech? So there's a couple different categories.

One is the one you're dealing with, which is launch. So the launch vehicles, SpaceX is by far in the lead. If you think about what Elon Musk did the last few years, he made tremendous investments in trying to get the space vehicle at about half the price that the government was charging for rockets. And he also has the ability to share rides, which means you can have multiple satellites per rocket launch, which is very beneficial, driving the cost way down. So he's probably in the lead in terms of that. He's also had a very progressive view of how to get the government to actually use his rockets,

recall back he actually sued the government to tell them they really needed to consider his launch vehicle, and that actually helped his business a lot as well. Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin are doing something different. What they're trying to do is they're trying to create infrastructure and space that will allow exploration of space beyond just our atmosphere. And so what he's doing is a little bit different than what Elon Musk is doing. Jeff Bezos, if you read some of his articles, what he keeps talking about is the reason why he was successful with Amazon is because infrastructure existed. He didn't have to figure out how to do delivery to door service. He didn't have to figure out how to do shipping. All that existed and allowed Amazon to ride on top

of that infrastructure. So he's a firm believer that that infrastructure in space will take us to a whole new level of exploration and use of space. Some of the other ones are a lot farther back in that particular realm. So you're seeing a lot of smaller companies now come in, including in Silicon Valley on the payload side, which is the thing that's actually doing the real work in space, taking pictures and such like that. That's an emerging market. And so there's a lot of players there. And there's a lot of talk about how do you get enough capability on those affordable,

small systems to actually be meaningful? And so that's where that market is. There's really no one clear leader in that market. But in terms of launch vehicles, it's by far SpaceX right now. What about the idea of internet delivery, internet ISPs from satellites? where are we on that? Again, another topic that I feel like I've been hearing about for two decades, and it has never quite come to pass.

Well, it's interesting because I think right now OneWeb has probably got a lead on that. What Greg Weiler did and his team, they're trying to really get it direct to remote regions, and I think that he's probably, as he puts up launches for the One Web satellites, which are starting to happen now, he will probably remain in that lead. If you look at this market, though, on how you commercialize to get the services and those kind of service products, typically you have to get the technology right, then you have to get the regulatory and the policy areas correct

so you can actually downlink and have Internet access through these satellites. And then you have the investment of putting out the infrastructure and then you get the service. So if you look at that three-year-four-step process, we have pretty much gotten to the regulatory process and investment. We haven't proven is that we can get a hit a cost point for people that you'd want to buy the Internet

unless you're way out in a remote region and you're willing to pay a little bit extra, just like you do on an airplane. When you're wanting to get Wi-Fi in your airplane, you're going to spend that a little extra because you really want to be connected. Those are the kinds of things that are now. It'll take a couple more years before you see the service levels come down to a price point where everybody can get it. Let's talk about something that actually reading an interview with you in Politico actually turned me on to this. I wasn't even aware of it.

Tell me about the small satellite revolution. Yeah, so this has been interesting. It actually transformed our company. So if you think about Harris Corporation, we were kind of a, we would be normally tall, an aerospace defense company and more traditional. And the small satellite market really made us sit up and take notice. So we looked at it, we started to think that the market was going to move to a place where affordability was going to be key. And speed to space was going to be key. And it was enabled by all the things we just talked about, launch being cheaper.

There's no way we could launch a small satellite and pay $70 million for a rocket. that wasn't going to work. But as the launch market transformed, all of a sudden, the ride to space became much cheaper. And so we basically, I use it the analogy, the hockey analogy. We skated to where the puck was going to be. So we transformed our company to go after these smaller satellites. With a small satellite, why would you even want one? Typically on a large, exquisite satellite for the government or even commercially,

it's going to take you about a decade to get it on orbit to design it and to make sure it works. That's just way too long for what the market wants today. So we basically transformed ourselves to build single purpose capability into a small satellite. So it doesn't, it's not the Swiss Army knife of satellites, but it can do a single purpose and it can do it very well. And so that began to transform. We actually started with something called hosted payloads, which was somebody else has a satellite, like a condominium. And I rent some space on that satellite to do a mission. And so that's the way we drove the cost down.

One of the first things we did was we put an airplane tracker on a communication satellite. And that airplane trackers called it Arian. And recently you saw the result of why that was valuable. And that was with the Boeing jets. What happened was we could actually from space watch the trajectory of the jet as it went up. And we were one of the ones that supplied data to that market to say, I think that was a really strange kind of trajectory it had, but tracking it from space allowed us to do that versus having it be from a radar on the ground. So all of a sudden we had a very useful capability

in a very small package that we could deliver very quickly, and it's begun to transform the market. It can't do everything. It's not the universal Swiss Army knife satellite. But for specific uses like tracking aircraft, it is very powerful and can be done very cheaply. I was building those satellites for under a million dollars a copy, which in the market of satellites, that's very cheap. Well, and this is what I found fascinating, like the idea of everything in tech has been about getting smaller and cheaper, and so it's even true. Like, I guess I had no idea, like, how big have satellites been generally? And what are we talking about, like, in terms of the cheaper and the smaller?

Like, what is the difference between a small set and a traditional satellite? So a traditional exquisite satellite can be as big as a small bus. I mean, they can be very big vehicles or a truck kind of size. And the small satellites that we've been launching are anywhere from a carry-on bag that you would have on an airplane. You'd put up in the overhead bin or even smaller than that where they look like a couple shoeboxes size. The question is, can they be useful? Anybody can launch something like that. But if all it does is generate heat, as I used to call them, if they're just a tote,

in orbit, that doesn't help us. What you have to do is have real missions. And so we've basically been able to figure out how to transform the technology to put very capable electronics and very capable apertures, which are the things that basically pick up the energy in a very small package. And so it's made them very useful in a very small package, very powerful small package. If you think back, for example, phones used to be really big, but now your iPhone small and you have all those features on it, that's what you're doing. You're basically shrinking everything down and putting as much capability as you can in it. And then the idea, what is the advantage of having these smaller satellites?

Again, because they're cheaper, you can launch more. So then you can do these things like create a whole constellation of like hundreds of them all tied together. What does that accomplish? So there's a, there's a balance of these things. If you build one big satellite, it can cover lots of area and it is very, very capable. But it also can only be refurbished, a couple, every 10 years or so, 15 years because it's cost or billions of dollars.

The small satellites allow you to do is constantly be upgrading technology. So if you think about the computer industry or your phone again, everybody wants to have the most recent revolution of technology. These small sets allow you to upgrade technology very fast and stay current with the market. And so you can be right on the cutting edge of technology at all times because you're relaunching them all the time. And because they're so inexpensive, that's an affordable way to do it. If they were $300 million a copy, you couldn't do it.

But given they're like $1 million a copy, that's not so bad in the space market. And so what you're able to do is quickly replenish, very fast capability to space, and you're getting a lot of capability in a very small package and for very low price. And so it's all about speed and capability and staying up with the most modern technology. Harris launched its first small set just this past December. back in the end of November and beginning of December, yeah, we weren't known as the satellite prime. So if you would have asked probably anybody, any of your listeners about this Harris launched satellite, they would say, probably not. I don't know those of them for that. So we internally invested in building our own satellite to prove we could,

and we were credible in the marketplace. And so, yeah, we launched our own satellite out of India with, we hitched a ride in India with another 60 or so satellites. And we have it all. It's working very well, but it builds credibility in the market that we know how to do this. We can do the end-to-end mission, so to speak. And so, yes, we made that investment. And right now are primarily the contracts that you have to do small sets? Are they primarily government contracts, military contracts? They're primarily government and military contracts at this point in time.

They are the leaders in that. Now, we do have contracts with slightly bigger the things than small sets. You might know it for World View or GEOI, which is the thing that produces your Googler's imagery. So we've had those contracts, all those satellites are ours. They're not huge satellites. They're on the smaller side of what we'd call exquisites satellites. But most of the ones we're seeing that are very small, these suitcase size or carry-on size are through the military and the government. And so then the idea there is that it's about delivering immediate actionable data from battlefields

in as close to real time as possible, that sort of thing? Yeah, what you're trying to do is trying to get situational awareness is what they call it in the military. They're trying to get a picture of what's going on in the world. You'll hear the generals in the different Air Force areas say they don't want to blink. They don't want to be staring at something, a missile, a rocket or whatever on the ground, and then blink and lose it for a little while and not know where it is. So a lot of this is about making sure you have persistence over an area. that you're getting that information back to the military or the warfighter as fast as possible

and making sure they have situational awareness. The other piece of it is we have a lot of valuable assets in space right now. So a lot of our world is around defending and protecting those assets as well. But most of what we're doing is trying to give situational awareness. I read you say that until recently there had been sort of a general resistance to small sets. Why was that? Was it just a new way of doing things,

like disruption, like the classic sort of thing? It was. There's two big reasons why. The first one is most people viewed them as a toy that they didn't really have high value. And so the mission value of what they were trying to do was not as great as what they would like. The other part of it was a threat to the large satellites.

People thought we were trying to replace the big satellites with these small ones. And you really can't do that. It's an augmentation. It's a fill in as a gap filler. It fills in where the big satellites can't perform. But you can't really replace all large satellites with small ones. That's not a really reasonable discussion to have.

But they are very valuable in the augmentation area. Well, Chris Dixon's famous quote is that the next big thing always starts out dismissed as a toy. But so final question, I like there's a whole universe of this that maybe we're on the cusp of. We're not there yet. But like there's micro satellites and nano satellites and pico satellites. So like is this again, the analogy to what, you know, consumer tech is like eventually can we be launching like tiny satellites like as the size of my hand or something like that? And you can today. It's a matter of packaging what is currently big into those small areas.

So, for example, we have one that's probably 12 to 14 inches across and maybe four inches wide in that kind of a cube. And we're packaging an antenna that can go out that's over a meter, you know, three or four feet in diameter out of that little tiny package. So it's about packaging things down in very small volumes and having the electronics be very progressive. But yes, that is coming. And we will proliferate small satellites throughout what.

happening in space and they will have value. You just, we have to wait for the technology to get there. We're probably at again the carry-on suitcase size for high value, but it'll get smaller and smaller as technology continues to drive smaller and smaller and higher and higher capability.