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At Wyvern, we want a sustainable future for Earth; we're making satellites that will capture the data needed to get there.
Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.
Gregg Oldring: Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin Horek and his fellow learner. Co-founders listen in his groundbreaking leaders, discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show today. We have Callie Lissinna. She's the co-founder and COO at Wyvern John and Greg. I'm excited to have her on the show. I think just the fact that anybody's doing space in Edmonton is completely fascinating to me. I think what they're doing is really fascinating to me, but what are you guys looking forward to hearing from Callie today?
Jon Larson: Oh, I'm looking forward to the interview. I'm really looking forward to this interview. First of all, they're different than a lot of the other guests we've had on the show. They're launching things into space, which is unique and cool.
Gregg Oldring: Launching really means launching. Yes.
Jon Larson: I think they're, I think their actual launches this year, they've been developing this for a few years and they just got into Y Combinator. Pretty exciting company to be interviewing right now.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah, it's super cool. I mean, this is hard science and I think this is that's pretty neat to be just the, my inner geek is super excited right now. I think as well, like she's got a pretty interesting background, just looking on LinkedIn. There's some questions that I'd love for us to get to just about her career and how, how, what she has learned along the way has informed why Vernon and created this cool thing. So, yeah, I'm excited about it.
Kevin Horek: Callie, welcome to the show.
Callie Llissinna: It's great to be here. Thank you.
Kevin Horek: Yeah, I'm excited too. Or we're excited to have you on the show. John and Greg are also joining me today and they're also going to ask some questions of you. Three of us are excited to have you on the show. Do you maybe want to give us a bit of a background in herself kind of where he grew up, where you went to school and then we'll dive into kind of a vibrant and everything you're doing with that?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah, definitely. I was born and raised here in Edmonton where I am today. I went to the university of Alberta where I got a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, but that was really beside the point. The point of my university experience seemed to be the Alberta sat student group who was an extracurricular student run project that made the very first ever made an Alberta satellite. I started volunteering for that right at the beginning of my first year at university and continued volunteering until my last years. And that's where I met my co-founders. As student at Alberta sat, I operated the XL to one satellite, the very first ever made an Alberta satellite and nearly every day for a year before it burned up in the atmosphere as planned. I led the project for the first couple years of XL to XL to one successor, which has been to launch into space later this year at around that same time I met my co-founders and co-founded, Wyvern a satellite company.
Callie Llissinna: He based here in Edmonton and Wyvern is four years old. Now we have about 20 employees and our first satellites are going up at the end of this year for the company. That's my story and how I got here.
Gregg Oldring: That is so cool. Now on your LinkedIn profile, I did check out your LinkedIn profile. On there you did mention as well dance instructor, which is, I think super fascinating, this performance art and you're sending things to space and so super cool on both sides. There any interplay or anything about what you are doing today that dance or the prepared you for that you've used in work or in life? I guess?
Callie Llissinna: Yes, totally. So many things. I think one of the biggest ones is growing up, dancing on like a pretty competitive team. I learned what it feels like to be working really hard with the team of other people who are also super committed to the same goals that you are. Just feeling how incredible it could be when all of you are working towards that same goal, that same feeling I'd only ever gotten at Alberta sat and at Weaver. Right now those are just high functioning teams. I was first introduced to them at dance. Now as a dance teacher, I do learn things as I'm teaching that I apply to like how I work with my coworkers, like how I treat my dancers. I'm like, oh yeah, I should probably carry that lesson to work with me. There are a lot of ways that it overlaps.
Kevin Horek: Can you give us some examples of what you learned teaching dance that you applied to your coworkers? I'm curious.
Callie Llissinna: Yes. I want to mention that I do teach teenagers. I don't teach like toddlers or anything. So, but one thing is I learned that sometimes people just need a gentle reminder at dance. I'm like, we've gone over this so many times. I don't understand how you haven't applied this correction yet. Wow, this is going to be so challenging to overcome. I just give the girls a gentle reminder and suddenly it's fixed. And that also applies at work. Like oftentimes you just need to give somebody like a small nudge and that's all it takes, even though you can build it up in your head to be like a bigger problem than it actually is. That's something I discovered last week that has helped me at work that I brought from dance, but it's also just, it serves as a big creative outlet in my life. Obviously I have a day job sitting at a desk doing really analytical thinking in a male dominated environment too.
Callie Llissinna: I switch and go to like a highly female dominant environment. That's I'm up on my feet running around all the time and it's mainly creative thinking. It adds a lot of balance to my life.
Kevin Horek: All right, man. Cool. I want to dive deeper into you quickly covered it, but what exactly is why Vernon and what is its mission? Because it's completely fascinating to me.
Callie Llissinna: Why Brian's mission is to make actionable intelligence from space accessible on earth, like never before. Actionable means we're collecting data from our satellites in space that can be used to make better decisions on the ground. Mainly in agriculture and natural resources sectors, that data is in the form of imagery. We have satellites that take pictures of earth. We send the data to analysts on the ground that then extract some insight that can be used by the agriculture or natural resources sectors. Right now, although you can buy earth imagery from a number of different players in the market, why Bruns imagery is going to have more data than any commercially available satellite imagery has right now. By more data per image, we mean that there's more spectral bands. The typical digital image has red, green and blue layers, like an RGB image to give you like a full color picture.
Callie Llissinna: Why brunt imagery from the satellites that are launching this year, we'll have 32 different colors in it and not just red, green, blue, but we're chopping up the colors into 32 more narrow parts of the spectrum so that we get way more spectral information about the chemistry of what's in the image. That's how we can get more actionable insights.
Gregg Oldring: Oh, we need more explanation on that. That's amazing.
Kevin Horek: Totally.
Gregg Oldring: 32. So, okay. It's guys, I understand RGB, but what is 30 to me? Like what, what are the spaces? Are they in between RG and B? Are they, are you going kind of higher and lower frequency or all of the above?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah, that's a great question. A little bit of both. The word for it is hyperspectral imaging rather than multi-spectral imaging. Multi is like, you have a few colors like red, green, blue, but with hyperspectral imaging, you get a more continuous set of bands. In between like red and green, there's going to be a bunch of other colors in the spectrum. We're also capturing those. We can also go outside the red end or the spectrum into the infrared and near infrared parts of it. The reason you want that is because you're basically measuring the chemical signature. It's, it's close to like doing spectroscopy on each spectrum in your image. You're measuring the chemistry of what you're looking at. Agricultural agriculture story, for example, that can not only tell you whether your plant is green or brown, which is what today's imagery can tell you, but it can tell you what disease is plaguing the plant or help you predict crop yield to much higher accuracy because the health of the plant in a lot more detail.
Callie Llissinna: That's what you can do with the additional spectral information.
Gregg Oldring: Wow. I K I I'm hearing now, so you're sending things to space. That's physics, you're taking, I guess, images, that's more physics and crazy physics, which I, I never under that light always amazes me. You've got chemistry what's going on the ground and agriculture biology and all of that who knows all of that on your team, or is that like, maybe this is all about the high functioning teams. Like how on earth do you put together a group of people to make useful information out of all these skills? That's so cool.
Callie Llissinna: I'm going to add to that question. How do you put together a team of people that can do that in Edmonton?
Gregg Oldring: The.
Callie Llissinna: Only satellite that's been launched was made by students. We do have obviously an incredible team of the 20 people working at Wyvern are all pulling tons of weight. We have a couple optics PhDs, then we have yeah. A lot of engineering and aerospace engineering background. We do also. Our clients, especially with our first satellite are mainly in the agriculture sector. One of our executives, Megan Deere is the former CEO of another Edmonton company localize. She has a lot of experience in the agriculture data sector.
Gregg Oldring: Cool.
Kevin Horek: How did you get some of these first clients? Because like you said, Edmonton's not really known for this, so like how did you get people to put faith and trust in your abilities to actually make this stuff happen?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah, a couple of things. One of the things that helped us land our early deals is that our CEO had founded a company before. He already had some connections in the satellite data industry. Just having a founding team that knows who's, who has really helped us. Secondly, it's taken us a long time to figure out how our sales cycle works. Like why Varun has been around for four years. We've been changing our approach on sales constantly because you're totally right. How do you get people to have faith that you're going to deliver when your company is so capital intensive? We need so much capital to get our first satellite into space. It's not going to be in just in space until later until like 20, 22, but we need to show like evaluate our product market fit now. How do we evaluate product market fit when we're not going to have a product for another few years?
Callie Llissinna: Our sales team has had a really challenging job and we've just been constantly pivoting and doing AB testing, like talking with our advisors constantly to figure out what's going to work for this like really strange deep tech enterprise sales kind of cycle. Honestly, our participation in Y Combinator has helped really change our mindset on how we approach sales, just in kind of going after what's really important, focusing on like, what are your key objectives, key metrics that you need to show where you hit in the next three months, the next six months, and really focusing our sales team on those. It's been like a big journey and a big challenge figuring out how sales works in this particular sector. And we're constantly learning still.
Kevin Horek: I think, no, I actually think that's really good advice. I'm curious because you're in Y Combinator, is it, are they giving you, are you like, they obviously probably have people that have done stuff in space before, or how do you think they are? Where are they that advice coming from?
Callie Llissinna: Great question. There are other space and I would like one bus together with like hard tech companies in YC to the Y C the company that graduated from YC that is very similar to Wyvern in kind of its growth trajectory is probably boom, the supersonic jet company, because they also are really capital intensive. They have a similar kind of enterprise sales cycle, huge contracts that take a long time to land. Y C like internally has advice from previous companies that are like us in the aerospace sector, but they also did a good job of lumping us together and keeping us close with other companies that aren't just B2B SAS, like software companies, because they obviously have a totally different approach. They have had the internal expertise and they've also kept us close with similar companies so that we can go through these challenges together.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. I'm curious, how did you raise that first round of capital? Did it come from the university or walk us through that because like you said, it's capital-intensive.
Callie Llissinna: Yeah. We bootstrapped for three years. We got, yeah, we had founders contributing money obviously. We got some grants from the Canadian space agency and the provincial government pretty early on that carried us through the first years. We raised our first round, mainly from friends, family, and angels about a year ago. We had tried to raise money before that and it just wasn't successful. Don't think that's the first time we tried And then with admission to Y Combinator that introduced us to obviously a much larger network of investors and set us up for success with our seed round that followed the angel round. Now we've just finished preparing for our series a, which is coming up in a minutely.
Kevin Horek: Very cool. Cool. I'm curious then what advice do you give to people that are trying to raise money when it's a capital intensive startup? Because like you mentioned, it's incredibly challenging.
Callie Llissinna: Yeah. I think this advice applies to like health tech companies. It's not, don't just think it's also space like anything where your product is going to take a long time to get rolled out. You do need to sell focus on selling contracts for the future, not just letters of intent, but actual contracts to show that you have the product market fit, even though you don't have the product. That's number one. Number two is, it depends on the founding team and where, what, they're, what they tend to focus on more, but make sure you're keeping your R and D progressing at a really high rate, because if you need a lot of capital to even get your product to market, runway is even more critical for you than it is for other companies, because you could run out of runway before your product is even it's impossible to make it.
Callie Llissinna: Keeping your R and D schedule accelerating is a really, should be like a strong focus of the people that are operating your company.
Kevin Horek: I think that's actually, that's really good advice. I want to dive deeper into the actual images that are getting taken. We talked about the, kind of the colors in the spectrum and the stuff you're capturing, but, and you said you can see some like diseases on plants and stuff, but like how detailed and how close can I see, like, can I see like a speck of dirt or is it like how much zoom, I guess, for the lack of a better term for it? Can I get with your imagery?
Callie Llissinna: Zoom is totally the right word. I'm thinking like an engineer, the question shouldn't be like, how much zoom can we get? Because more is better. It should be, how much do we need? Like, what's their actual requirement. For agriculture, the action that's going to happen on the ground. As a result of our image being taken is fertilizer or water are going to be distributed on a field differently because we know the plant has this disease, how we treat that, we know this part needs more of this nutrient, how do we get it there? What is going to come down to is a farmer driving, like through the field, doing variable rate fertilization or watering, and the boom on the side of the combine that actually releases the fertilizer is about five meters long. What we need is five meter resolution, because that's the smallest unit that the farmers actually going to change what they're doing based on.
Callie Llissinna: We don't need to see your farmer's field is centimeter by centimeter. Also the crops don't vary that much like centimeter by centimeter. We're looking at like five meters, especially for our earlier generation satellites. As our technology advances we'll get higher resolution. We'll be able to serve different markets that do need the like slightly higher resolution,
Gregg Oldring: Like rows of corn, let's say that are either two feet apart or 20 inches apart or whatever the dude in these days that is that the next step then. And do you mean by that?
Callie Llissinna: Yes. Other natural resources like mining or oil and gas applications, remediation of old sites from the oil and gas industry, there's a whole host of things that will require a little more resolution, but we're focusing on the minimum viable satellite right now, and that is able to meet the specs of agriculture perfectly.
Gregg Oldring: Cool.
Kevin Horek: Got you. So, so then eventually, like if you're taking a photo of a crop of whatever, it doesn't really matter, you're going to send back optimum photos for a crop type photo, and then if it's natural gas or whatever, you'll send optimum photos from, for net or for gas or whatever. Right. Is that fair?
Callie Llissinna: Yes, exactly.
Kevin Horek: Okay. Interesting. I'm curious then how LA, like if you take a photo now, hypothetically, how long until I get that like second photo or is it like live or how updated are these photos?
Callie Llissinna: Again? That depends on the use case, but your crop is going to change on like the order of weeks, not the order of days. Even though our satellites have the capability to revisit the same spot on earth, multiple times per week, we'll probably only be delivering like capturing and delivering customers images like a couple of times a month for this first mission. The satellites are in an orbit that covers the, it orbits earth 16 times a day. We revisit all kinds of different spots at a pretty high cadence, but yeah, customers don't always need an image every time it passes over the location.
Kevin Horek: Got you. How big is the first satellite that you guys are sending to space going to be like, is it a size of a car? Like, can you give us some real world kind of rough size and shape?
Callie Llissinna: That's really easy. Yes. It's think about two loaves of bread side by side. It's very small. Yeah. This is, This is getting into our core technology, which I could talk about for hours. I'll try to Control.
Gregg Oldring: Only seven hours,
Callie Llissinna: That's why Wyvern is able to offer this product for the very first time is our core technology is mirrors that unfold off of a very small satellite. You get basically a giant telescope on a super small cheap to launch satellite. Right now, this type of imagery that Wyvern is selling would be prohibitively expensive because it would need to be coming from such a large satellite that it would cost millions of dollars for launch. If you fold the satellite up into a tiny package, that's also relatively lightweight launch that and then unfolded in space. You get a satellite that functions like it's very large, but in a cheaper package.
Gregg Oldring: Okay. I, I detect, maybe there's a story here because those are two. Launching a satellite into space, but then also having the telescope idea, how did this, these things come together? Like, what's the story behind that?
Callie Llissinna: It's a canonical like tech company, founding story, where Chris, our CEO was at the bar with Kristin. One of our other co-founders before Waldron started and Kristin is an optics expert. She would know all about the light and mirrors and the telescope. Chris is a satellite designing guy, some chemical engineer too. He knows all about the satellite and they were talking about it and they said, what? We could probably do this. Within weeks Wyvern had been founded in the four of us were together working on it.
Kevin Horek: Okay, cool. I'm curious, the actual parts that make up the satellite, are they kind off the shelf? Did you have to design and build your own a bit of both or walk us through that?
Callie Llissinna: The reason I use loaf of bread as the, to explain what size a satellite is because the salads we're making are called cube SATs. They're made up of 10 centimeter cubes that fit together in a modular way. If I am talking to students about this like elementary school students, I say like Lego, they fit together these modules of the satellite. We have six, 10 centimeters cubes put together to make our satellites that are launching this year. The reason that the 10 centimeter cubes matter and why cube sets are important is it's an internationally standardized satellite form factor. It was established in 1999 by researchers at Stanford and the California Polytechnic Institute. They wrote the very first ever CubeSat standard. The reason why that's groundbreaking is for the first time ever the space industry was able to take advantage of to a certain extent, economies of scale by manufacturing, many satellite parts that could be used on different satellite missions, all over the world.
Callie Llissinna: Whereas previously, every satellite that was ever made had been a one-off. So the engineering costs were really high. Now you can go, like, if you want it right now, you can use your credit card to buy a satellite computer for a cube sat online right now. And that's how available these parts are. They will fit together if you buy them from 10 different cubes that companies, so Wyvern is taking advantage of the cube, set a form factor and buying parts from suppliers to keep the costs down.
Kevin Horek: All right, cool. How do you actually launch this into space? Do you need special technology? Do you need to be in a specific geographical location? Just cause the only reason I'm saying is like the Kennedy space center launches a lot of stuff for NASA engine space and obviously that's in Florida, like how does that work with you guys and what you guys are trying to launch into space?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah. Unfortunately at this time, Canada doesn't have its own ability to launch into space. There are no Canadian rockets taking off from Canadian soil. We do have to buy a launch from a rocket launching from a different company because CubeSats are so prevalent in the space industry. Now entire companies have cropped up in the last decade or so that just broker cubes, that launches. They talk to you, they talk with space X or some other rocket company, and they will match you with a slot on a rocket that fits your satellite perfectly to just take you to the right location in space. We are using those services to get our satellites up.
Gregg Oldring: Do you just fed ex or satellite over to some location? They'll send it up. Does that, is it that easy?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah. Cool.
Kevin Horek: Wow. It's like Uber for satellites. That's cool. Okay. No, that's fascinating. How long does it take you to build one of these things? It like days, weeks, and afternoon after you order all the parts and you have them sitting in front of you,
Callie Llissinna: I should ask for a sponsorship from the CubeSat standard for this discussion. I'm just going to say that is the fantastic thing about cube sets is they are so quick and easy to build. You're probably used to hearing like in the news probably NASA missions or most of the headlines you will have come across in your life and those are going to be decade long missions. That is the typical timescale for a satellite mission is 10 years or more. In the last 20 years, since the rise of cube sites, missions can be on two year cycles, for example. We kicked off the mission for our satellites launching later this year, less than a year ago. Yeah, we'll be under two years for this first mission. I should mention that we're partnering with a company called AAC, Clyde space. They're in Scotland and they're doing the integration and managing the launch and operations of our first satellites.
Callie Llissinna: Their team has really enabled us to keep up a rigorous schedule.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. So, so when you say you kick off and you can do it within two years, what does that two years look like? Because obviously you have to assemble everything and kind of get it, but what does that really mean? What do you do in those two years? Obviously like, you'd start back over to get the two years following like another one up or how does that kind of work?
Callie Llissinna: From project kickoff, everybody should have an idea of what the objectives are, broad strokes objectives. If you don't have that, you're not ready to kick off the project yet after that, you just need to follow like a space engineering project management guidebook. Basically there is no document by that title that I'm thinking of. I'm just thinking of general like training and in space, mission, project management, or you have a preliminary design phase where your engineers are coming up with the, again, broad strokes concept designs. You have a review, like an in-depth review. This design going to work all the experts in the different areas. Cross-reference each other's work to make sure all the interfaces are going to work out. If that looks good, if you pass that preliminary design review, you move through that gate into the next phase, which is detailed design. Then you have another review.
Callie Llissinna: Then you move through that gate. If you pass the review into integration, so you manufacture the parts and actually put them together. Now you're not doing work on paper anymore. You're putting things together with your hands in the lab, after integration, you do another review. If you pass that, then you do testing. You subject the satellite to all kinds of crazy conditions and check that all the subsystems work now that they're all put together. If that checks out, then you deliver it to the launch vehicle. That would be kind of all carried over the span of two years in a really organized gated fashion like that, to make sure that there's a lot of appropriate reviews because it's the spacecraft. Once it, once it goes up, there's no fixing it. So it has to work.
Kevin Horek: Can you push software updates or any updates actually to it? Or how does that kind of work?
Callie Llissinna: Interesting question. You can, you can totally update like the operating system of your satellite while it's in space. I personally, like I get scared every time that happens, even though that everybody's done their diligence, I'm always like, what if it doesn't boot? What if it doesn't, But you can.
Kevin Horek: Absolutely. What's the lifespan of this first satellite, is it years or how does that kind of work?
Callie Llissinna: The lifetime of a satellite is just a function of the altitude that it's deployed into orbit, assuming that it doesn't have a propulsion system to boost its orbit over time. That with the altitude that ours are going up at, they'll have a lifespan of about three years before they naturally reenter the atmosphere and burn up, which here we go again, is another great thing about cube sets is that they're normally deployed at relatively low altitudes above earth. They do burn up in the atmosphere rather than creating space junk that stays up there for decades and decades.
Gregg Oldring: Cool. Here's another question then, this is a business you've created, so presumably then you're not doing just the one satellite. What.
Callie Llissinna: We.
Gregg Oldring: Tell you to, will there be more of the same satellite? It, will the next one be different? Like, is this, are you creating a menu prototype, which would then you'll do a lot of the same app or is this now in an iterative thing? You kind of do one at a time. There they're all going to be different.
Callie Llissinna: Good question. When I say so for our first satellite mission, we all, we actually already have three in the works. It's the first one we're sending up as like a tester, just to make sure like that works before we send up the next two, even on the next two are basically identical. We just want to, de-risk a bit by staggering, the launch of the first three. We do have already, we're already working on the next generations of Wyvern satellites, which will have better imaging capabilities, like better resolution, a broader spectral range, more spectral bands in the imagery. We have, yeah, like a more advanced satellite that we're already working on. That's not going to be ready for another couple of years. We'll have different satellites in orbit at the same time, serving different verticals. And, and I liked that roadmap because as I said, launching them in a staggered way, allows us to reduce a bit of the technology risk.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. How can you, so you launched the first one test one how after the first one does the second and then after the second one, how long until the third one gets launched, is it like weeks is a month? How long does that space it out between?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah, we're still figuring that out right now for a few reasons. One is that honestly, one thing that is really going to shake up the launch schedule for those last couple satellites is that there were a bunch of satellites planned to go up on Russian rockets that are not going up on Russian rockets anymore. There is going to be a scramble for all the remaining launch slots on the rockets at the end of this year and early next year. So that's one factor. We also are just, we do work with our partner in Scotland, Clyde space to select launch bookings. We're working together right now to nail down the dates for the last two.
Kevin Horek: Got it. Okay. I guess then ideally, would you want to do it weeks or months later or does it not really matter?
Callie Llissinna: I see the ideal timing between the first satellite launching the next to the pens on how long it takes you to get all the data you need to verify that first satellite is working. Cause you want to be able to verify the first one's working. You have time for change anything on the second two before they're already out of your hands. That amount of time is one to two months. It'll be just a number of months between.
Kevin Horek: Okay. Interesting. That's fascinating. Very cool.
Gregg Oldring: I have a totally left field question as a person that plays Dungeons and dragons. That is how I know the name. Wyvern how did the name of the company come to be?
Callie Llissinna: Our CEO, Chris loves dragons. He also loves Dungeons and dragons, But a Wyvern is a dragon light creature that has excellent eyesight. It's also very appropriate for an earth observation company.
Gregg Oldring: Cool. I love it. I kind of expected there might be a connection there.
Kevin Horek: I'm curious then in what other industries could you potentially target with this? Because obviously there's probably some military stuff if you wanted to go there, but what other types of imagery could you collect maybe in the future that we could really use on earth? I guess a follow-up to that is, could you take pictures of other planets maybe down the road or is it they're too far away from what you guys are trying to do?
Callie Llissinna: I'll answer the second part of the question first. Cause I'm most excited about that one. We could totally image other planets and why bring we're really excited. One day we want, like our dream would be to have why bring satellites in orbit around Mars, for example. We have a really good understanding of the mineral deposits or like the, all the, we can measure the chemistry of the surface of the entire planet of Mars with Wyvern satellites. If we had wider and satellites in orbit around Mars right now, we would be able to do that. We haven't figured out how to make a revenue that takes yet, but that's in the works.
Kevin Horek: I forgot to talk to all those. Well, you got to talk to all those companies that are like, isn't there like supposed to be like a community or some billionaire guys trying to like send people there and like a few years or something, we got to talk to them. Yeah.
Gregg Oldring: Actually, you know, follow up questions now. Back to earth, what sorts of things are interesting that you might've come across, that you couldn't make money from for this? Like there may be common goods about just getting this view of our planet that is so different. There, are there opportunities that you couldn't make money from, but the human race could benefit from.
Callie Llissinna: There is a track record of earth observation companies that already have satellites in orbit of coming together in times of need to provide imagery where in areas where a humanitarian aid is being sent, just so that we have a better idea of exactly what's going on. Especially if local infrastructure has been destroyed. Some satellite companies have released statements around the war in Ukraine and what they're doing to do their part. But one on a much lighter note. Some of my favorite satellite imagery is of when the ship got stuck in the Suez canal. There's like synthetic aperture radar, which is just like high tech, black and white really high resolution, satellite imagery of just, they're just taking it because the can the ship in the canal. Like, nobody we know perfectly well what's going on there. Every, I think every satellite took a picture of that because it was just really notable.
Callie Llissinna: I loved looking at like them coming out one by one every satellite company.
Kevin Horek: This might be a really stupid question because I don't really fully obviously understand the science behind it, but like, can you actually, like when you're playing, doing like a simulation, obviously you can do it in the computer, but can you do, like, because the satellite so small, can you like build a thing to house the actual satellite? It could be like, just in front of you and you guys can watch it move and open up. And, and that kind of thing, like, is there like a chamber you can create.
Callie Llissinna: While the satellites in space or.
Kevin Horek: Like, well, it's on earth and you're like testing it. Can you like build a model that kind of just like floats there in zero gravity that you can kind of tinker with and play with?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah. It's common to have an engineering model. That's like a copy of your actual flight model. The engineering model is the one that you can like poke and prod and kind of test and push to the limits. You don't want to push the flight model to limit cause you don't want to break it before you launch it. You can have like a, basically an exact copy. That's the engineering model. Talking about like building a chamber around it or zero gravity kind of stuff. There's a ton of a really cool testing and integration equipment involved in satellite testing. One of the things we're going to have to do at one point is again, thank goodness it's small. Put it in a chamber, suck all the air out of the chamber. It's a vacuum close to the vacuum of space and then heat and cool the satellite cyclically so that it.
Callie Llissinna: Simulates like mechanically on earth being on the light side of earth, like where the sun is shining, where it's very hot because there's no atmosphere between the sun and the satellite. Onto the, in the earth shadow where it's very cool because on the satellite around all sides, it's facing deep space, which is three degrees, Calvin like very cold. We cycle it through hot and cold cycles on the ground to make sure that the expansion and contraction and electronics and everything will survive that. There's all kinds of contraptions that we subjected to before it launches. Yes,
Gregg Oldring: That's really, I just have to ask our listeners will be like me. I, I I'm familiar with Calvin, but where is that on the coldest day on earth? How much colder is that in? Let's say the coldest you've ever experienced. It's a 200 or so degrees colder.
Callie Llissinna: Let's see. Three Calvin is minus 270 Celsius. I've never experienced that. I don't think I'd be here today. If I had it.
Gregg Oldring: One on the watch side, how hot does it get then? What's the, what's the hot side.
Callie Llissinna: I only know temperature readings from inside a satellite to when it's on the hot side. One of the saving graces is that if it only takes, like, let's say two hours for it to orbit earth, it's not baking in the sun for hours and hours on end. It'll be like in the sun for an hour and then it's in cold for an hour. Although it's facing extreme temperatures, it doesn't have much time to heat up or cool down. The temperatures I've seen from inside a satellite in a similar orbit are like 30 degrees kind of comfortable temperatures, but it is getting up to 30 degrees pretty fast from being at zero in the eclipse.
Gregg Oldring: That's amazing.
Kevin Horek: What types of material are you putting kind of on the outside to handle that extreme, hot and cold? Did you have to create something or is there something that are part of that, the pieces that fit together? That something that is already on the parts or did you have to come up with something for that?
Callie Llissinna: There's nothing there usually isn't a ton of components on the outside of the satellite that are too sensitive to temperature. You have solar panels, which you want to be facing the sun directly. Most of the outside of the satellites covered in that. And those don't have a problem. One of the, like the biggest are you need your electronics, all your chips to be able to withstand more extreme temperatures. Unfortunately that means a little, they're a little more expensive normally than like what's in your phone because you need the chips to be able to withstand more temperatures than your phone is ever subjected to. Also for the camera, we need to be able to cool the sensor. If it gets too hot, having a camera sensor B two pod is a common problem in earth, observation satellites. There's a cooling system normally to prevent that.
Kevin Horek: W what is the cooling system I'm assuming it's not like water or something?
Callie Llissinna: No, you don't want to have liquid on your satellites that causes all sorts of safety issues for launch and deployment. People generally avoid that if they can. So it's all electric.
Kevin Horek: Okay. This is going to sound really nerdy. I'm assuming you're running Linux on the satellite then, or what's the software on the satellite running like there? What operating system or did you have to build your own?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah, the software is being built through a contractor with, or, sorry, not through a contractor, but with our partners at AAC Clyde space. So they are writing the software. I don't know what is the base of the software on this satellite? I do know there are cubes that operating systems that are Linux-based those exist and have flown in space before.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. Very cool. If I'm a farmer and I want to subscribe to get this information, how would, how do I, how will I go about getting that?
Callie Llissinna: That's a great question. It took us a while at Weaver. To understand the answer to that question, like I said, we've been around for four years. It took us the first year or two to get a good answer to that. If you're a farmer, you and your farmer who is keen on precision agriculture technology, which is what Wyvern caters to you already probably are using satellite imagery or drone imagery, or other data from sensors in your field. You have an app on your phone that collects the data and shows it to you. You might already have a map of your crop on your phone using other people's data right now, the problem is that data doesn't have sufficient imagery to tell you in much detail, what's going on. It just tells you generally, how healthy is everything doing? We don't sell directly to the farmer because those doing precision, agricultural, all are already embedded in a system of like monitoring their field that they're used to and is working for them.
Callie Llissinna: Now why Vern would sell to the companies that are making the products that the farmers already using. We're selling to the analytics firms who are delivering the insights to the farmers, because the farmer themselves wouldn't know what to do with the hyperspectral image. If we just give it to them, they don't know the processing to extract the insights. A, we want to embed ourselves in the system of technology they're already using. We don't need to switch just for us and B, we sell to one level above the farmers so that they know how to process the data.
Kevin Horek: Is, is the information also interesting to an insurance companies? You guys explored that as well,
Callie Llissinna: Potentially why Vern is not tackling the insurance market, but our CEOs, the company, our CEO previously founded, did look into how earth observation data can be used in the insurance market. I'm not sure what it is about the business case there that doesn't quite work out, but I haven't seen anybody like nail that yet. So yeah. Wyvern, doesn't have any plans to go into that anytime soon. No, and I'm not quite sure what it is about that doesn't work, but if somebody could figure it out, then, like, I'm sure there's that's definitely an opportunity.
Kevin Horek: Are you, when you, okay, so the satellites going around the earth 16 times a day, I think you said, is that correct?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah.
Kevin Horek: Are you covering the entire globe then? When you sell to one of your customers, are they basically just giving you, like, we need the Latin longs of like, I don't know, the state of Texas or something, and then you can give them the state of Texas or how does that kind of work?
Callie Llissinna: The satellite will, so are each satellite will be able to image the whole globe, except it can't go above or below a certain latitude off the top of my head. I don't remember what latitude that is, but it's pretty far north and south. Most of the landmass we can get and the customer will place an order by giving us exactly that a bounding box of coordinates. Wyvern takes that bounding box and our Wyvern software determines whether our satellites can image it, like, or when's the next time our satellite is going to be able to image it. And then we tell the customer, yep. This is when we can image it and then they can complete the order.
Kevin Horek: Okay. Interesting. I'm assuming at some point, will you build a Google earth type view where I could just like scroll around the globe and like zoom into different parts to see all the images you've taken it, or is that kind of, not really what you guys are going to down the road or today?
Callie Llissinna: Yeah. To build something like Google earth, you do, you need to actually image the whole earth, not just have the capability to image the whole earth. And those are two very different things. We will not actually be taking images of everywhere and downloading them because sending images from the satellite to earth is actually pretty costly. That's like one of the most costly parts of operating it's because you need to be in the data down via radio, to antenna on the ground, like antenna on earth that can receive data from space. There's only so many of those, and they're only in certain locations and lots of satellite companies want to use them. You have to pay for time on those. We're only going to send back the data that we need, which is the data, our customers order. We're not just going to be taking images everywhere for the sake of it.
Kevin Horek: Okay. Like would down the road, like, is it even legal to build your own antenna? Like, or you always have to go through a third-party company to do this.
Callie Llissinna: Yeah. We could build out our own network of antennas. Absolutely. That's at the beginning of the podcast, were talking about being capital intensive.
Kevin Horek: So yeah,
Callie Llissinna: We'd need, and we'd need them to be everywhere because the satellite will only be over like able to communicate with Edmonton for 10 minutes before it's gone over the horizon. We need to put antenna up in New Zealand and like all in Europe, all over the world. So it would be a big operation.
Kevin Horek: Okay. This is probably a stupid question, but is the satellite going east to west to east, north to south? Or is it like, kind of going all over? Like how does, what direction is it going I guess? Or is it always changing?
Callie Llissinna: Yes. The satellite is inclined, not quite a polar orbit like north, south, but it's inclined roughly 10 degrees off of a north south plane And the earth is turning under it, which means that as it's going around that inclined orbit. Yeah. What it's seeing underneath is going to be constantly changing. And so.
Kevin Horek: Where are you using the Earth's rotation, but you're continually circling the earth in the same circle. Yep. Okay. Interesting. That's fascinating.
Gregg Oldring: That pretty standard way to do it? That typical of satellites or is that there's all kinds of different ideas around that?
Callie Llissinna: There are three main ideas there's that, but I just described, if you want to do a deep dive on that, look up sun synchronous orbit. That's the orbit that we're in. And it means that we'll pass. Yeah. Look up songs into this orbit. The other two main ways that people will set up their imaging satellites are, if you want to mainly image the Northern, like the Arctic or something, if you're Canada or Russia, you can do a really cool, weird orbit that the Russians invented. I'm going to mispronounce it. Monia orbit and it. Highly elliptical. It kind of lingers over the north pole for a really long time and then slingshots around the south of the earth. Other earth imaging satellites will be in that type of orbit if you want to focus on the Arctic. Cause it's really hard to get like a lot of time above the Arctic in any other orbit.
Callie Llissinna: The last option is geostationary, which is way further out like 30,000 kilometers in altitude, as opposed to 600, which is what we're talking about for a sun synchronous. There are imaging satellites at a geostationary mainly for weather.
Kevin Horek: Fascinating. But, but sadly, we're kind of coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about why Vernon, any other links you want to mention?
Callie Llissinna: Sure. I would recommend Y Vern's website as a starting point, it has links to our socials and everything on it. Our website is www.wyvernwyvern.space like spell out the word space. And, but on Twitter, we are at Wyvern space and on LinkedIn, you're also at Wyvern space.
Kevin Horek: Perfect Kelly, while I really appreciate you taking time in your day to talk with us and have a good rest of your day.
Callie Llissinna: You too. Thank you very much.
Kevin Horek: Thank you.
Jon Larson: Thanks Kelly.
Kevin Horek: Bye bye. Well, John and Greg, what did you guys think of that?
Jon Larson: Well, that was great. As a very deep dive into a subject, we have deal knowledge of. So Credibly addressing. I also think it's, what's really interesting to me as the complexity of what they're trying to do, first of all, to try to build hardware, launch it into space and then sell a product, the data and add the product itself. So I, I think it's fascinating.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah, that's, it's a high wire act of like six different kinds. I think we talked about your physics, chemistry and biology, but then it's a business to hold it like this like said that is incredibly hard, so kudos to them. It's so cool. It's so cool. What she's doing. I thought that was really, I loved the parts. Well, actually I was surprised by the answer to how debts now she's able to use that in work. I love that kind of stuff, like learning year and bring it to there and how, two people having beers ended up being this origin story for something that's ends up being really cool. Like, two people with two different disciplines come together and they realize, Hey, we can do something together that now these two separate ideas make something kind of magical. So I love that stuff.
Kevin Horek: Totally. I think for me, just the size of being like basically the size of like two loaves of bread, like how small they're able to make these things now to like send something back and forth between, outer space.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah, your frame of reference was a car. Now you can put it in the glove box.
Gregg Oldring: Thank you for tuning in to the learner.co show. If you're looking to be a guest, try out our app or want to get in touch, please visit learner with two L's at www.llearner.co. The music for the show is by electric mantra. Thanks for listening and keep on learning.