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Farhan talks about the story behind ExseedSat and his experiences of working within the space industry to launch India's first privately built satellite.
The NewSpace India podcast brings you insights by providing glimpses of the past, addresses the present challenges and installs a vision for the future from experts who have been involved in India's space activities.
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Narayan: [00:00:00] Hi, you're listening to the new space India podcast, a biweekly doc show that exclusively brings insights from the Indian space activities ecosystem. I'm your host nine, the co-founder of India's first space focused think tank spaceport by guests on the new space in depth podcast. Help you understand space activities related macro and micro trends within India in all aspects, including space.
Local industry space, science, technology, evolution, law, and policy art, and more, the new space in their podcast is supported by Dassault systems, a global leader in providing businesses and people that collaborative virtual environments to enable sustainable innovations. That's all system solutions, support startups, small and medium scale enterprises and original equipment manufacturers in developing disruptive solutions for space [00:01:00] launches and satellites.
Hi, and welcome to yet another episode of the new space in their podcast. And today we have who's the inventor of India's first satellite, which is privately built and launched on a space X rocket for unwelcome to the show.
Farhan: Hi, N B it's a pleasure and an honor to be here on the podcast. Been following it for a long time, probably from the podcast customer one.
Yeah, and great to be here and be connecting with everybody else on the podcast. Hi, good day to you guys, whatever time it is in your zones.
Narayan: Thank you. So before we dive into the topic of, satellites and space and everything else, I know that you've done a lot of different things life at the end.
Unlike, most of us were very focused only on space bits at the end. So would love to hear from you your own early days, because I know that, you're probably one of the only people I know in India who can go down to the basics of electronics components, connect that back to software, connect that back to systems, level stuff, [00:02:00] do product design from a baseline component level to then realizing the whole products at the end.
So would love to hear from you, what got you actually into getting into that frame of mind because, it's not really something that is very easy to get into
Farhan: at the end. I was actually lucky to have. A bunch of people around me all the time and probably by design or by fate and luck who were interested in making things and then, doing things set and stuff like that.
W my family actually has very little of science in them, most of them are professors of history or literature and stuff like that, but many of them also worked on the volunteer radio. So I used to tag along, and that actually was, I was really fascinated by the fact that, a voice travels through nothing and gets to the other side.
And I started for a long time from a fifth standard onwards to make a radio transmitter. And it didn't work of course. Okay. I had no idea of how [00:03:00] to go about doing that, but then one day, this is one of those weird things that our school had a very funny policy. Every teacher was also encouraged to pursue their interests.
So for example, a geography teacher was a radio ham. A class teacher was a good bowler and he actually caused our team. Our Hindu teacher actually did theater with us. Stuff like that. So this vice-principal one day walked in with a complete ham radio set and set it up in our physics lab. And I was completely blown that, I, here, I was struggling to get a toy transmitter going from one room to another.
And these people who are, very casually speaking to somebody in Bombay, withdraw Bangalore, and then, they even got somebody from Germany. They said, I didn't believe it because it's on more, more scored. I don't know whether they were fibbing or not. But that actually, so I'll just latch onto that group of people and I stuck with them and I'm, even till date, I am, in touch with that.[00:04:00]
So I'm among the things that they were doing there. These rumors of some of them who were able to go through amateur radio satellites, and I didn't know much about that at all. And what happened was that there was this local club here, the a hundred position, majority of society, and they had a shelf of books and I just keep rummaging through it to see if I can get hold of something or the other, because there's no internet, there's no tribal knowledge too.
Most of these people were basically using battered old world war two radios and somehow got them going. Very good and committed people, but they didn't have much of electronics knowledge. And one thing which I managed to extract out of that entire pile was an AMSAT bulletin. Okay.
Which had a description of Oscar seven and Oscar. And it basically said that the other frequencies on which, comes up. So one of the [00:05:00] Oscars, which is Oscar seven also had a beacon in HF in high-frequency okay. At 29 megahertz. And I happen to have a radio, which could actually, get onto that frequency.
So I tune under that frequency, although my antenna was not meant for that frequency. And whenever I was home, the volume was crammed up and the frequency of student, and I'd just sit, hoping to catch it. And in about three, four days time, I actually managed to get it guys, the beacon. So there's no prediction.
I don't have prediction software. But I realized that it's a polar orbit and the next orbit will come around the same time the next day. But it didn't come at the same time. It came about, 70 minutes later. And then I realized that it keeps shifting also every day. So it was a very, intuitive sort of a feel.
I got that, the passes keep shifting by 70 minutes every day and a new possibilities on the other [00:06:00] side, which also keeps the room. Then again, shifts back in the timescale. So you knew that between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM, you would have these passes. And if the past happened at eight o'clock today, it'll happen at, nine 10, the next day and so on and so forth.
And then the Mo the other important thing was that the passes were be longer if they were at 9:00 AM, because otherwise they were glancing passes, but I had no idea of this. So where does really exciting to get a signal from space, right? Then I had to uplink, there's no way to uplink, I'm just a 14 year old, 15 year old kid and stuff like that.
So he's crouched around and all that. And the other hams who were able to get. What they did is that they took these VHF walkie-talkies and hacked it out to generate just a constant wave instead of frequency, modulating it, then managed to, somehow pull the frequency or because in those days, the walkie-talkies didn't have PLL.
They were all crystal controlled managed to ground a crystal down to this frequency [00:07:00] and, get it up. It is a very hands-on way of getting on to satellites and being able to, hear your own echoes. But what happened was also, and this is the amazing part that apart from getting the beacon was actually more scored and then more scored.
They gave out a telemetric, right. And eventually I found out the format of the telemetry through someone and we would start, copying this down and no down the telemetry and then translate it back because it would basically give numbers out. So you knew that channel one was battery voltage channel two was, solar panel, 1, 2, 3, 6, et cetera.
So when I was about 16 years old or 17 years old, not just me, lot of my friends, I'm and others, we knew how satellites, live. So to say that, as the satellite tumbles that our voltages, which keep going up and down, the battery keeps going up and down, in the morning passes because it's just coming out of the eclipse.
The battery is going [00:08:00] to be low. Okay. Et cetera, et cetera. This is really fun things that we figured out about the satellites and these satellites are die. And when they would die, they would basically keep coming down with battery and then one day they would go away. So you had to hang in there with, better antennas, better positioning, et cetera.
And this has all been done manually. The new computers, there were no computers. It's not that we didn't have computers. There were no computers. Than to actually give a whole lot of us. And these people still are around a very intuitive hands-on tribal sort of knowledge of the lower orbit satellites.
What keeps them up how do they manage? Th they would have these bulletin boards coming up, saying that the satellite is going into eclipse for the next two weeks, don't operate, et cetera. So what does this eclipse business, there's no solar eclipse happening, so you figure out all this stuff.
So that actually was a big grounding that I had for subsequent work with satellites. And then at that point in time, you'd always imagine what would it take [00:09:00] for us to make our own sidelight? And that was not something that, I never imagined that we would, a bunch of us sitting here in and Bombay would be.
Off, but there was an opportunity of some alignment of stars that, God, that opportunity. And we managed to pull that through.
Narayan: It's fascinating to hear all of this, because today I see that. I don't know if you consider him to be a dead hobby today among youngsters or it's a generational thing, because I guess, people, the whole hobby probably got ruined by smartphones at the end.
Farhan: It's actually good that happened because what happened is a lot of people came into this hobby as a way of, you're not talking to people for cheap avoiding the STD charges. Those people have gone away, but the hobby is pretty well and alive last month from Heather, about a hundred people applied for licenses just last month.
Okay. And this is every two months there are new batches coming up. So the thing is that the interest in tech stuff, [00:10:00] and I'm not talking just about him, It was mostly coming from CNB towns. The city folks are, have no need to investigate these things. I'm in the curiosity sort of diet. I don't know why, but that's a separate discussion to have at some point in time.
But I see that there's a lot of stuff that these kids come up with, want to do. Okay. And this year radio, they say, okay, I need to build this. How can I, buy this or build this? Or, you tell them the about sidelights stuff. For example, the seed side itself, many of the people of the team came from, bounce and Orissa, and here and there, et cetera.
So actually there is a fair amount of very interesting folks who are coming, not just into ham radio, as hobby, but even electronics, and basic electronics and embedded stuff, et cetera. So when
Narayan: We talked about being a Hammond growing up in everything. I don't know that, you did other things in life, of course, before trying to build a exit side would love to hear [00:11:00] a bit about, your own professional journey and building companies and everything
Farhan: else.
Yeah. So basically what happened was, as I said, that, I am a great believer in Russia. Parampara okay. And I happen to have had some really fabulous mentors and I always look for mentors and, go and become the disciples. So too much of that embarrassment. Earlier on, when I was in engineering second or third year, I ran into this really amazing guy called Aaron Kumar.
His call sign was viewed to Oscar Zulu and he was actually part of the original area, but our team and he was a radio ham, and he basically instilled the stuff saying that, My friend, Roger, who's my colleague now, right now sitting here he was also a good friend of our own, and our own would say that, you just take on really ambitious projects and somehow throw himself at that and get it through.
So this entire hesitation of, free fear of failure was something that I don't ask us to, [00:12:00] throw away. So he, in 81, I think 81 or 82, decided that we are going to build a telescope to see Haley's comment. And we going to build a six inch up and he would every day, sit and keep grinding this glass six inches wide.
Got it going. He used to run a computer company here in those days, just eight-bit computer CPM computers. So you took stepper motors out from floppy drives and made a full asset tracking system. And the entire code was written on a 6,800, not thousand 6,800 microprocessor and about 1 28 bytes because that's the only memory which is available there.
So he was really, a huge influence on me and I worked at his place and my engineering project under him was to bring up a complete eight bit computer with an operating system called CPM. So that was the first thing that I did. And out of there, I was basically a hardware guy. Okay. I didn't know much [00:13:00] about software and thought software for sissies, it was just people who just stop, sit down on a computer and write boring stuff. Real men work with sorting that into some fancy notion that way. But what happened was that, as I said, that my family has been into literature. One of the things that we came across was the fact that all dual language did not.
Typeface. And that is because we'll do as cursively written. And it was coercively written with lot of patronage coming in from Kings and OBS, et cetera. So it was a very evolved cursive thing, which is almost like, it's calligraphed right. Out of college, I was doing, working at with our own in integrated data systems.
But, I thought that this was something that we could crack. And I met a calligrapher who had half figured out how to do it. So we tried, implemented it on computers. And in those days, for example, there was no phone designing software. So you have to design the font on AutoCAD.
So you write all these tools to translate that into, rasterize them, et cetera, because there were no vector phones in those days. There was no laser printer, so managed [00:14:00] to convince someone to import a laser printer and then, learn to. Directly to the binary, to the laser printer using HP laser printer driver, you have to write et cetera.
So that was actually fun project. And that actually taught me to program. Okay. And this is very tight space. You're programming to an 80, 88 with six 40 K of Ram. And you have to staff a complete graphical user interface, a text editor with , English forms. This is going right to left, that's going left to right.
And I had no idea when I wrote the software. I had no idea of what the link list is of water trees. And I joined Mtech and central university here, and the first class was on data structures. And in my mind, I said God, that is something more than just add is that you can use as a data structure.
So I, I grabbed that book. Okay. So honey, I remember, and I said, okay, this is the book for me. And this is going to be my future. I became pretty good at see, I think, for me, CS, as well as English, I can just visualize stuff and see before I even sit down to write stuff.
[00:15:00] So I got the audio software going and that actually then from ODU, it jumped into Vedics and split because very difficult. It's just, doesn't go, left left it goes top-down as well because of the, the conjugations which happened there. So did that then that business got sold off to see Dak Ciroc acquired it.
lot of that code is in there DDP software. I don't know whether they still sell it called iSleep. So the integrated into that, then I was part of the Iskey standardization committee. The Indian standard code for information interchange was for India languages. So I actually took part of the Porsche Arabic script Senate, which were a lot of Indian.
It's not just to do, Cindy is written in that script. The old Punjabi is written in that script. Psyche is written in that. We did that 98, I sold that off and then I took a hiatus for a couple of years. And then in 1999 a friend of mine who is also my chartered accountant he had bought a computer with wow.
A sound blaster on it. Okay. So you could [00:16:00] actually record sound. And being a radio ham, I said, okay. You've got these computers networked here. Probably I can record the sound on this computer and, take it off to the next computer. So that actually spun off from being a lab, curiosity of an Entercom, to being a complete voice IP service, which ultimately spanned about 70 countries.
We had some cust clients in 73, it was the Asia's largest wiser IP network. And this was before. The standardized on the protocols. There was no protocol. There was edge 3, 2, 3, but that was actually a video conferencing protocol that some people had to get going with voice over IP. I was part of the ITF group, which was doing the sip protocol.
In fact, ours was the first sip protocol, the ref the reference implementation of sip which is the standard protocol for IP telephony. We did that. It's still there on the homepage of sip. So that happened in about year 2000, 2002, [00:17:00] 2003. That business continued for a long time, but there wasn't much that I was doing there because had written the code and, had moved on.
And that echo, I got acquired in 2008. Then again, I took a couple of years off visiting here in Lama council. We started this cultural center because, really interested in culture. So we did that. And then, I was having a fairly happy and peaceful existence until Mahesh called up one day.
Why don't we do something with technology and we'd like to S and starting a venture fund, would you like to be a partner there? And that's, I said, yeah, I'd love to do that. I didn't know that, we ultimately were running our own company. And at that time we were looking at a lot of companies, including yours, through up we had a lot of discussions with drew as well and a lot of other guys, and that was pretty exciting to me. And I kept telling my hash that it's not so difficult to actually build and launch a satellite. And I think we have to do that, to see how this industry works and whether it's really, achievable at all or not.
So he said, okay, in that [00:18:00] case, let's, Florida company and we're want to do this properly. So that's how, the exceed site actually came into the projects got started. I remember
Narayan: actually, I think it goes back now seven, eight years or. From all of this. And one of the reasons why we started through our space, me and Sunday is we saw a gap in the market actually saying Israel is building all of these big satellites and there's a shift towards smaller satellite.
And, there could be niche applications that can compliment these bigger satellites and it's taken a while for some of this ecosystem to come through and, form and so on. It's still forming as we speak, but I guess we were at the very early stages
Farhan: and yeah, lot of businesses get killed because they're too early on the code.
There's nothing to do there.
Narayan: Yeah. It's an interesting thought and something that I think about almost everyday saying, are we still early or not in India? So what do
Farhan: you think? No, I think in the last few years, India is too late now. [00:19:00] Really? Okay. I think that, because I've been scanning the market, looking at investment opportunities, et cetera.
So for example, if you look at the launch costs, they have really plummeted. Okay. Some really good friends are still, looking at launch vehicles and investing in them or going to building launch vehicles. But, really, if you look at the, what space X is going to offer in terms of, launch capabilities, except for you wanting some really weird orbits.
Okay. But for that, if it's a standard orbit, it would be very difficult to beat people like space X and space. X are not the only guys who are going to be doing this right. Everybody from electron onwards will be doing this. So I think that market has gone. Second thing is when we're coming to building space, carves themselves at a space missions, right?
Whether they're satellites or otherwise I hope it's not too late, but I think that, we just wandered around trying to get a policy in place and that's really effected us [00:20:00] badly. There's no way you can get frequency clearance. There's no way you can get flight clearance.
You don't know which authority to explore at all. So what will happen ultimately is that a lot of subcontracting will come to India, but I don't think that the value will be built here. For example, if you think something like starlings could be done in here, impossible, because, you just don't have those sort of clearances, all that could be done here very easily.
A lot of these constellations would have been done from India, but, we've just missed the bus. Yeah.
Narayan: I think that our pockets, of course, we can talk about this later in the episode, but then would love to hear from you on your journey of conceptualizing exceeds at.
And then, looking at the architecture of the satellite itself and why you chose to do whatever you chose to do at the end. And then how did you realize it, the journey of the realization of the satellite itself and then, going towards launch and yeah,
Farhan: Okay. It's interesting. This has got a little technical I hope our listeners bear with us on this.
The whole thing is that, [00:21:00] I have always believed that you should, figure out the maths, right? You should figure out the mats. You start a mission typically by doing a link budget. And from the link budget, you figured out what, how much power is going to consume. And from that on, you basically develop everything else.
One thing was very clear to me that our first mission is going to be a transponder. Okay. There's nothing else that we could do. Because. It's you have to do this in steps, right? So if you say that in the first mission, that self I'm going to do a lower orbit satellite, which will have a, a three degrees stabilize platform and give you, 60 centimeter resolution, infrared imaging, that's not going to work, so you have to basically do this and you have to keep flying. That's the most important thing, for any startup, unless you're flying. Okay. You're not in space business, you're in business off simulations. What is it that we can quickly make and which will actually give us experience, which will, put us firmly in some sort of a place where, you [00:22:00] know what you've done.
So you have to pick up a mission which did not acquire, DCS you to pick up a mission, which could be done on low power. Most importantly, which could be done on one, you, because that's all you could afford because you didn't know where you were going wrong either. So given all this, we thought that we should.
An analog FM transponder. And that also is partly because I have expertise there. I've very radios all my life, right? I could build radios very easily. So you say, okay, this is what we are going to do. And then, you build these radio separately, try them out. So the payload is worked out because, radios are something that you can do, except that I had a lot of, I struggled a lot to have the receiver and transmitter on at the same time, I really struggled a lot because the transmitter keep kept overloading, the receiver, all they were at different frequencies.
You had to use something called a diplexer. So finally we didn't manage to, get that piece in place, but what happened? And this was one thing which, I was very glad. I kept [00:23:00] reaching out to people and asking them, from Kristen saw many of his role to you guys, and you and Sandra and be, and Jerry Buxton, who's the VP of technology at AMSAT USA.
Now us has this policy of and I think we just specific to space mission. They'll not tell you they can't right. They'll go to jail if they do that, but they can discuss them general stuff and publish stuff. So they would point out to, various things here and there, et cetera, et cetera.
We put this entire thing together and for me the important pieces of which I had no idea was the OBC and the EPS, and we went wrong with the EPS and I'll come back to that story in a bit. So for the OBC it had to keep running all the time. And thankfully I had some experience in that because in my internet telephony, I had to write switches, which could work for months and years without requiring a reset.
And I had learned how to do that. It was almost like an embedded program. It used to run and run [00:24:00] on Linux, but I remember that from 2003 to 2006, we did not reboot the system and the switch ran for six years. I remember this because it went round its clock right. Of that pit comes right.
When you say, what a PS and you get the process status out, it basically clock rolled over. So I was thinking what's happening. Then I realized it's been years since it's been running without reboot. Again, how, what processor do you pick. If you actually took a theoretical thing, you would say, you go to, a MPS four 30, it takes an instrument or something which can run on a milliwatt, it can run on a lime with two coins stuck in it or whatever.
But the fact was that, in order to write it properly, I needed to know the tools that we knew ourselves. So I chose Arduino which would consume, 10 million of current instead of, 2 million times. But I thought that, it's better to have a tool chain, which is reliable with everything else sorted out and especially where I can get [00:25:00] people to work on it.
Are, do we know something that every kid knows how to program? My son programs are not, we chose stuff which is safe to take on as a technology. And what happened was when we were doing all this stuff, I already engineered the radios. They were actually using huge sheets because I said there was a dispensing problem.
So we ran out of being able to use NiCad batteries. So the thing is this, and I never knew about all this stuff, batteries would care. Batteries are the most boring things, but they are actually so critical. The EPS is so critical to making a satellite that I had no idea. You had to have these number of cycles, right?
It would be best if I use simple NiCad batteries because Nikon has spent thousands in the charge, detailed cycles. Lipo has typically thousand but Nike ads, weigh a ton. They're really, heavy battery. And they also charge very easily. You actually don't require much of a charger or a resister.
You're not connected to the solar panels with a [00:26:00] diode in series is all you require and it'll charge very forgiving in the way charges. It doesn't have to be heated if to, restart. So it was very good. But when we finally put this entire thing to weight, we found out that we were, far beyond our power budget wait budget.
And it was $70,000 for kg at that time, from a space flight. And that was something that we just could not afford to. And you can't say, okay, give me 200 to buy a second new, which is another Katie. And that's a lot of money, right? It's about a crore. So there's no way we could afford it. So about four weeks before we were to ship this, we decided to switch.
EPS which is based on lipo. And, we couldn't develop this in that much time. So we bought it from Enduro, sad and sad to send DuraSite actually shipped a 40 unit to us. It was [00:27:00] not charging properly at all. We went through a couple of charts cycles, the battery was not coming up to full speed, which is why actually the exceed side did not last a long time.
Or probably, two months. But does, we are paid for a slot, launch slot. We decided to fly. We should not have in retrospect, so when a virus had this stuff, and he said, I'm pulling back from launching a sidelight Excel. So I reached out to him and I said, good job.
I didn't have courage to say that, it's off. But these are the things that you learn, right? The stuff you. Ultimately, we had put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get that going. But nevertheless, as a first first space mission which is building my, we didn't even have a proper office then, and everybody was learning, those George fabulous machinists, the first time in his life, he was building this and he was 70 plus. And later on, we figured that he was actually suffering from cancer and he expired [00:28:00] subsequently, but he signed up, okay. He taught me a lot of metalwork go to that. And I just walked in saying that, I need to be on the project.
So he was Teddy on Sunday. I was handling all the paperwork between space, space, light and us. And then so Delta just stepped in and she was not part of our team at all, but she was the one who got us space flight actually agreement in place. And she had. Critical project management.
So she used to actually run the XP service pack project. So she knew, what it takes to get this stuff going. And my age was kept fixing this stuff, et cetera. But the point was that we were always willing, 20 hour days, literally for a long time. And we didn't even have proper test instruments in place.
We had to improvise for example, to test these sensing, you can't test decency in a lab, right? So you have to simulate it. So what you do is you Mount the satellite on a clear day, and this was a big problem because around that time we had to deliver in October, it was monsoon everyday. Like it [00:29:00] is here today and it's raining every day and we couldn't take a satellite out.
So take the satellite out, switch it on, deploy the antennas on a big long pole. And then you sit in a car. With a re with a ground station with huge attenuators put on both the antennas and see if the signal loops through. How much the free space path is, for example, from here to the airport is 20 kilometers as the Crow flies, and then you do your calculation and say that it's working or not working, et cetera, et cetera.
So you do that. It took us almost two months to, get those things in place, but it was really exciting times. And I was reaching out to various people from Aaron to Jerry to whoever I could, get my hands on or who give me a time of the day to figure out this stuff.
But ultimately we did manage to do it. We kept things very simple. That's an important thing. We didn't optimize too much, which was, again, a very good thing that we did. So yeah. It was actually. A great [00:30:00] experience, really great experience. And thankfully nobody lost their cool sorta say, right? Under pressure that happens very often and that actually spoiled it even more so that an effect is, how we managed to get it done that quickly.
Again,
Narayan: one of the interesting bits of all of this is this also many firsts in all of this, because nobody ever attempted to build a satellite, even a cube set, for example, in India at that point of time and fluid outside of India as well, just in terms of the bureaucracy a bit. I know that there's a lot of challenges even today in that, but, so what was it like to, let's say, firstly, operate on those frequencies, even if it is amateur band or whatever, but also to just take a satellite in a backup.
Possibly fly to the U S
Farhan: integrate that I took it in a penguin case. Let me clarify. I didn't take it in a backpack. The thing is this, that thankfully the ham radio frequencies are pre-allocated right? So you, they are [00:31:00] pre-allocated and the, I look the coordination is done by international.
I measured your union. It's not done by WPC. So WPZ actually was completely out of picture out of the picture. They already have a located these frequencies for ham satellites and the coordination is being done by somebody else. So that is one thing which we didn't have to fight for. Now, what happens is a lot of people use amp frequencies, but the key thing of using ham frequencies is that any transmission that you make there has to be publicly receivable by everybody.
The format has to be well known to everybody and it should be available for use by already. With this mission was of course, so we didn't have a problem there, but the sort of problems that we, we would have much preferred to launch it to Israel. A second satellite went to his robot.
We would have much preferred the first one to be with his robot. So his hands were tied because it's real good, only billion dollars. They had never run into a situation where an [00:32:00] Indian company walks up to them and says, launched by satellite. Everything that is so launched, which belong to India was belong to Indian government.
So there was no transaction. So to say, so that actually and we actually spent a lot of time, probably about seven, eight months trying to get this out and to be fair to everybody in Israel, that they worked really hard trying to get this thing out, but that's the way government works.
It's not because of a lack of empathy, but just the way the structure is. And it remains the same even today. There's no further clarity, with all the meetings and all kinds of stuff that we have managed to, put out as papers and policy documents, et cetera.
We still write that, if it comes to a space mission, you'll still have problems clearing, I don't know how, other missions are doing it, but, and what about, let's
Narayan: say, taking the satellite out in a penguin case, were there any questions on all of this or people just said, oh, we don't
Farhan: really well, there were no questions [00:33:00] at at the Indian end.
But in when I landed in Seattle, I had a very funny situation because and then the Y too. So what happens is people who've actually seen us a cube site or any satellite for that matter will know that there is a remove before flight pin. So you basically am on the satellite side.
And once the satellite is fixed inside the spacecraft, there's a pin that you pull out. And then what happens is the moment the satellite ejected out, it starts working. So does this remove before flight pin? And it actually had a big tag with said, remove before flight.
So when it was coming from, do you think the flight over from the Indiana, the aircraft, which came to Dubai in Dubai, you have to change to the us craft, right? So the customs opened this and there was this satellite there it's had a big thing that said, remove before flight. So this guy thought that this was removed before putting it on to the [00:34:00] next aircraft.
And he reached out to pull it and had to jump and, grab it. And as I grabbed it, they thought something violent was going to happen. So everybody was, Would that action stations, but thankfully nobody fired at me, but I explained to them that this is main floor somewhere else. And then Seattle, there was another interesting experience I had.
So they had given me these custom papers, right? As you bring the spacecraft and you have to show it at the customs. So I went up to the immigration office and I said, you know what, I'm carrying. This is all we know all about this. So I said, how do you know about this? He says, today, you're the fifth person to have come in here because a lot of people bringing in their cube sites to be integrated into the space lights, the deployers that day.
So we had a lot of people and I met Jerry there for the first time. And a lot of people, those Thailand group as well. We were all discussing our own stories then on integrated ourselves, then we went out. Those interesting episodes, the customs in the by-end us, rather than it.[00:35:00]
Narayan: Yeah, I've been always exciting in all of this, you did this all on your own, a card at the end, and there's a lot of people of course, want to start these companies. And now venture capital and other things have mature in India. But I've been thinking about this for many years as to what can the government do or a do or any of this at the end, I would love to hear from you, if you see any role for government in all of this and supporting any of these efforts in one way or the other, or, even giving market access in one way or the other two companies at the end, what would be like your thoughts
Farhan: on, one key problem that's space missions.
You know what I mean? I'm not talking about launch bakers, but space missions face in India are primarily to do with two regulations. One is regulations with spectrum and the second are regulations around making. Spacecrafts and air products. Okay. For example, in the U S even if you do not, you're not the age to drive a car, [00:36:00] you can get a license to fly an aircraft, they're fairly straightforward, even if not simple rules of how you can make your own rockets, for example. So if you see all people who are working at space X on the technical side, they are all who, as kids have, built their own model rockets. And some of these modern rockets go a couple of kilometers into space, right?
So they knew what motors were about. What's the difference between the solid propellant and a liquid propellant. And what are the ways to control it? These people have had hands-on experience and unless as kids you have made it, when you had time to explore it or during college, and then you come to work, otherwise you will not have an intuitive feel to this.
So if you want. Get this ecosystem going 10 years from now, you have to deregulate it today. And unless you deregulate it, people will not be able to experiment. And people will experiment for the heck of it, not as a part of business. So what happens in India usually is that somebody works at [00:37:00] ISRO figures out how things work, then they'll leave a store, then come out and then uniform their own company to do it.
So they have used it's rose time to, basically develop the technology. But on the other hand, if you just allow people to do stuff that will itself, create a lot of people who are interested in it right now, you can't make your own drone, leave alone a spacecraft, even an indoor drone you can make as per the current rules.
So I think you have to deregulate that I think is important. The moment you say you have to apply for a permission, then it becomes really difficult. The amount of problems that you guys had to even fly a bit. All right, leave alone. A spacecraft was phenomenal. You're just trying to put up a weather balloon and you have to get a DGC, a clearance, and this clearance and that clearance, and that balloon is like a party balloon.
You can leave a party balloon and nobody will ask you a question, but the moment you're putting up 10 grand pill or onto it, then suddenly all these things, come up. So I think the key thing is to deregulate to allow people to experiment because unless they experiment, they will not develop the confidence of, building these [00:38:00] big missions.
And on the other hand, people were interested in this space should start building, right? So you don't have to build big stuff. But for example, you build EPSS, you will OBCs you build radios, you build all these stuff, right? Unless you have taken a solar panel and charged the battery with it, you will not know how the battery works.
So hands-on experience is very important because entire space industry is based on tribal knowledge. All right. Very few books. And even if there are books, you don't understand those books because you need people with experience to tell you how to do it.
Narayan: And one of the things that we talked earlier is if this, the timing of the whole industry is off or are we too late or all of this?
And I believe that there's still a massively big opportunity. The question is people have not really thought through how big this industry can get. I've been talking about this for a few months now on trying to see which applications in this country can be unlocked in a unique way that makes this industry very big.
So for me, the problem is that we actually haven't [00:39:00] explored any application that integrates into the markets directly, that user space infrastructure in one way or the other. So the problem that I see is when people in Israel are building. The building it to prove out a pertinent particular application that the application itself can be done from space.
So for example, let's take the whole, a potential fishing zone, or even, a fishing boat tracking, using space. And so on what happens is that it's process, or we identified this mission because there's a anthropology need, there's a safety net, there's whatever need. And those people who are, whatever anthropologists or sociologist or somebody like that says, okay, this is a requirement in the society.
And then it gets raised to a mission level planning where somebody says, okay, we'll build this mission that can solve this particular problem. Somebody goes in and says, I'll build this because I'm interested in this hardware. And I'm interested in this application. And what [00:40:00] happens with all my research that I've done in all of this is that the build that out, they prove it out on the ground, but they never operated at.
So you will do it in a way that you will say that 200 fishing boats are now operating all of this to 200 fishing. Boats are not fishing community in India, right? So you'll need a, a hundred satellites to service a country in India, right? So it's always in the business of proving applications are possible in space, but not operating
Farhan: it.
Actually the name says it all, it's a space of such organization. It's like a university, right? So you don't expect a university professor, even a professor of marketing to be able to run a marketing department of a big company. They are only theoreticians. You require people with entrepreneurship to be able to take on these risky and just, and feel right.
Nine out of 10 of spear startups [00:41:00] are going to fail good for them. I don't see why they shouldn't. That's what venture capitalists for that, you basically take high risk bets and if things work, they work, if they don't work, they don't work. And then you move on to another because as a VC fund, you're invested in 10 companies and that at least one of them is going to succeed and it will cover up for the next, the other nine.
I don't think that is through, we'll be able to do that. And the fact is this, as soon as basically into launch vehicles, business, okay. Satellites is not that business because earlier you had one satellite mounted on one launch vehicle, but now you can have 200 satellites mounted on that. So it does not have the scale to do 200 missions for every launch.
They were before COVID they were launching twice a month. But they can't be doing 400 missions. So somebody else has to step in. And the fact is that the costs of the mission has to come down to such a level that, you can basically look at it saying that, okay, it's like buying a car or something, car costs about 50 [00:42:00] lacks, a good car or whatever, or a small house, or an apartment. And for that much amount, if you can actually put a mission out and see whether it works or not, I think that's where you'll see a lot of ideas being tried out and then thrown away saying that, okay, this works, that doesn't work, et cetera, et cetera.
So we just do not have the infrastructure in India to be able to do that. And that actually involves access to launch launches at a very low cost by costs. I just don't mean financial costs, but even bureaucratic. How easy is it? If you have a small mission, let's say three, your mission to be able to fill up a form, pay up money and say, okay, in the next three months, I'm going to put this mission up and this, and this, the timeline has also become very critical because what happens is a lot of college kids take on a project.
And if your launch date is three years away, you're not going to hang around until then you will move on. [00:43:00] That's actually a big problem that a lot of kids want to build stuff, but the simply cannot wait long enough to get along slot. Yeah, absolutely.
Narayan: And when I look at the market situation today, I'm in reflecting back on all the last 15 years of trying to do all of this.
I feel like there is one thing that we've totally missed that people are starting to unlock. Which is I'm looking at, which are markets that can use space-based intelligence that I've never been addressed in India. The problem that I see having now worked in Europe and other places is that you need to understand culturally the problems of the place to solve it in a way that the technology fits that culture in solving that problem.
As an example, right? So we have 150 million acres of farmland in India. And you look at the penetration of credit in farmers. [00:44:00] It's still not nowhere close to anywhere. Where advanced countries are, informal institutional credit penetration, right? So you look at what has happened with respect to digitalization of farmland in India.
We're nowhere close to anywhere around the world as well, because farmland is broken. It's now an average farmers like less than two acres of land or something like that. And then you'll look at a regulation, for example, RBR regulation on lending, for example, 19% of lending has to go into agric sector in traditional banking, and that's a rule and you'll look at the challenges that the banks face.
They don't have actually a way of be risking investment, unlike, using a simple score for somebody who is borrowing money or whatever, for farming at the end. So now the fascinating thing here is that if you just take the credit rating that you can provide for farming sector in India, the market size can be more than a billion dollars, big every year [00:45:00] by building based data products that can be risked a lot of the investment, including climate models and many things like that.
So unfortunately, We have not really had people who understand these local problems in the country come up in a way where you can plug these gaps and work directly in a B2B ecosystem to solve those problems that businesses face that are market type, right? So you go to 20 different banks and tell them I will help you.
De-risk, like your investment in all of this, and you I'll give you a way of telling you, which are risky investments to make when it comes to lending. And this the same for insurance, it's the same for, microfinance and many other things. So talking about markets that are completely, ripe for disruption in all of these things.
And you can talk about it's not just a position you've talked about communications as well. I'm in logistics [00:46:00] at the end, how much of even. Or other, such logistics solutions can be explored for completely B2B solutions. It's not even, it is not even a B2C solution. So these are unfortunately like things that I've not seen.
People like explore in India at this point of time. And unfortunately, I guess the problem is that we need to communities for people that I see to participate in our ecosystem. One is people who are not from the space industry who understand markets directly and the problems that exactly.
Right.
So that is one sort of a people. The second sort of people is the. Traditional software operators in the sector like PCs or head cl or, whatever Infosys or others. Because today what I see is that these guys are running the infrastructure for every different industry around the world, right?
Oil and gas, airports, whatever. And they understand how that space operates. And if, and what are the requirements of [00:47:00] those companies and customers and software, right? And so we are in the space industry operating independently. And the moment we are able to link up with, what scientists are doing or what, Infosys is doing or whatever, for any customer who is an oil and gas customer or a, BP or whatever shell or somebody else.
And we are able to tell them that I'm able to give you a, some coms or some your product that adds value to your customer. That's something that I see that we haven't even gotten.
Farhan: In this country. Very true. And not just our country, most of the countries I would say. But more particularly with India and move particularly, I think because of the situation in India of, certain types of infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera.
So what are you seeing is very right because given the sort of, intelligence which space can generate, whether it's infrastructure projects that you're seeing agriculture is a huge one that a lot of stuff can be done, which is [00:48:00] not being done. And so as soon as not really the they're not the ones who will do it.
So for example, when you're talking about agriculture, it would be the agriculture university, which has to figure out this stuff, that I can apply data this way and I need this data. Then, are the companies would step in because see what happens now is until now we've been extremely excited about the fact that, you can build a satellite that is over right.
That's over 10 years ago. Building a satellite is not a big deal launching. It is not a big deal. What is a big deal is as you're, identifying it is somebody who knows that I can put this sensor or that transponder or, whatever, this is the stuff that I can put in as a payload.
So it's really, like moving from an embedded system to saying, okay, I've got high level languages available on the computer. Now I've went to build applications for your business. So we have to graduate to there. We can't just keep getting excited by the fact that we haven't got an eight bit [00:49:00] microprocessor, which can, switch on entities and such often it is, the Altair eight or oh eight.
Now it's a time for an operating system of sorts, which is already in place, in terms of cube sat in terms of being able to buy stuff, et cetera, et cetera, to be able to build stuff, which actually delivers a lot of value. And one of the things that we figured out is that if you go to, for example, agriculture department of state, right?
And you say that why don't we do this on site with space? They imagine that it's a 500 crore project. So if you actually tell them, but actually for, two crores, we can have one space mission going and you can prove this. Then this person says, oh, that's within my own budget and I can, approve it.
So you see that you have to go under that radar of where affordability is so easy and even you've risked it. So one problem is that most of the. [00:50:00] Are extremely inefficient as entrepreneurs when it comes to their mission. So let's start, which we'll take, about a hundred thousand dollars for someone else to do.
You will go and quote some 50 growers and the customer will walk away. So you have to be real realistic in terms of being able to quickly deliver that's the key thing, right? Being able to quickly deliver a space mission and do it cheaply. I was looking the other day of how much Elon Musk has invested into space.
X is he is invested $30 million is 200 crores. That's really cheap to get a launch vehicle off the ground, literally. One of the things that we have to learn from startups abroad is how to do it cheaply. This is a big myth that Indians do stuff, inexpensively. No, we are one of the most expensive people.
When it comes to entrepreneurship, we pay ourselves big salaries. Oh, real estate is one of the most costliest in the world, right? And Heather about it will cost you a bomb to actually, own a bungalow where you can put up an international Shantelle, right? This is so the cost of running [00:51:00] startups in India is huge.
And I think that you have to figure out and then also figure out how to deliver these missions, very inexpensively. So I think that if you do, then you will find customers whether in, within India or outside India, but that I think is also something that, that the partnership has to look at. Some soul searching it's needed that
Narayan: again, I had an interesting subject on some subtle things that I've realized over time, especially is unfortunately nobody in India, who's an end-user of anything space pays for it.
So what I mean is that, from what I know, at least what I've at least demystified over the. If the ministry of agriculture wants to monitor every crop in this country, for example, right? So unfortunately the minister of agriculture is not paying for that data. It is asking Israel for a requirement saying that, we, as a ministry of agriculture, want to have whatever food security in this country and so on.
[00:52:00] And we want to monitor all of this and essentially what is happening. At least my understanding of what is happening is that the end user, which is the minister of agriculture, which is again, a government body will go to Israel and say that you are the space guys. And, we want the service of being able to monitor of this.
And then the guys in this role have a special division in our program, planning division or whatever in that. And they will say that, okay, you will have this a thing where you want to monitor 150 million acres of land every year and whatever, dry and wet and whatever land at the end. And then they will translate that back into how many satellites this is, what is a resolution on the satellite, what band it is and so on.
And the way it is working is that it's processed that this satellite costs so much, so many crores in terms of the number of satellites and so many launches. And the launch vehicle costs 200 CROs per vehicle and satellite cards to know 500 per satellite. And they'll say for this monitoring service, you will have to then put together five launch [00:53:00] vehicles and 10 satellites, which is whatever 2000 course at the end.
And that gets passed onto the finance ministry saying your own, ministry of agriculture is asking for the service. So if you pay me 2000 crores, I will be able to launch 10 satellites on five rockets and, the end user they have. So the problem that I see is. Government markets are locked for entrepreneurs because end users are not paying at the end.
And so you have a way where essentially you cannot go and sell this to end users in the country, because this is the difference in us and India.
Farhan: So I think, but for instance, India is one of the largest customers of planet labs, right? For the defense needs surveillance needs. For all sorts of stuff, they are doing that.
So what happens with the Indian government space specifically is that if you have something which is working, then they'll just start buying. So the idea is not to wait for them to give you a contract, but to go out and build some system. And and just start [00:54:00] retailing it, see the whole idea of a product is that you build something that people don't know that.
Okay. When you are selling them something that they know they want, then you're already in the market, right? Where there's competition, where there is no innovation, there are other big players and it's most, probably a service. For example, people know that they want an accounting software. They know that they want an inventory control software or whatever.
But if you are looking at something very innovative, you'll have to build it first. Planet labs didn't have any customers to begin with. They launched some six or seven satellites through satellites and then started, once the data started coming in, then the customers came in.
All you look at what does that pay? Or how can I T 60? Is it yeah. Okay. 360. It's just three satellites, right? They have fairly small satellites that will use satellites. There's three of them built pretty cheaply. Okay. Bob Maguire, the founder of that is a good close friend of mine radio.
With a lot of experience and AMSAT, I think he was VP technology there. So [00:55:00] he actually learned a lot of stuff about building small missions there, and then he use exactly the same thing to replicated. And he just offered a service where he could map, provide a map of radio transmitters, Perisher radio transmitters, whether they're walkie-talkies or tanks or, whoever, ships going around, et cetera, et cetera. And that has become a really a key technology now. And a lot of people are, so I think the whole idea of a product is to bet on the fact that people will require this second thing is that now there are companies which are as big as nations who will want this, right?
You look at a company like Roche erstwhile, Monsanto. These people have a huge stake in knowing how agriculture is doing. All right. All for example, or for that matter geo now, right? W where do you buy what from, how's the crop coming up, et cetera. So they will require this stuff.
And I think the whole idea is to build it primarily for the private market. And you have to [00:56:00] build it first because these people are on legacy businesses. They will never appreciate what it can do until you show them what it can do. So there's this thing, I read about a wall street guy who said that he's walking down on wall street and he stopped this in seventies, late seventies to see that on a shop window, there's this upper two, which is running VisiCalc where it could, it was just 60 rows.
60 columns by 24 rows. And he said that I used to spend weeks doing the stuff. And he walked in and said, I'll pay you any amount I need. So it's like that, that the aha moment for them will come and they see the data they see, oh, wow. This is what it can do. For example, keyhole, they build this entire what's now Google earth.
So until you saw it, you had no idea why you needed it, but once you saw it, then you said, we are, this is what I need. Every real estate developer needs it now.
Narayan: Yeah. That is why I think that mapping [00:57:00] these things out and moving further. I think that's where we'll see a lot of entrepreneurs in India succeed in all of this.
Just to give you a sense of some of the new work that we are trying to do. We're starting a think tank. It will be announced soon on and the goal of the think tank is to basically match management research. With a space as a sector. And the goal of the, one of the elements of the, this is one of the elements of the thing time that we will have scientific statistical evidence being built from primary research that will actually tell policymakers how big can this market.
So you bring in a management researcher who is focused on, let's say agriculture, or let's say fishing or infrastructure or any other sector, because they're not biased about space. There are experts in that particular sector, and then they can talk about inefficiencies that [00:58:00] are local to India. And then we could tell them what is possible to be done from space.
And they could then say, okay, these are the inefficiencies that we can actually. And the size of this market in this particular segment is, X, Y, and
Farhan: Z. It can be done two ways. One is to let's, call people in, we're working in agriculture and say that this is what space can do and others to listen to them.
So you say, come in and tell us, what are the challenges which you think might be solvable by, applying space tech? Yeah.
Narayan: It's both ways, of course, in all of this, but the problem is that I think that a reason why we don't see as much support as let's say the software industry gets with, government supporting a lot of that is we don't really have any evidence that says how big this
Farhan: industry can get.
Yes. Very true. Very true. See, this will become a sort of a support industry. I don't think that space and et cetera will be an industry. But it's like saying, manufacturing, PCs. So manufacturing pieces is not the big industry software is the biggest. If you look at Intel's [00:59:00] market cap, Intel powers every computer in the world, but Intel's a market cap is a fraction of that, of Microsoft. I don't think that, launch vehicles and people who build space missions themselves are that they should really get themselves back and, put app developers, front and by abdomen up as I don't mean Android app developers, but who will develop space applications, understanding the domain.
So they don't have to bother about how the spacecraft will work, whether it can do three access via text or not, et cetera, et cetera. And that all will take care of, you just go and build your mission. And then we'll ruggedize. It we'll launch it. We'll maintain it for you. We'll, put it on space, et cetera.
So I think that's the important thing to know that, you're comfortably well off. It can be done cheaply, it can be done reliably and we'll be able to do that. If you can figure out what the heck is it that you wanted. So that's the key thing. And
Narayan: the most money of course you can make is when you are closest to the market and the end user, you will not make a lot of money, like profitably when you are in the current status of the market is [01:00:00] that as things get standardized in either, the launch market being organized or the spacecraft market being organized, all of that is already being done.
Which means that the standardization and the competition there for just the hardware itself, makes the profitability and the volume to be, distributed among people. And you are not going to be, building 10,000 satellites. You're not going to be, going from billing 10 to 10,000 satellites in a year.
Unfortunately I think, this is where we have not seen people do a, still a lot of things. And it's also the scale of problems. What, when you identify problems like air pollution or water or any other thing, right? So food and others, we have not really plugged a lot of the space-based solutions that can,
Farhan: the problem is you don't even understand those domains, right?
That's the tragedy that the space scientists are so enamored with their own technology, that they have not bothered to dip into. What [01:01:00] are the challenges and possibilities in other domains, right? For example, how many space engineers even understand communications fundamentals of communication, and, what's possible what's the latest happening, et cetera, or for that matter, digital signal processing as applied to images.
What are the possibilities of image processing? What is the sort of intelligence that you can get out of it? This is a stuff that. The S the people working in space technology have to figure it out right. Then they will be able to build really, targeted solutions.
Because if we just say, I know how to build an OBC, I don't know how to build an EPS. I know how to put a, to you together. Now you tell me, when you buy it, of course they're not buy it. Why would they buy it? But if you say that, I will tell you, what is the water level in all the farms of India, without sending people out there, then you're talking business, right?
So you figured out how you're going to do it. Whether you're going to do it for ground penetrating radar. So having to do it through foliage whatever it is, but that's actually the key thing. And this is what has to be, has to happen. Now, you [01:02:00] wrap up this entire business of being able to build space missions, and get out into the field and learn the technology of other fields so that this can be applied there.
Otherwise, all you're saying is I'm a C program. Okay. And I can build, I can write link lists and I can write trees and I can do, bubble sort. So pay me money. They're not going to pay you money to do that. They going to pay you money to solve the, so I'm going
Narayan: to put you into a tough spot of being a fortune teller.
I would love to hear from you from whatever we've seen in the last two or three years, there's a lot of things that have, of course in, eight years from now, eight years before nobody cared about this sector so much as what attention it gets today. And there's, 15 new companies that have been formed in the last maybe three or four years.
So we've solved a lot of problems in the sector, starting from, venture capital, being available, institutional financing happening with a lot of the companies regulatory changes starting to take place on all of this. We'd love to hear from you, which sort of companies succeeding in India and are not yet built and [01:03:00] with sort we'll make it really big.
Farhan: I think that. Sorts of companies. One will be companies which are looking at enterprise space, which will basically do a, what you're talking about. For example, agriculture being sold to, big, there are fairly large agriculture companies in India with fertilizer companies and et cetera, et cetera.
There'll be a lot of enterprise space tech, but really the exciting thing will come from. I don't have any other word for it. The P2P space market and the P2P space will basically do to internet what internet did to the legacy businesses. So what will happen for example, is that you, it will bypass a lot of local regulations.
This is the big problem which is going to happen. Now, for example, you couldn't earlier access any remote sensing data without taking an RSS permission, but Google earth completely. Why did that entire business and everybody had access to stuff and, you could see [01:04:00] your own house and stuff like that because of Google earth.
But there are going to be even far more personalized startups in just earth observation itself. And these will cater to smaller customers for example, like planet, right? You can ask planet to give you a daily snapshot of whatever project is happening somewhere else, or how your own farm is doing, which is, 500 kilometers away from where you are for pennies.
Same thing with, financial transactions. Let's say, lot of people are talking about it, but for example, if there's a Bitcoin satellite somewhere which can do transactions there are IOT. So all this will actually. Put up a whole generation of new devices, which are connected, which do not depend on legacy and by legacy.
Internet audio in 4g and 5g to be connected across. I'm very bullish on that coming through which will you know democratize data at a completely different level and in a completely different way.
Narayan: [01:05:00] And maybe some last questions we've already recorded for like more than a, close to 90 minutes now.
So thank you for the time. So we've seen a lot of young people build new companies and, not so experienced folks coming from different sectors, stepping into the community to build these companies out. And that's something that's probably unique to India that any other part of the world recently all of this, so would love to hear from you, There's a lot of young people who contact me or contact others in the sector saying, we are really passionate about the sector on what to get in and, they want to get their hands dirty and getting to do all of these things that there's not much of a support system ecosystem existing for a lot of these people to really step into the sector in a way that can really affect a lot more inventors, a lot more creative people to being in the sector.
So for an average teenager, who's now going to be, interested in the sector [01:06:00] genuinely, what would you advice in terms of them being able to, as younger adults, be inventors or be creators to come into the
Farhan: sector? See, I think the most important thing is to keep building that's the most important thing.
Did, I see a lot of. And this is a thing we today specific to India, they just think about it, but they don't do anything about it. So of course, it's very difficult to find a launch for your spacecraft, but it doesn't take such so much money to build it right. Build a prototype. Okay. It doesn't matter that you have to buy a space grid solar cells, buy solar cells off Amazon or wherever.
But unless you've built a system where a solar panel is charging a battery and that battery is running some radio's costs a couple of dollars now, right? So for probably 50, $60, you can actually build a complete space system together and, put it on your rooftop, flight on a balloon or do whatever.[01:07:00]
But I think it's very important to have that hands-on experience. And unless you have that hands-on experience all your it's just an imaginary world that you're spinning up. So I think that's an important thing to actually gain a lot of hands on experience. For example, a lot of them talk about this earth observation satellites, right?
And they go on and on about the fact that, this resolution and that resolution and this telephoto, and you have to fit a telephoto lens on to a raspberry PI camera and see what it can point at, add a servo motor to it, or buy a surveillance camera cam Mount, which can, you know, pan and tilt a camera and see where you can point.
It's going to be an education worth, half a million dollars to know how crude that entire mechanism is. You think you'll be able to get something like 0.1 degree accuracy. You're not going to get that accuracy. I'm just talking about picking one thing out. So I think it's very important that all the young people.
[01:08:00] Acquire skills to be able to build stuff very important. Okay. However, primitive, how are some planets best that you build primitive stuff. Okay. Battery chargers build solar battery chargers built OBCs build embedded systems build radios, find out actually how much range it gives you. These are all the things that are parts and parcel of space stick, and you can acquire these very easily and they ought to be acquired.
Even if you are not willing to be a techie, even if you say, okay, I'm going to, face a customer, it's important for you to realize what it takes to build this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And
Narayan: I think it's an exciting time despite, maybe being possibly a little
Farhan: bit later, see, this is the most exciting time to be a builder or a make-up as they are called these days.
You can buy anything from any part of the world and it'll arrive on your desk within a week. If government of India. Agrees because that's another big hole. You can't get anything. You've stopped AliExpress from, us from buying from AliExpress, [01:09:00] the entire maker market of India survived on AliExpress and they have nowhere to go.
But that's another, I don't want to start that discussion at the end of the podcast, but the fact is that we can get components from complete spacecrafts to not send boards. For example, the spring, which is, which goes on the bottom of the cube side, it's available from McMaster's cost $2.
You can buy that stuff. It'll be on your desk, it'll come in and then we'll up right. For $10. You'll get it. So I think it's important to play around with this, especially if you're an engineer and to, that's the only way to learn that stuff. And once you learn this stuff, then you know how much it actually costs to build.
Building stuff, being able to get money out of this will come a couple of years down the line. You cannot think that you will do a startup today and within three years or four years realize revenues. That's not going to happen.
Maybe
Narayan: final question you've [01:10:00] built and launched two assets up into space.
Where do you see yourself? Using all of this experience so far and doing things
Farhan: further, personally speaking, I would like to get out of XSEDE space as soon as I can. Okay. Because my, the originally the job that I had signed up for was to do technical diligence on companies that we would invest in.
And we ended up by running a company on its own, but the company has a team in place. I hope that the steam will be able to do the future. Actually the current we have two missions, all ready for launch. It does that. It was not flying much. So the third mission was I have not even touched it.
I have not even, except to do a review of the source code. I have had no part in that one at all. So I don't see myself doing much. What I would like to do very late in life is to learn more maths because really mathematics is at the [01:11:00] basis of all this. And I have been going around to debates and quizzes, et cetera.
And I should have been, sitting in the class and getting my math sorted out. So that is actually one big gap I have in my own, knowledge and I hope to be able to cover that up quickly. So that is my personal goal within space tech, to understand this technology from Matt's perspective, because that really is the key thing.
How do you predict an orbit? I don't know. I think, I'll use G predict to prediction, but I need to know. How that equation works. I need to know, how you can get one of the three constellation satellites to go into a slightly elliptical orbit. What does it take to do that?
What's the software, how does a PID work in ADC? S so at the end of the day, entire space, science is maths. It's not very complicated maths, by the way, it's fairly simple maths. You're not using tensors here or whatever, or, any of those things, but it's simple maths, but someone, you need to [01:12:00] know, figure that out.
So that, that's my personal goal here to be out of XSEDE space satellites as it's called now, and to be able to look at more companies and be able to, invest in them and, mentor them. So maybe just to
Narayan: close off would love to, at least for the crowd in hydrovac for you to talk a little bit about the radio activities here and how possibly they can be
Farhan: involved.
So we have a llama econometric radio club. Every second Sunday here at Lama Canada, 3:00 PM, Lama con, you can find on Google maps. So drop in here. You'll see a lot of people who are building earth stations, people who are thinking of building satellites, people who are doing radio work and also people not doing other stuff.
Building their own 3d printers they are builders makers. They are software hackers, all sorts of people gather here. So it's an interesting crowd young and old, all mixed people mixed together. There are people who are just going to secondhand markets and picking up, winter and stuff.
That's actually a good place to begin with if [01:13:00] you want to start building stuff, even if you're trying to get woodwork going or from there to building satellites. So I invite you all to come and join the llama econometric radio club CPM every second Sunday at. Foreign
Narayan: always fascinating to talk to you.
And there's so many things to learn and it's very inspiring, always to talk to you on all the whole array of things that you managed to.
Farhan: Do. You guys have been a big inspiration for me? I should be put it on record right now. My exceeds this wouldn't have been here.
If it wasn't for you guys on the conversation that I've had with you before we started this off.
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