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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to In-Orbit, the podcast exploring how technology from space is making a better world. Brought to you by the Satellite Applications Catapult. I'm your host Dallas Campbell and in this series we'll be in conversation with some of the most inspiring minds in the country exploring the ways of the UK is using space to make huge differences to our everyday lives, as well as gaining a better understanding of its role in shaping and sustaining our planet for the future.
Today, in our series finale, we're venturing once again into the world of small satellites. Discussing the latest partnership between the Catapult and Open Cosmos to build and launch a key demonstration satellite to join the Open Cosmos OpenConstellation, and I'm joined in the studio by Gary Cannon, space Segment Lead at the Satellite Applications Catapult, and from Open Cosmos, we have Jordi Barrera Ars, Co-founder and Vice President of Technology, and remotely Florian Deconinck, Vice President of Growth at OpenCosmos. The Open Cosmos OpenConstellation is a global shared satellite infrastructure built to provide diverse, frequent, and reliable data of our changing planet. This new satellite, which is expected to launch as early as next year, will gather and process Earth observation imagery that can be used to develop solutions to challenges in the Atlantic Ocean, from illegal fishing to ocean pollution.
It's the In-Orbit series finale. We've saved the best till last, obviously, no pressure. Listen, thank you very much for joining us. It's great to have you here. Gary, just fill us in, IOD-6, what is this?
[00:02:04] Gary Cannon: IOD-6 is the sixth mission within the In-Orbit Demonstration Program that has been set up by the Catapult by our very own, ex-very own Florian Deconinck as far as I understand, perhaps Florian can bring us up to speed with, to where it came from. But the In-Orbit Demonstrator Program is there to help bring all these ideas that come out of various sectors, not just the space sector. It could be anything from agriculture and mining, seafaring, there's so many applications that might benefit from a space borne capability or technology, and the Catapults IOD program is in place to help bring those ideas to fruition.
[00:02:47] Dallas Campbell: And have you actually put, the number six lends a clue that this is the sixth iteration of this.
[00:02:53] Gary Cannon: It Two have flown, IOD-1 and IOD-5 have flown both successfully. IOD 3 was unfortunately on the Virgin Orbit launch back in January, which didn't reach orbit. So that's now at the bottom of the Atlantic.
[00:03:08] Dallas Campbell: And the ones that flew, are they, are they kind of working? Are they doing things?
[00:03:13] Gary Cannon: They were. They've now retired. They're quite small spacecraft. They're, what we call 3U, which basically means 30 centimetre long spacecraft, pretty small. So they've got a pretty short lifetime. But again, Jordi and Florian will be able to tell us more about that.
[00:03:26] Dallas Campbell: So, okay.
[00:03:27] Gary Cannon: Only lasted for about six months and they were launched, IOD-1 was launched, I think it was 2019. I'm looking at Flo.
[00:03:34] Florian Deconinck: I think, yes, it was just after I left the Catapult.
[00:03:37] Gary Cannon: Yeah, and then IOD 5 flew a year or so later.
[00:03:39] Dallas Campbell: And was the, is the idea it's like, Oh, I've got a brilliant idea for satellites, and then you guys come in and say, okay, we'll help you. We'll put it up into space. It does six months and then it's, it's just the demonstration. It's not like...
[00:03:51] Gary Cannon: Kind of. So I'm going to be a little bit specific or picky there because it's not, I've got a great idea for a satellite. I've got a great idea for a service. Yeah, because a satellite is kind of the bit in between. I want to see how hot buildings are. I don't want a satellite to show me how hot buildings are. I, my service is, how hot is that building? It just so happens that from space, you can see more buildings. So you can, you know, your service might be better.
[00:04:17] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, that makes, that makes sense, and this is something that's going to be going on into the future. This IOD, this is the, you know, the catapult is here to support good ideas, and it seems like a very end to end, like you actually help them design the bit of kit that's going to tell them how hot a house is, and then you help them launch it.
[00:04:34] Gary Cannon: We are there to hold the hands of the applicants basically, because generally the applicants, the people that come to the IOD program with their ideas, or they're specifically their business case, they have to have written a business case, and all of those applicants get judged on the standard and the feasibility of those business cases and the winner in inverted commas gets selected and taken forward, but the Catapult will Help those people out with all the jargon and the timelines. What's going to happen when? What kind of information do you need to provide? But the technical content is generally dealt with by the, what we call the platform providers and these, and in the case of IOD-6 that's OpenCosmos.
[00:05:15] Dallas Campbell: You're kind of like a producer, you help kind of organise and...
[00:05:18] Gary Cannon: Yeah, what's the word when you bring people together? Collaboration ...
[00:05:21] Dallas Campbell: A bringing people together-er.
[00:05:23] Gary Cannon: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:05:24] Dallas Campbell: That's, exciting. So, Jordi you won, is that the right word? So your company....
[00:05:31] Jordi Barrera Ars: Not really.
[00:05:31] Dallas Campbell: And so that's the end of the podcast. Thank you very much. tell you what, before we get into that, just tell us a little bit about Open Cosmos, tell us who you are and then tell us how you got involved with the Catapult.
[00:05:43] Jordi Barrera Ars: So Open Cosmos is a company that, our vision is to help solving the world's biggest challenges.
[00:05:51] Dallas Campbell: How hot is my house?
[00:05:52] Jordi Barrera Ars: For example well, to be honest, you know.... providing self shelter in an economic basis that people can afford. It is an important thing for humankind.
[00:06:02] Dallas Campbell: When you say we want to solve the world's problems. So give us some examples you, so when this company was set up, you were thinking, okay. This is, these are the boxes we've gotta tick.
[00:06:11] Jordi Barrera Ars: That's right. So humanity has been facing few challenges across many, many years, and we look at history to know that, well, more recent events, everyone knows about, you know, the climate emergency, climate change. It's just that with the space data using satellites. It's the best tool actually to provide data for some of these, not for everything.
This is like having a hammer and a screwdriver. Hammer is good for some things, screwdriver is good for some others, but actually for monitoring global events, global phenomena in a coherent and timely manner and economically space data is actually very well placed. So OpenCosmos was founded to actually help on this.
There's multiple companies helping on this push, companies, governments, agencies, different institutions, etc. So we are one company that we thought that we could do things in a slightly different way to actually help making this faster, more accessible to everyone, etc. So our different products and services of OpenCosmos, they span from Deploying space infrastructure.
So that will be deploying satellites, to get specific type of data for any type of customer and the winners of the IOD-6 or any of the IOD missions, et cetera, would be, essentially the customer that would come to us and we would put together this infrastructure to launch that payload and get that data from orbit. So that goes from the design, all the assembly, manufacturing of all the different pieces on ground and the satellite part, and taking care of like the launch. We take care of all the procurement of the, all the legalities, the certain insurance and things like this that are needed and that we operate the satellite and we provide that data. That's one of the services.
[00:07:55] Dallas Campbell: So, so people come to you, so if I've got a particular idea, I would come to you and go, well, I've got this idea, and you can go, ah, I know we can...
[00:08:01] Jordi Barrera Ars: You can come directly to Open Cosmos. Some people would go to Catapult and some institutions, and then they could help doing, you know, like a bridge. Yeah. They could help by providing funding, they could help by iterating a certain idea if it's less major to help them actually see if space data is the best one. Maybe the outcome is it's not, maybe the outcome is yes. But they could come directly to us. I mean, many of our customers. have come directly to us saying hey, we need this data or, do you guys think that you can help with that? And then we will look at which is the best way for us to do so.
[00:08:38] Dallas Campbell: Got it. And Florian, can I just ask, how did you get involved with the Catapult? How did that sort of partnership develop? Because I know, I think I'm right in saying that you used to work at the Catapults as well. So, presumably, you had a bit of an inroad there.
[00:08:54] Florian Deconinck: Indeed, and I think five years. So I started in 2013 and I worked five years and that's where I helped, so create what is, the In-Orbit Demonstration Program. So supporting companies and, demonstrating a service exactly as, Gary mentioned, and after five years, I decided I wanted to be one of the companies that one could be helped and to also, so go from the Catapult, which is a research and technology organisation into more the business investment type of companies such as Open Cosmos.
So that's my first link with, Catapult and the In-Orbit Demonstration Program. The second link is, as you mentioned, that, OpenCosmos has in effect two roles within this, IOD-6 mission. The first one is that we are providing the mission in terms of the satellite itself, which is being built, but we're also the one who are demonstrating a service out of it.
So we act as both roles and we effectively are building the bridge, which is how we can take advantage of the technology which is available and make it accessible for people who don't need to know anything about space at all.
[00:10:05] Dallas Campbell: And it's the idea with the demonstration that you use a prove that it works, and then, okay, this works, and then they go off and build more them?
[00:10:16] Gary Cannon: Yeah, I think that's the case in the IOD-6. Again, I'm going to look to our Open Cosmos friends here, because, this demonstrator is part of the Open Cosmos OpenConstellation
[00:10:26] Dallas Campbell: Lot of opens.
[00:10:27] Gary Cannon: Exactly, yeah.
[00:10:29] Dallas Campbell: Let's, okay, let's, let's just, let's get our, let's get our definitions. So Open Cosmos is the name of the company. OpenConstellation is. Well...
[00:10:37] Jordi Barrera Ars: It's the name of essentially one of the services or proposition of OpenCosmos really to the world. We are putting together like actually making it reality, a concept that has been for a while actually, going back dozens of years of the constellations. So constellation is a group of assets in this case will be satellites that work together towards a common goal.
[00:11:03] Dallas Campbell: People will have heard of the SpaceX, starlink.
[00:11:07] Jordi Barrera Ars: That will be a constellation. Exactly. Now in the earth observation domain, which is. anything we do to actually gather data, from the earth, for the earth, right? There's been, multiple constellations in the past, but what has happened is that either in order to have actually certain type of data, let's focus on different verticals.
One is diversity of data. So this is going back to the hammer and the screwdriver. Depending on what you want to observe, for example, put in the case of a climate change, you might need to gather different types of data. So these will be different types of sensors, instruments, okay? And you need actually different, diverse data to put together for a common picture.
If you just get, you know, I don't know, temperature at the surface, in land, you won't get actually the full picture. Okay, you might want to observe how the snow or the ice caps actually change over time. You might want to observe CO2 concentration. You might want to observe how vegetation expands or diminishes in places, etc.
This requires different instruments. The other axis is what we call the revisit times. How often you can get that data. There's no point on getting one data point and nothing else. Many of these effects actually span days, weeks, months, years, dozens of years. Okay. So in order to do that, you want to have a constellation.
In the past, and still now, launching a constellation is expensive, it's tricky, it's not in the hands of, like, many companies, and many people actually don't want to create a space company to get that data, it's not their business, it's not their purpose, it's not within their reach. So we thought that by creating a constellation where there's multiple customers that have a common purpose, but kind of like a collaborative approach, would be better to serve them all. So that's what comes a federated constellation. It's a constellation made of different satellites, diversity, more of them because in revisit times, but of multiple customers, which means that the cost for each one is reduced.
[00:13:17] Dallas Campbell: Interesting. So multiple customers, all with a name. We want to understand. Climate...
[00:13:22] Jordi Barrera Ars: Or other applications.
[00:13:23] Dallas Campbell: Or, whatever it might be but so each customer might have a different instrument or a different usage for their particular satellite and then group together we get...
[00:13:32] Jordi Barrera Ars: And they benefit from the others.
[00:13:33] Dallas Campbell: Ah, okay
[00:13:34] Jordi Barrera Ars: To do an analogy, it will be the difference between having a public. Transport system, buses, trains on the ground versus owning a car. Okay, so we benefit from a federated, from a system that multiple people use that makes it more economic, in many cases, actually, it makes it the best alternative.
[00:13:55] Dallas Campbell: Great so what does the Open Constellation look like now? I mean, do you have other satellites built like how many?
[00:14:02] Jordi Barrera Ars: OpenConstellation is already a reality.
[00:14:05] Dallas Campbell: Oh, so it's in space? Is it...
[00:14:06] Jordi Barrera Ars: It's in space. We've got, we launched the first satellite of OpenConstellation in January 2023. So eight months ago.
[00:14:15] Dallas Campbell: Okay, just pause that. What did that first satellite look like? Just a picture in our head. Is it massive? Is it a car?
[00:14:21] Jordi Barrera Ars: A six year satellite. So to go back to Gary's numbers, yeah, it will be kind of like double to the three year, right? So...
[00:14:27] Dallas Campbell: Why do you call it U? Why don't you just say 3?
[00:14:29] Gary Cannon: One U, one U is like a, the size of a standard unit within an electronics rack, and that was 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. So it's a cube.
[00:14:40] Dallas Campbell: It's a liter. So that's an old, that's kind of an old measurement in a way that's just sort of being carried over to this new technology. If you...
[00:14:46] Jordi Barrera Ars: And then it's back maybe from the eighties or the nineties.
[00:14:48] Gary Cannon: Yeah.
[00:14:49] Jordi Barrera Ars: Commercial electronics. Yeah,
[00:14:51] Dallas Campbell: So six U, six by six by six.
[00:14:53] Gary Cannon: Well, thirty centimeters, it's six lots of these litre units, which works out as thirty centimeters by twenty by ten.
[00:15:02] Jordi Barrera Ars: It's like a shoe box.
[00:15:04] Dallas Campbell: Like a shoe box. So you've got one of those that's right, and what was on the shoe box? What instruments did you have?
[00:15:09] Jordi Barrera Ars: On this satellite that we launched in January, there is a multispectral imager.
[00:15:13] Dallas Campbell: Nice.
[00:15:14] Jordi Barrera Ars: Well as multiple on board processing nodes, which allow us to actually process the images on board and to extract certain information, as well as obviously the systems that are required to provide power, to ensure that thermally the imager is happy, to provide communications, to download the data, to tell the satellite what to do. So, but the main instrument is, it's like a small telescope, let's put it that way that can see in different bands.
[00:15:40] Dallas Campbell: And that's, and that's actually working and the, and the customers are getting data.
[00:15:44] Jordi Barrera Ars: Yeah. Yeah. So we've got, so this satellite is on the backing of a customer that joined the Open Constellation. So we are providing images recurrently to this customer, but then as well, the satellite is generating images that will be available to other customers of Open Constellation.
[00:16:03] Dallas Campbell: And IOD 6, so IOD 6 helped develop that?
[00:16:07] Gary Cannon: Not the first one.
[00:16:08] Dallas Campbell: Not this first one.
[00:16:10] Gary Cannon: So the differences really are the fact that we're demonstrating a different type of camera and new technologies and capabilities on this second spacecraft within the open constellation. So that's where the demonstration aspect comes from. There's another company that Open Cosmos are close to, that have developed this, it's a hyperspectral camera, this one, isn't it?
[00:16:31] Jordi Barrera Ars: There's a hyperspectral camera, and then we are also putting an AI, artificial intelligence processor, actually two of them, but that's just for technical reasons.
[00:16:41] Dallas Campbell: What was the word...?
[00:16:42] Jordi Barrera Ars: Processor, just a computer, and this is, IOD-6 is a mission that has few things that the kind of like are the forefront of technology, but to summarise it will be a mission that will be highly autonomous.
Satellites are already very autonomous. We don't have connection 24 7 to satellites and we don't need to. They are prepared to do their thing and, you know, download the data when they have it, et cetera, and they have to get in trouble out of travel if they get in, et cetera, on their own. But IOD-6 will go beyond that.
IOD-6 will be able to take the images from the hyperspectral camera and then we'll be able to process them on board. Then read that information in itself and then re task, tell itself the satellite what it has to do in the next coming minutes or hours based on the information it sees. For example, if we tell IOD-6 to monitor a certain coastal area to look for specific type of vessels, ships, then it will take images and depending on what it sees, it will tell itself to then maybe image a bit on the side or forward, back, et cetera, another area, or to monitor it a bit later on. We'll be able to take its own decisions without ground control. This is kind of like the next level in Earth observation. So you can see that even though we launch one satellite in January, the satellites in the making, which we have a few dozen now, already have quite a bunch of capabilities that will come in place in the coming months, some of them in one year or two years time.
[00:18:10] Dallas Campbell: You know how everyone's like freaking out about AI at the moment and anytime anyone mentions AI, it's like the world's gonna end.
[00:18:16] Gary Cannon: It's the levels of AI, isn't it? Like, I think you're talking about, is it, I forget which way round it is. Is it level three? Is the Skynet, so is it level one?
No.
[00:18:24] Dallas Campbell: Well, you say that it all starts with an autonomous nano sat.
[00:18:29] Gary Cannon: So this AI that Jodie's talking about it, basically, if you can imagine a spacecraft flies over, but it's cloudy. Okay. The spacecraft has been told to look for ships, but it's cloudy. I can't see any ships. So the onboard processor will look at that data and say, it's cloudy. I'm not going to bother downlinking that data because every time you send data back to the earth, it costs money.
So there's no point sending clouds down to the earth. So it does that processing on board. Sometimes you might want that data really quickly. You've passed over the area of interest, the coastal region that Jordi was referring to. You found useful data. The AI processor said, this is good imagery, but we need it now because we can't wait a couple of days till we go back over that area.
There's more capability on the spacecraft called an inter satellite link. What that means is the. The IOD-6 spacecraft can then broadcast the data to another satellite, which is over a ground station, so it can then send it down quicker.
[00:19:21] Dallas Campbell: So this is the idea of, the constellation is that, that having lots of satellites with slightly different...
[00:19:28] Jordi Barrera Ars: You can, you can do that with constellations.
[00:19:30] Dallas Campbell: They also talk to each other rather than...
[00:19:31] Jordi Barrera Ars: Yeah, in the case of IOD-6 doesn't talk to open concession satellites. It talks to another constellation of existing satellites, which are not Catapults or Open Cosmos ones. It's a commercial constellation out there, but yeah, that's, Gary's, explanation is great.
This is another step forward, which I forgot to mention actually, which is very important for Earth Observation where there's certain events that actually don't happen in days, weeks, months, years, but actually they, we need to know, or it's very useful to know them. as they happen. Think about emergency, you know, natural disasters.
[00:20:10] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:11] Jordi Barrera Ars: And in that these satellites can do all the processing on board and tell you, Hey, something is happening here real time.
[00:20:19] Gary Cannon: Because you only pass over, you have to pass over a ground station to receive the data from the spacecraft, but you only pass over the order of four to seven minutes in Low Earth Orbit. So you can imagine if your spacecraft is taking loads of data, you've got to try and pump all of that data back down to Earth to that ground station that you're looking at really quickly and of course, the faster it goes, the more technology you need on board the spacecraft. But if you can beam the data to another spacecraft, then it can take its time to download that data.
[00:20:48] Dallas Campbell: Is thatthe kind of where we're aiming for kinda real time Earth Observation.
[00:20:52] Gary Cannon: Useful. Yeah, useful. This works.
[00:20:54] Jordi Barrera Ars: For some applications. Yeah.
[00:20:56] Gary Cannon: And this is where the AI thing comes in as well. It is useful data. It's not just all the data that we get, but it's the use. It's understanding what the good data is.
[00:21:03] Dallas Campbell: That's the thing. I mean that data we're collecting there in space, it's just unbelievable.
[00:21:07] Gary Cannon: There's some great stuff. Yeah, as Jordi was saying, constellation itself has got the Multispectral, camera already. We're putting a Hyperspectral camera up. There's this spacecraft out there, the...
[00:21:16] Dallas Campbell: The Megaspectral, the SuperDuper Spectral.
[00:21:19] Gary Cannon: Infrared
[00:21:20] Jordi Barrera Ars: Already a lot of bands.
[00:21:21] Dallas Campbell: Fun, who comes up with the names of this? I want to be like a camera superlative namer of things Florian, just tell us a little bit about Open Constellation We've got a nice sense of certainly what flew earlier this year What's the kind of grand ambition? Like, what will the Open Constellation look like in, I don't know, 10 years?
[00:21:42] Florian Deconinck: So our plan, as Jordi mentioned, is we really want to have a mutualized infrastructure.
[00:21:47] Dallas Campbell: So how many satellites are we talking about?
[00:21:49] Florian Deconinck: So the minimum capability would like to have for, let's say weekly revisit at least. So every week, more or less, you're able to take an image of what a point, whatever point of interest of the earth would be around 24, 25 satellites.
But we don't have to reach that, let's say minimum capacity to start sharing the data. As mentioned, we started with this first satellite and we have already, five more that will be launched over the next, nine months, and that's the beginning. So with this, we're going to have the first initial capabilities that we're going to be able to first serve operational needs and also test some, let's say, high technology and performance.
But more in a demonstration, aspect, like the ISL, Inter Satellite things that we mentioned. We really, we really trying to push, the technology up to the maximum of what it can deliver in term of time. So, overall, what this looks like is, so multiple sensors, as mentioned either you have simple bonds, simplistically, like, say, black and white or RGB.
But you could also have 30 or even sometimes hundreds of bonds. The advantage is to get more granularity and a good mix in terms of, for example, multispectral or hyperspectral, but also in the future, since you mentioned, let's say, five to 10 years, we will aim to have other type of bounds. So not only the visible bounds that we can all observe. But also thermal infrared bond. So it would be anything between 8 and, 15, 13 micrometers, for example.
[00:23:21] Dallas Campbell: And what are you going to be seeing, like, what does that tell us?
[00:23:24] Florian Deconinck: So the, specifically, for example, the thermal infrared bond is very adapted to detect any temperature. So meaning that, because of, let's say you have a curve, the black body, and you have a maximum of emission depending on the temperature.
Okay, thanks to this, for example, for thermal infrared, you're able to detect whether, house is badly insulated because it's going to emit a lot of energy, so it's going to be high temperature.
[00:23:50] Dallas Campbell: So, like, you know, the, your local council can look down at particular areas of cities and go, well, actually that whole block of flats is terrible. It's like a...
[00:23:59] Gary Cannon: Yeah, exactly. Yep. There's a...
[00:24:00] Dallas Campbell: Why Britain so bad at insulation when the rest of Europe is so brilliant? For example, not pointing. Not making a political statement.
[00:24:09] Gary Cannon: That's exactly one of the use cases of another satellite that's being built at the moment called Satellite View. They are looking at the thermal emissions of buildings across the UK, and I think it's wider than that, I think it goes across Europe as well. But the consumers of that data are exactly, as you say, the councils and government agencies, because...
[00:24:30] Dallas Campbell: They'll be looking into our souls.
[00:24:33] Gary Cannon: I'm. Not sure. Yeah, we haven't, we haven't got a soul soul camera yet.
[00:24:37] Jordi Barrera Ars: It's not about control, just so that people listen.
[00:24:40] Gary Cannon: But, but they can use that data. They can use that infrared data to do exactly as you say, you know, they can start to create metrics on how hot a particular city is or how hot a particular area is, or where the traffic's being routed around the city because those hot cars are showing us where everything's going and the city planners and the communications engineers can start to use that data to either create distribute the traffic, fix the insulation, or basically, you know, if they understand where we are now, that creates a baseline and it helps us to improve from a climate perspective going forward.
It's amazing.
[00:25:17] Dallas Campbell: It's great. It's amazing. I say this every episode, it is rocket. So I say this every like the fact that most people just don't know about this is the thing that's really amazing. It's so, it's so mind blowing like what we can do in space, and the fact, you know, the fact that we even understand climate change and what's going is because we have satellites and space measurement.
[00:25:37] Jordi Barrera Ars: This is a key point. When, when something becomes truly useful and people use it without having to know how that is done, that shows a level of maturity that actually matters, right? If something, you are using it on a daily basis. Yeah. For example, you're using a laptop, right? You've got a phone.
But, I mean, I don't know your background, but I, I guess you don't know how to design every single part of the laptop you're using.
[00:26:02] Dallas Campbell: I know every single... I know nothing. But that's great. It's invisible.
[00:26:07] Jordi Barrera Ars: That's great, right? You use technology, you use science, you use things that you don't have to know how to make them, and that benefits everyone. That makes us essentially collaborative as a society that we can push forward.
[00:26:20] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. I mean, it's a deep philosophical point, I mean the fact that there is no one person alive that could make what it probably is actually that could make a phone. But it's so specialised, but I don't know there is something I quite like pulling things apart and tinkering with them and trying to figure out how they work and things like phones are so designed...
[00:26:39] Gary Cannon: We still need those people...
[00:26:40] Dallas Campbell: ...to, not to pull them apart.
[00:26:41] Gary Cannon: We still need people that, we absolutely need the consumers of data because I walk around, I use. I looked at my phone the other day and I realized I'd spent 50 percent of my phone time on Google Maps. I don't, I don't know how Google Maps works, but it's amazing. I can see where the nearest McDonald's is or the nearest beaches or anything like that.
[00:27:00] Dallas Campbell: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
[00:27:03] Gary Cannon: But we still, we still need those men and those women and those kids to come into the industry and do this stuff because it's no good just looking at the data and thinking this is great. This is useful. It is good, but we also need the engineers behind that and the scientists.
[00:27:18] Dallas Campbell: We need, we need tinkerers, we need tinkerers. OpenConstellation, so tell me where it's kind of focusing, which sort of part of the world? Are you sort of looking at one particular area of...
[00:27:28] Jordi Barrera Ars: Planet Earth.
[00:27:29] Dallas Campbell: Just planet Earth, Joe. Might do some other planets later. But for now we're just doing Earth.
[00:27:35] Florian Deconinck: Actually it's more because we don't have the choice of, in some cases, the orbits go all around the earth. So the question would be why limit ourselves? When we, in any case, have to obit the earth, it's more or less pole to pole, 98 degrees, inclination.
[00:27:49] Dallas Campbell: Pole to pole. I thought, I'm sure I read somewhere that you were looking at the Atlantic, particular Atlantic regions.
[00:27:56] Florian Deconinck: That's also true as well. Indeed. So that's part of of the area and actually also related to climate change is a lot of the area in the Atlantic specifically, our interest is mostly on the coastal areas because that's where you have a lot of activities because of the way it's naturally placed and, that's indeed one of the, interest of one of our customer because that's first where you see a lot of changes more recently. One part because of climate change and you have a lot of, soil erosion, or just for example, you want to see what is actually evacuated, from, let's say rivers into the sea.
For example, I think there was a case in the UK where you had a huge amount of discharge because of management of water. That's one way to monitor what is expelled out of it from space. Specifically of interest to us because there are very broad areas. When you think about, for example, monitoring coastlines, it's very hard to do with one plane and very expensive to do it continuously.
But if you have an asset which is orbiting the Earth and can take strips of, let's say, 20 by 600 kilometers, then you can easily have a very good overview within one pass, and that's one of the key advantages of satellites. You mentioned the role for climate change. I think it contributes to the majority of what they call the essential climate variable and, I think it's at least one third of all the ECV, Essential Climate Variable, can only be monitored from space. For example, monitoring the height of the sea is not something you go, you know, you're going to the sea and you say, Oh, is it higher or lower than my belly.
[00:29:33] Dallas Campbell: A big stick, that's what you need.
[00:29:35] Florian Deconinck: You need to, to use satellites. So not necessarily small satellites, but big satellites.
[00:29:39] Dallas Campbell: So satellites plus ground truthing plus, well I suppose the better the information that you put into the climate models the more sense it makes.
[00:29:50] Gary Cannon: And the better prepared we are to deal with it. If we understand more fidelity, then, yeah, we can implement the technology to recover.
[00:29:57] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. Let's talk about the technical challenges, like how, I mean from sort of catapult point of view and doing this kinda stuff. How... is it easy ? Is it like a massive headache like I did? I gives a sense of the sort of technical challenges of...
[00:30:13] Gary Cannon: There's an old...
[00:30:15] Dallas Campbell: ... Building something like this.
[00:30:16] Gary Cannon: There's an old phrase in space. Space is hard. We know that. It's not...
[00:30:20] Dallas Campbell: We're constantly reminded that space is not straightforward.
[00:30:25] Gary Cannon: So, yeah, there's a lot of systems, even in the smallest satellites. There's a lot of systems and there's a lot of people. You've got onboard processing, power generation and distribution.
You've got attitude control, the thermal control, environment control, all of this, obviously, there's a lot of radiation up in space. So there's a lot of people, well, a lot of skills required to put even the smallest spacecraft in space.
[00:30:48] Dallas Campbell: And launch as we know, as you mentioned, the Virgin Orbit.
[00:30:50] Gary Cannon: Let's not even go there. Yeah. Launch is a massive sector as well.
So technically it's a tough gig. So, the likes of Open Cosmos have got those specialists in those various areas and they can work together and they do to interface these various systems to make the system work, and where the catapult comes into that is we have an understanding of the processes, project processes, technical processes, financial processes, and we can tell people not within that system how it works, because of course, if they're a bit more confident about how it works, they've got more knowledge, they can start to implement their business case better.
[00:31:25] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. Flo, you worked at, you know, you work in OpenCosmos and you worked at the Catapult. How important is collaboration? How important is it to have these organisations working together rather than separately, independently?
[00:31:38] Florian Deconinck: So first part is, synergies of the effectively the amount and diversity, versatility of skills you need to build a space mission. We have to think that building a space mission is similar as building a completely different ecosystem, but outside the earth where you don't have your own energy. That's why you need the sun and you need your own independent processing.
So it's so complex. Even, you know, our body control, our temperature naturally. We don't think about it. The satellite needs to pay attention on its own. So we need to rebuild an entire organism, the satellite, so that it can survive. Out of this, you need to put all of the pieces together. So you have all the different, programmatic layers.
So regulation, making sure things are on time, that we are well observed. But also making, aggregating the technology into something useful that after serves a benefit. So we are not doing only, let's say, technology for the sake of it because it's fun, but so that it can benefit people on the ground. So if I put it simplistically, it needs to be very simple for the people who use it, but it's as simple for them as it's going to be hard for us.
The same as for everything, and within this, the amount of skills that you can have for the Open Cosmos is fantastic, but at the end we are between, let's say, 70 close to 80 people towards the end of the year. We are never short of, competencies or even facilities, which are heavy in terms of capital, that a small company will have struggled to justify financially.
[00:33:14] Dallas Campbell: That's quite a good way of putting it actually. The more complicated it is for you, the simpler it is for the user.
[00:33:20] Gary Cannon: But that said, this, there's a bit of a trend at the moment within the space industry and the hardware side of things, towards this plug and play type of regimen, especially in the, new space kind of area, because the old space guys used to build everything themselves, all of those processor boards and yes, attitude control boards. They did all the electronics and the software and the firmware and the interfacing. Whereas nowadays you can buy these units off the shelf and essentially plug them into your spacecraft and they're ready to go. It's, it' obviously more complicated than that, but we're...
[00:33:48] Dallas Campbell: Now, I get it.
[00:33:49] Gary Cannon: Space is going that way.
[00:33:51] Dallas Campbell: So we're seeing this great revolution, certainly in satellites becoming much smaller, things like plug and play, as you said, launch becoming cheaper, and there's obviously lots of talk certainly about launch in the UK. I'm interested in where is this ending up? I mentioned this idea of sort of real time Earth observation. Is that the goal or what, you know, what's the sort of landscape going to look like in the, you know, in a decade or so, do you think?
[00:34:16] Jordi Barrera Ars: The goal is really to make something that is useful, that helps humanity. So whatever we need to keep ourselves here safe on our planet, right? So we have a responsibility as society to, we have the potential to cause a lot of damage, but we also obviously have responsibility and potential to do a lot of good.
So this data actually will help us. It will take us where really it needs to. Now going to a bit more detail for certain things, yes, we are working at real time. Information for some other things we're looking at. It's not needed real time. Actually, what you need maybe is information like a time series information that you can actually extract a trend to actually see if something is changing the way you think.
The first thing to solve a problem is to actually understand it right. It's to actually monitor it for some time, get the data, truly understand it, and then apply the solutions, and then check if those solutions actually are solving the problem. Sometimes we get it wrong. So all this data will help on that.
There's a diversity of data. There's different type of instruments across different bands, and across literally a different spectrum. I mean, we are not talking only like obviously visual, but going to infrared, there's all the radio waves. There's multiple ways to actually sense same way that we see with our eyes.
We hear with our ears. It's the same as well.
[00:35:42] Dallas Campbell: We see clearer, clearer and clearer. Flo, you're about to say something.
[00:35:47] Florian Deconinck: Building on what you said about the time criticality. So one of the important point is as we get, let's say, more capacity to, let's say, create a change. So either through the different use of machinery or because it could be climate change or other things. The sooner you can identify that there is a problem, the more capable you are to solve it and there are many aspects which you can't solve if you don't have, for within 15 to 30 minutes. Fire detection, which at the moment is very, very much of an interest because of the summer period. At the time when we did some researches, it was some years ago, the fire brigade was saying, look, we need to identify within 15 to 30 minutes where the fire has started.
If we don't get this, then, it's effectively, it's a decrease exponentially in terms of efficiency. So that's when having the right information at the right time is key, and if you can't see something, you're very unlikely to be able to fix it. Satellites have been underused because of different hurdles of time, the huge amount of cost and thanks to, let's say, new miniaturised technology, we can now have access to many more satellites. So there may be less performance, for example, in terms of resolution. We're not going to reach 30 cm resolution on the ground, which you can with 3 ton satellites. But you're going to gain another order of magnitude in terms of how often you can see the world.
You're not seeing the world, for example, like an image every, for example week, you're going to see it, be able to see the image a bit more like a video, and be able to react much faster to task the satellite, but also to retrieve the data, and that's really where we are going forward. That's also why we developed our own data platform that we call Data Cosmos, is to bridge, the last part of, of the gap, which is how you go from data to actionable information.
In a simpler world, how do you have an app store of applications using satellite imagery? It's similar to Google Maps. Imagine that instead of having only visual, you're going to have thermal infrared as well. But you could also have alerts. For example, you say, oh, there is an oil spill here. There is an alarm sent, for example, to a desalinator that needs to know that it needs to stop the intake of water, otherwise it's going to be polluted. Sorry, it goes a bit into a lot of different ramifications, but that's real concrete examples of how this could be changed.
[00:38:18] Dallas Campbell: So one satellite will be able to say, crikey, Dallas's printer's not working, and it'll send another satellite, We're on it, we're on it, and then they'll beam something down and get it. Yeah, I...
[00:38:27] Gary Cannon: Well that's comms. That's what that's coming. That's real. That's here. That's called IOT.
[00:38:31] Dallas Campbell: You know what? I mean, I often say to people, and I sort of talk about this sort of area. Modern civilization would not be able to function without what we're doing in space now. And even more so in the decades to come. I mean, it's, we're gonna be entirely reliant on it.
[00:38:48] Jordi Barrera Ars: You are using space data every day without realizing weather forecast, GPS, these are examples that everyone knows, but communications and just literally monitoring the earth for many, many things that then are used for scientists and day to day companies to manage our livelihoods.
[00:39:03] Gary Cannon: And there was a report issued a few years ago, the Blackett report, that said, it looked at what would happen if we lost the GPS system, and it would cost the UK economy a billion pounds a day, for every day, because there's so much of the industry, and the UK relies on that data, that timing.
[00:39:23] Dallas Campbell: It is crazy. I'd be okay, 'cause I used to be a motorcycle dispatch rider in London. I had my A to Z and I was, I could just whip it out my bag. I know where I'm going.
[00:39:31] Gary Cannon: Okay. But all of those traffic lights that you pass through run on a timing signal. And some of those timing signals are provided by the GPS in the Galileo satellites.
[00:39:41] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:39:41] Jordi Barrera Ars: Your phone has atomic precision, thanks to the GPS satellites.
[00:39:45] Dallas Campbell: I can never get reception here. That's my other annoying thing.
[00:39:47] Gary Cannon: Bank machines,
[00:39:48] Dallas Campbell: Bank
[00:39:49] Gary Cannon: they go down.
[00:39:50] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, everything. Just tell me about how's the UK doing in all of this? Are we kind of punching above our weight? Do you think? Are we...?
[00:39:57] Gary Cannon: I think so. Yeah.
[00:39:59] Dallas Campbell: Are people looking at us jealously in secret from Europe and America?
[00:40:04] Gary Cannon: I'm not sure jealously, but yeah, the, the big states like obviously America and China, are way ahead in the number of assets and some of their capabilities. The UK is doing very well.
[00:40:16] Dallas Campbell: What can we, can we do better though? Can we, do we need to...?
[00:40:19] Gary Cannon: We have, like I said, there's a lot of potential in the UK, and if we can get all of those individual spots of potential working together better, then we can move faster and deliver more capability for the benefit of the earth and humans worldwide.
[00:40:36] Dallas Campbell: And finally, just to our Open Cosmos, to Flo and Jordi, what's the most impactful bit of Open Cosmos that's... do you think that you're sort of aiming towards?
[00:40:46] Jordi Barrera Ars: I think the most impactful service is the one now, that we are, well, we have released it for a while and it's now growing, which is called Data Cosmos. So we talked about...
[00:40:55] Dallas Campbell: Data Cosmos?
[00:40:56] Jordi Barrera Ars: Data Cosmos. So we talked about the space infrastructure bit, which is deploying space infrastructure for any type of usage. It could be science missions, communications, et cetera.
We talked about the open constellation for the constellation, which is a way to help, you know, bringing diverse data more timely manner, and then Data Cosmos, which is an information platform. So this is a cloud based software that people users, you know, agencies, governments, individuals, companies can access where they find these diverse data that it's the way that they interact with this data and then it's got applications made by third parties, companies that we partner with, where they are really good at extracting useful information from certain type of data, and they create this hammer, this screwdriver, you know, all these tools that provide the information that people need in a useful manner and this is ultimately how people, how humans will consume this information.
[00:41:56] Dallas Campbell: Data cosmos, it's basically a repository of data, which is...
[00:41:59] Jordi Barrera Ars: Not only that, it's a catalog of data, but also you find the end processed information. For example, I think Flo mentioned this, there's the oil spill monitoring, right? So if you're a company that wants to monitor a certain area where maybe there are oil spills actually, because what practices, whatever that might be, you can actually get alerts of that an oil spill might be happening.
What's the shape, what's the extension, where is it going? Because we have wind data, et cetera, and currents on the oceans, and then you can actually try to control it. You can try to shut down or protect critical infrastructure like the salinator plants, which obviously they provide them water to people.
So that's a problem if that goes down. So this is a platform where people again, users don't need to know how that data is generated. What they care about is make sure that they get the right information, the right insights, at the right time.
[00:42:58] Dallas Campbell: Can anyone get this or is it, is it like you sign up for?
[00:43:02] Jordi Barrera Ars: You sign up right now, not every single individual in the planet can get it because we still cannot support it, we are working on it. But there's already few companies and agencies using it. So we have already few customers and bit by bit we are controlling essentially the onboarding of new people in it.
[00:43:21] Dallas Campbell: For you guys, when you wake up in the morning, what's the exciting thing when you look ahead?
[00:43:26] Jordi Barrera Ars: Make good.
[00:43:27] Dallas Campbell: Make good.
[00:43:29] Jordi Barrera Ars: Yeah. So really it's just to, I think many people at Open Cosmos are likely in the space industry and far beyond what drives them is just to help literally. So we didn't choose to leave. We were born out of not our choice. We can choose though what to do with our lives, right? And we have to spend the time here. We have to live a life. We have to have certain income, et cetera, to pay our bills, but we can actually choose them to be good citizens, right? To do our bit to actually benefit society and help ourselves. So I think this is what drives us, most of us, and I would say, hopefully most of the people.
[00:44:08] Gary Cannon: I see that across the industry. There's so much good in the space industry. It's nice that it's not competitive in a way. Everybody really works together so well.
[00:44:18] Dallas Campbell: That's a good place to end, I think. On an optimistic note. Thank you very much. That's it. Thank you very much for joining us for this series of In-Orbit. We've had some terrific guests share their expertise and insights with us on everything from AI and sustainable land use to drones, microgravity, exploring the new frontiers of space technology.
We're going to be taking a short break, but to hear future episodes of In-Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favourite podcast app, and for deeper insights, latest news, more real world space applications, visit the Catapult website, or join them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.