What NASA did with the Apollo program was amazing.
But the amounts of money that you have to spend to do that were enormous.
You can't just do space for the sake of doing space.
So the only way to really open up the frontier,
is to show that the frontier is worth opening up.
Our satellites and our system that we're building has to pay for itself.
It has to exist for its own right.
Not just because it's a cool thing to do
but because it actually provides value at the end of the day.
It makes the world better.
Kickstarter. We've all used it to give our filmmaker or musician friends
a couple of bucks for their latest passion project.
We don't usually think it is a tool that new space entrepreneurs
are using to open up the frontier of space.
But a company in Glasgow, Scotland did just that.
Welcome to Spire...
the company that believes it's on the cusp
of revolutionizing the satellite industry.
This is Joel Spark, one of the co-founders.
The birth of Spire... it was a bunch of us at grad school
and there's this thing called CubeSat.
A satellite the size of a wine bottle that makes it
infinitely easier to get a satellite in space.
But up until that point the prevailing idea
was that CubeSats are toys.
A typical large satellite is huge
it's like the size of a bus.
It's really expensive. It's billions of dollars.
Most big weather or communication satellites will take 10-15 years to get built
with the expectation that it will then last another 15 years on orbit.
So by the end of its lifetime every component on board that satellite
is 30 years old.
A CubeSat is a completely different methodology than a traditional satellite.
And here's where we come to the revolutionary idea:
What if they could build a lot of these little CubeSats on the cheap?
Get them into space really fast
and then start linking them together.
Suddenly it wouldn't be about single large satellites.
It would be about a network. A constellation.
But first they had to prove that they could build a single CubeSat.
So they launched a Kickstarter.
We thought it was a good idea but you know
that doesn't that doesn't say a lot
of a couple of crazy students in garage that are building something.
The Kickstarter campaign was a decision point
whether to go on from there and start building this thing.
Or go our own ways and never speak of it again.
In July 2012 we started the kickstarter campaign.
Hit our target in about three days and so okay now we actually have to do this.
And in about 12 months we go from napkin sketches to a satellite in space.
T minus 10, 9,
8, 7,
6, 5,
4, 3,
2, 1.
Ignition...and liftoff.
It's a weird sense of scale.
We were watching the livestream of this rocket blasting in the space
where you have all your hopes and dreams
and all these expectations crammed in this little cube.
You feel like the cube could fill the whole rocket.
It feels like the rocket is your rocket.
It's not a toy.
This is real.
Congratulations on a successful deployment.
So they got a CubeSat into outer space.
That's when the real work began...
figuring out how to build a business around them.
Their first hires were not engineers
they were there actually business people.
What we really needed to do was to go out to customers and various markets
and see what are customers interested in, what are industries interested in.
One of the things they found was that there was a real need in the are of weather prediction.
So in 2017 we're starting to see a lot of NOAA and NASA satellites
that are primarily used for weather
reaching the end of their useful life span.
And we don't have anything that replaces it right now.
There is going to be this gap where we currently have 30 year old technology or older
that's trying to keep the weather network alive.
This is a simulation of just earth and a satellite moving around it.
So the dot is your satellite and this target that I put here is...
it could be extreme weather events like hurricanes and tropical storms.
The idea is even though this satellite
that i'm simulating goes around the earth every hour and a half
that doesn't mean you see the whole world every hour and half.
This one satellite travels around, its going to see this target
but it's not going to see it again until that target has
rotated it all the way around to the other side
so 12 hours later.
And that could be a long 12 hours.
A hurricane can change its direction in less than an hour
and depending on how much direction changes
whether it shifts inland or outland when you're looking at a hurricane.
The loss of life can go from zero to a thousand or tens of thousands people
depending on how that path changes over time.
You need to be able to replace this capability
And that's what we think you can do with CubeSats.
So the idea is instead of having one single satellite
you have a constellation or a fleet.
This is just a simulation but it shows that by having lots of satellites in different places
you can see how you have a greater view of the planet.
So this particular target that you're interested in
you see very very frequently.
When you make it possible for people to get updates every minute
and that's actually showing a truer course of that weather system
you can directly impact people's lives
and possibly save people.
Time will tell whether or not team Spire is able to grow
their constellation of CubeSats fast enough to fill the impending weather gap
But either way they truly believe they're on the cusp of a revolution.
The beauty of CubeSat is that it's in essence a technology demonstration
of a lot of things were going to need in the future when going to other planets.
What are we going to do about tracking people on the surface of Mars
We're going have to bring with us a network of small satellites to do all the stuff
that we have currently happening on Earth.
We're really demonstrating the technology that can be used in the future now.
They have a lot of cathedrals here in Glasgow
and one of the things I always found interesting about cathedrals
is when you read the plaques on some of the really old ones they say
this was built from this time to this time
and sometimes the span of when they started
and when they finished the cathedral was hundreds of years.
So the people who started and who built the foundation
and saw what the cathedral could be and really designed it
didn't actually get to sit in it.
But they still started and for me that's what I think Spire is doing now.
We're building a foundation because we see that someday humanity
could be using space to be better and that's what's exciting about CubeSats.
It's not what it is.
It's what is going to be.