Three, Two, One, Zero.
Let's begin with the simplest of space math.
From 1960 to 2020,
the number of satellites in orbit
increased at a slow and steady pace.
We went from zero satellites
to about 2,500 satellites,
zipping by over our heads.
By the end of 2021, however,
that number had doubled to 5,000.
And this is not an anomaly.
5,000 will soon turn to 10,000
and then, deep breaths, 100,000 satellites.
If companies like SpaceX, Amazon,
and many others get their way,
most of these satellites will settle in low earth orbit,
which is right here.
It might seem like a roomy enough place,
but it's already filled with those existing satellites, leftover
rocket bodies and debris from collisions
in some countries - Russia, we're looking at you
- have only made matters worse
by firing missiles into space
and blowing things up.
What we have here is a real problem,
the kind of problem that could ruin space now
and for many years into the future.
If only someone,
somewhere was doing something about it.
Today
I am going to go visit a company called
LeoLabs, it's a startup
based right here in Silicon Valley.
You can think of them as a sci fi,
super modern air traffic control system.
They've built some technology
that tracks everything in space,
rocket bodies that have gone up there,
satellites, all the debris
from things that have collided and exploded.
It's kind of an essential technology that we're going to need
in the coming years, as space
fills with more and more stuff.
And so I'm going to head into their office
and try and figure out
how this technology works.
The core of
what we do is tracking all the satellites,
all the pieces of debris in low-Earth orbit and the reason we're in
business is space is gone into space race 2.0.
And so the numbers of satellites are scaling up.
The risk from debris is scaling up.
None of the tracking systems were built to scale.
And the reason we started the company
is because we knew how to build scalable tracking systems.
So we're in the process of doing that.
Dan and his
co-founders started LeoLabs in 2015,
and they appeared just in the nick of time.
The success of Elon Musk's
Space X triggered a revolution in the space industry.
Almost out of nowhere, the world became awash
in rocket and satellite startups.
More people than ever before
want to put more stuff than ever before into orbit.
The LeoLabs founders saw
this frenzy of activity coming
and they bet that we would soon need better systems
for tracking things in space.
You guys were ahead of the game
in kind of predicting where this economy was going.
Yeah, that's the whole reason we're in business.
The number of satellites has gone up so dramatically.
We focus on low-Earth orbit, so kind of the closest 2,000
kilometers to the surface of the earth.
That's where the revolution in space is happened.
It's where the business revolution is.
Three years ago, there were 800
functional satellites in that part of space.
Now there's close to 4,000.
On top of that, there are about 15,000
pieces of debris tracked today:
dead satellites, dead rocket
bodies and fragments of it.
And there's been weapons tests, there's been collisions
on top of those 15,000 pieces of debris,
there's about 250,000 critical
but untracked pieces of debris up there today.
So a big part of what we've set out to do is track that small stuff
and bring it into the safety picture.
Today,
LeoLabs has raised more than $100 million.
A lot of that money is going toward the construction
of a network of radars placed around the world.
It's these radar systems that look up at the sky
and spot and catalog objects as they orbit.
You need this global network of radars.
If you've got one radar site,
you can check in on a satellite about twice a day.
So every 12 hours that's a long time to wait.
Really, you need sites around the world.
You know, we've got four sites today.
We're going to have more than 20 sites over the next few years.
So today, you guys are in like Midland, Texas, Costa
Rica, Alaska and New Zealand.
That's right. OK, yeah.
And then we've got three more sites under construction.
A big part of LeoLabs mission is not just tracking objects in space,
but actually making sure that satellites don't collide into each other.
Satellite companies like Space X and Planet Labs
pay to find out where their satellites are
and if they're about to hit something.
A lot of the satellites have propulsion systems.
They can kind of move to get out of the way of each other
or change their orbit a little bit.
It's a service that you guys offer to help
these companies know how to maneuver the machines.
Yeah, we offer a collision avoidance service.
It's a subscription service.
We'll send you an alert up to seven days in advance.
If your satellite's going to come dangerously close
to a piece of debris or another satellite.
And most satellites have
thruster on board a chemical rocket or an electric thruster.
Companies have been doing that for decades, moving satellites around.
But it's sort of like a harder problem now.
The risk of a collision is a lot higher now
just because we've installed
so much more hardware into space.
You have a big collision, it creates a cloud of debris.
And now all the other satellites are flying through this whizzing
mess of debris.
The other element of it is the need for tracking all the small debris
as well as we add all of the new satellite into space,
the risks of a collision, the likelihood of the collisions going up.
Right now, we're putting out
about 400 million collision alerts
per month, in low-Earth orbit.
So these are either the first alert of collisions happened
or follow ups letting you You said 4... 400?
400 million.
What's that
mean, you're sending out 400 million...
emails?
You can get them over email.
That's kind of the legacy way of doing it.
It's machine to machine.
So we push out these alerts through our API
and then the satellite operators these days their fleets are automated.
So when we send them an alert, they can decide to nudge
their satellite again.
Or to a different time to avoid the collision.
To really
understand how the LeoLab Service works,
it would be super helpful to have an astronaut,
someone who spent time
aboard the International Space Station
dodging debris on a daily basis.
And as luck would have it,
I found just such a human.
I'm Ed Lu.
I'm one of the co-founders of LeoLabs.
And you are an astronaut.
I am a former NASA astronaut.
I flew three times in space, two times
on the space shuttle then I launched on a Soyuz mission
to ISS immediately following
the Columbia disaster.
When you're on the ISS,
you guys actually do get pelted by debris, right?
Yeah, things do hit the ISS,
I remember looking out on the solar arrays and you can see holes in them.
In fact, I remember doing a spacewalk coming down a railing, and there's a thing
it looks like a bullet hole in one of the railings.
So I literally hit a railing - a steel railing.
Was it
experiences like that that drew you to this
start up or how did you end up getting involved with LeoLabs?
Absolutely.
So at the time,
the number one danger to crews on ISS
was orbital debris.
And to this day, it is
the number one danger, according to NASA's own figures.
And the reason is because
the vast majority of objects that are large
enough to go through the hull, should they hit
the ISS,
were not tracked
or are not tracked by the US government.
And so this company was created
to track those- the vast majority of objects
smaller than our tracked
by the Department of Defense.
And because they're a danger not only to the astronauts
but to all of development of low-Earth orbit.
As both Dan and Ed mentioned,
Russia made the space issue all too clear last year.
It fired a missile at one of its own satellites
because, well, because it could.
And now everyone has been left
to deal with the consequences.
So what we're looking at here is the Earth,
and these are LeoLabs' radars are tracking.
The orbit of this satellite, Cosmos 1408,
was roughly along this line and when you break it
up, everything else kind of ends up following that path.
That's why all this stuff is kind of looking like this.
So these are all the objects we're tracking
whenever any one of these things
goes through one of these beams, we we recalculate its orbit.
Each of these beams can track about 2000 objects per hour.
You've got the green are actual satellites.
Yeah. Yep.
The yellow are rocket bodies. Yep.
And the red is debris. Yep.
And then blue is unknown?
Yeah.
It's important that you put your radars
all around the earth because that's how you get the coverage.
You want to get to the southern hemisphere.
And that's because, well, objects, they spend half of their time
in the Southern Hemisphere, and historically,
people have left their trash up there.
So those are dead things.
The largest of the current constellations is StarLink.
They are covering the earth in these things.
There's more than 2000 of these things already,
and they're launching them in groups of 60
every couple of weeks.
This is a big problem for satellite operators when they launch.
And one of these rocket spits out 30, 40, 50....
100 satellites. Which one is theirs, right?
Because they're not all, right?
So one of the services that we've been providing
commercially to companies is "hey figure out which one is which." Like
if you look at this particular picture,
you'd be like, "Oh, we're already f'd.
This place is jam packed." But these....
This is very misleading. Yeah.
So these are much larger.
For the purposes of display.
Again, something that's the size of, you know, China, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, the size of a satellite is going to be really small.
It'd be less than a pixel.
You couldn't see it.
OK, so keep in mind that there's a lot of satellites up there.
There are many, many thousands of satellites, but they're not this big.
While my space math is simple,
this space math is hard.
It takes brainiac people like Bonnie here
to find out when satellites might collide.
As an astro person,
I get to work on algorithms, and those algorithms are
what's going to go into the, you know, server.
And it's going to produce some sort of alerts
in the alerts on the CDMs.
So the conjunction data messages.
The heart of the algorithm
is math and physics.
We have two satellite in orbit
and we know the path.
And when they come through our radar
we get an approximation for position and velocity.
So we know how fast these guys are going
and you know where they're going to go.
If we have two of them
going on a collision course,
then we run something that is called
like the probability of collision,
which is going to tell us, "Hey,
at what exact time these guys are going to come close
and how far off they're going to be?"
One of the things that you can see, like the work that I do right
now, is going into the safety of flight and looking for conjunctions.
So if you are satellite operator, you know the name of your satellites,
so you can just type it here in object one
and then if you suspect that you might be colliding
with like another satellite that you already know.
So for example, I don't know one of the StarLinks
from Space X or one of the Doves from Planet
or anything, you could just type the other object here in search.
Let's just say that you have no idea.
And let's just say that you are me,
a Colombian citizen
that is trying to find out what's going on with that one
and only Colombian satellite that we have in orbit.
Let's look it out.
So we go FACSAT, and there he is.
We just want to see what's coming in around FACSAT.
So we do "search".
and we
have a potential collision with a StarLink and you can see
when that is going to happen in the future.
We can click on View and it's going to take us to a page
that is called an analysis report.
It is going to show you the ground station
so you can see what the path is that the two satellites are actually following.
So it tells you the exact time when we think it's going to collide
it gives you the miss distance.
And so, you know, 20 kilometers in space
is nothing like nothing at all.
And so the actual collision
probability is actually low.
And so we know it's not like
super high risk.
Without this
type of work, space runs the risk of becoming unusable.
Humans will have messed up low-Earth orbit
in much the same way that we messed up planet Earth.
This debris is a big issue.
There's this thing called
the Kessler Syndrome, I think is what they call it, right?
Is that syndrome the right?
yeah it is the Kessler Syndrome.
So tell me how that works.
I mean, it's this idea of kind of cascading debris clouds, right?
And the idea almost like a nuclear chain reaction of one piece of debris
hitting another piece of debris and a cascade.
I don't think we're close to
an overall risk of Leo going into that.
There are bad neighborhoods in space, though.
And so, in effect, we're becoming a space realtor.
We can tell you
where the bad neighborhoods are and where the good neighborhoods are between
about 800 and 900 kilometers altitude There's been some bad events.
There's been weapons tests where a satellite was blown up.
There's been breakup events and the like.
So there's just there's more debris there.
So if you're going to put out new satellites, you're going to launch
these satellites, don't put them there, put them
in other regions of space.
The situation's manageable
right now, but we do need to manage it better.
There's satellites going into all different orbits.
You see them going north, south and south, north
and kind of east west and everything in between.
And it's just not organized.
With a bit of organization it can....
I think we can put a lot more satellites into space.
We've seen SpaceX
with its StarLink communication system.
They want to put up something like on the order of like 10,000
or more satellites, and they're not alone.
There's multiple companies and countries that want to put up
tens of thousands of satellites for comms networks and all sorts of things.
And so if everybody gets their wishes and there's
100,000 satellites in low earth orbit, like
is that actually feasible to manage, if we have the right technology?
I think we can totally manage it.
That's the exciting part about this
second space race is it's commercial.
The leaders in it are bringing new commercial services
to market and they're leveraging new technology.
It's Moore's Law brought to space
like you said,
five, ten years
ago, you'd spend ten years designing and building a satellite.
You run it for 20 years.
And so at the end, your technology would be 30 years old.
And now companies are refreshing
their satellite design every year and launching new satellites every year.
It's like keeping up with the latest iPhone.
I mean, you're getting new new chips, new sensors, new cameras all the time.
Exactly; new cameras, new computers, new radios.
It's awesome.
To me, we're building like a computing
shell around the earth.
To sort of analyze it in ways we never have before, whether
it's photographing what's happening with the rainforest and water
and the movement of people and roadways or the communication systems, it's
kind of like this new Internet
layer around us.
That's how I think about it.
Yeah, I think about it the same way.
It's in another way to look at is business on
Earth is just stepping into space
in a big way for the first time.
So now just normal day to day stuff's getting routed through space,
and that means it's communications networks, cameras.
Yeah, everything you said.
This is the computer revolution
in 1990, happening in space.
Yeah.
The monitoring and understanding of where everything is and where it's going
is going to be crucial to the development of this economic sphere.