- This satellite could be your next ISP.
Ask yourself if your internet is fast
or slow, like an old pickup truck.
'The internet is not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.'
Well, we came to meet the folks
who are taking the internet out of the tubes
and putting it into space.
- There are 3 to 4 billion people in the
world that do not have
reliable access to broadband internet.
They have smartphones just like we do,
but those smartphones are still stuck on
a 2G internet connection.
You know, the equivalent of dial-up.
And that's what we've gotta fix.
- Why do this?
Well, ever since the internet broke into the mainstream,
it's become more and more essential to our daily lives.
Now, if you don't have reliable internet access,
you're essentially cut off from modern society.
- The traditional ways of connecting people
to the internet just don't work
for the next 4 billion people.
You would never think that the only way
to connect somebody is by strapping something to a rocket,
having it blast into orbit
and like be bathed in radiation for 10 years.
Like how is that the cheapest
and most effective way? But, but it is.
- But this is about more than just satellites.
It's about a whole new approach to building infrastructure.
Something that's extra important when things go wrong-
stick around to see why.
This is "Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
This is my old office building. That's correct.
I used to work in this not impressive-looking building.
And while I worked here, even though this is San Francisco,
supposedly one of the most connected cities in the world,
we couldn't even get DSL.
The only way to get broadband access was
to install either a microwave receiver that talked
to an antenna on Mount Diablo about 40 miles away,
or a dish that could talk to a satellite in orbit.
At the time, satellite internet access was extremely
expensive and extremely slow.
And that apparently left these companies
with very small budgets for their commercials.
- 'Directway is the high-speed internet
that works anywhere in the continental U.S.'
- You can see what I mean. - 'Interested? Thought so.'
- There are 4 billion people around the world
that are not connected to the internet.
These aren't people that are, you know,
all in far-flung places around the world.
Some of these people are in the United States.
If a hospital in Alaska wanted to have like a gigabit line,
which in San Francisco it's like what?
$80, $100 per month?
It might literally cost them $20,000 a month.
- That's Christian. He's the chief of staff
for a new startup right next to my old office that's aiming
to change all of that.
- We came to Astranis to see
how they're connecting millions, maybe billions of people
to the internet with satellites in space.
- This is what a fancy satellite factory looks like.
It's very clean, but let me just say,
it turns out there's a lot of different ways to die in here.
Anyway-
You've probably heard
of satellite internet companies like Starlink before,
but this is very different.
Starlink satellites are in LEO, which stands
for low Earth orbit.
That means they have to orbit the Earth very quickly
to avoid falling back down into the gravity well.
It also means that any dish down here on Earth has
to track those satellites as they move across the sky.
And anytime that dish needs to jump
to tracking the next satellite,
it'll lose connection with the internet.
- The challenge with low Earth orbit is you have to launch
thousands of satellites in order to provide a sort
of a usable service,
because each satellite is really only overhead for five
or six minutes at a time.
- This is John. He's the co-founder of Astranis,
and he took an idea from one of our favorite sci-fi writers
and turned it into a business.
- Arthur C. Clark actually invented geostationary orbit.
He came up with this idea
that if you can put a satellite out at just the right
distance from Earth, its orbit will match the rotation
of the Earth's surface and you could
bounce signals off of it.
- Astranis is putting small satellites at GEO
or geostationary equatorial orbit,
which is about 20 times further away.
- Oh, no it's, no, it's like a hundred times.
- Oh, well that is very far.
- Yeah, it's about a 10th of the way to the Moon.
- Anyway, because these satellites orbit at the same speed
as the rotation of the Earth,
from our perspective, they stay in one place in the sky.
- Every geostationary orbital slot
is exactly 35,786 kilometers away from Earth
and is exactly at the equator.
- We actually call it
the "most valuable real estate
in the solar system" because each spot that a satellite,
or in our case a cluster of satellites could take up,
there's only so many of those to go around.
So we really have to make sure we're
making maximum use of those.
- That means you don't need a fancy dish
that can track LEO satellites back and forth across the sky.
And it means a single satellite can
cover a much larger area.
All this is possible because it's gotten far more affordable
to launch things into space, thanks
to companies like SpaceX.
Astranis started with a 3U CubeSat, roughly the size
of a loaf of bread, but now they're launching a larger
model, more like the size of a small refrigerator.
- We have satellites up today that move data
around in this way,
but they're huge Goliath satellites that cost hundreds
of millions of dollars and often take years if not a decade,
to build and launch.
- They were able to do all of this
by completely throwing away the assumptions about how
to build hardware for high orbits
and start from first principles.
- But space is hard:
between the flight computer,
all the software running on it, all the suite of sensors,
and then all of the cutting-edge radio technology
that has to be packed in.
Getting all of that to work along
with all the ground systems, all the networking systems-
it really all has to line up for something like this
to work, especially on the very first try.
- Well, let's just call that statement "foreshadowing."
Getting all these different parts
to work together requires a lot of testing, which all starts
with these smocks.
- Let's see if anyone here works here named Nick.
- B Money.
- That's pretty good. All right, I'm just jealous.
I don't have a personalized one, but that's fine.
- So we refer to this area as "panel integration land."
Basically, the satellite's composed of six panels.
- Is that big reflective sphere in the middle of
those the fuel tank?
- Yeah. It's one of our tanks and it's wrapped in MLI.
So we call that stage of integration 'Tie Fighter,'
resemble the tie fighter, and kind of rolled
with it-company of engineers
so we like Star Wars jokes.
- Yeah. It's not unusual.
- This is Effie.
She's the mechanical integration lead
and a googly eye specialist. More on that later.
- This is basically what a fully
assembled vehicle would look like.
It's on our breakover fixture. So
- So the purpose of is is to
take all panels you've built over here,
put 'em on this,
shake the heck out of 'em, make sure they don't break,
- Yep.
- I'm guessing
and do all the sort of like testing on
this sort of fake version of the final satellite.
- Yep. The first you- - You guys just have like a
giant paint shaker from-
- Yeah, I mean, so this is our spacecraft-level
vibe table right here.
- Oh, this is the shaker?
- Yep. So right now it's set up to do x, y
and then the shaker head will rotate up
and that's how it does the Z-axis.
Wow, okay.
- But yeah, this is our shaker table
for a few low-level runs,
we put some googly eyes on it.
- Oh yeah.
- And it was just like, it's actually just like really
adorable seeing the eyes like roll around.
So we always joke that we qual those eyes for space,
- But passing the literal vibe check isn't the
only thing that's done here.
There are tests done in thermal vacuum chambers
where the satellite experiences wild temperature
fluctuations, just like in space,
A propulsion test chamber inspects propulsion systems
behind this ominous structure with a bulletproof curtain.
And there's also an RF dead zone
so they can test the electronics
to ensure they don't interfere with each other.
Basically, they test for everything
because once you send it up to space,
there's no sending a repairman after it:
A fact that will become important later in
this story. Anyway-
- Things are gonna get hot, things are gonna get cold,
things are gonna shake up and down,
left and right on that rocket going up.
You're gonna have stars exploding all
around you sending a bunch of ionized radiation out to you.
Can your hardware handle it, or will it literally blow up?
In our case, not the latter.
- That's Brady Salz:
He's the electrical integration lead
and he's got the coolest smock in the whole factory.
- I have to ask this, is B Money is the name?
- Yes, this is, so my dad, his name is Rich Salz.
And when, back when they were like inventing email,
he invented our dollar sign way before anyone else did it.
So it's, you know, passed on down. I've stolen it.
- Oh, very nice.
If any my brothers ask, I did First
- Brady's brothers have not asked.
Anyway-
B Money is making sure
that all this expensive hardware they shoot up into space is
powered and returns the highest quality data back.
- How do you make sure that that thing
is gonna go work in space?
Right? If you have a lot of high power things
or high frequency things,
spoiler alert, circuits are like people,
they wanna talk to each other, right?
They're all gonna be bouncing around, introducing noise
to each other, going up, down,
left, right figuring this out-
and proving that's not gonna be an issue
and really getting that right is really
difficult in simulation,
and it's even harder in real life.
- Right.
- So you spend a lot more time on the R & D cycle,
getting it just right.
- All this R & D, production, testing
and assembly happens right here on site so
that all the teams can coordinate much more quickly
before getting ready for launch.
- Oh Effie, that's amazing.
- Yeah. That's the, that's the box that we use to transport
Arcturus down to Cape Canaveral.
- That's where Astranis sent their first geo satellite,
'Arcturus' into space.
Can satellites finish the job that Al Gore started?
- 'I took the initiative in
creating the internet.'
- Let's find out.
- This is our San Francisco Mission Operations Center.
We actually have a backup in Utah, Eagle Mountain, Utah.
In case the big earthquake hits in San Francisco,
something happens, we can quickly shift
our operations over to there. Wow,
- Wow. You couldn't get Houston.
'cause I hear that's a great spot for Mission.
- Everyone wanted to go there, but all
the, yeah, it was all taken.
- This is mission control for the Astranis satellites.
Right now, they're just watching Arcturus,
the one with its antennas pointed towards Alaska.
- A lot of time we're monitoring,
but things do happen on the spacecraft,
but everything is deployed now then it's chilling.
Yeah. I wouldn't want this to be an exciting job for you.
Yes, very much so. Yes.
- But soon they're hoping to have
as many as 24 satellites built
and launched every year to cover other places
where people need access to information
but can't get Comcast to return their phone calls.
Right now you're probably watching this video online
connected to the internet.
Pause and think for a moment about how that's even possible.
Think about the vast web of computers, cables,
and other means of transmission that bring millions of bits
of information to you every second.
Now remember that the Earth is immense
and connecting humans with this kind of fidelity
and consistency across vast distances is far from easy.
But with technology like Astranis' satellites,
you could be a thousand miles away from the nearest person
or the nearest telephone line
and still be able to stream "Friends" in 4K
- 'Ground control to Major Tom.'
Or this show-either one is fine.
- The experience is gonna be very similar to
what people are used to for like satellite TV.
And this isn't very expensive or very complicated equipment.
It's like a piece of stamped aluminum.
- A single satellite can provide broadband to a huge area,
and that means one tiny dot up in space will replace the
need to string thousands
and thousands of miles of fiber optic cables
to all those remote locations.
Satellite connections aren't great for everything.
They are terrible for low-latency applications like gaming.
- I would not advise that you game on a geo connection.
You will not do very well.
You will be last place or something,
but it's limited by the laws of physics.
It's just how fast can the speed of light go.
- If you can figure out a way to speed up
the the speed of light, lemme know
and then we'll implement it immediately.
We are building four more satellites that'll be launching on
SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket later this year,
and they'll be going up and delivering this service
to countries all over the world.
And then we are gonna be adding satellites over time
as we see that increased demand
to add capacity to those countries.
- But it's important to remember that this is a new venture;
that Arcturus is their first geosynchronous satellite.
So it's not shocking to learn
that not everything went perfectly to plan.
A month after filming, we learned that one
of the solar panel drive assemblies supplied
by a third party vendor experienced an anomaly,
which is space talk for, it's not working right.
That means Arcturus won't be able
to provide internet service to Alaska.
Also, me playing around with the power cable
outside had nothing to do with this.
Sorry, Alaska.
- We're pretty sure.
But this anomaly, despite being a big expensive snafu, sort of
proves the whole point of Astranis.
If this had happened to a satellite that cost hundreds
of millions or billions of dollars,
it would've been a staggering blow.
But Astranis is banking on smaller infrastructure projects
and more flexible hardware.
So they're already planning
to launch a new satellite utility set,
which definitely does not sound as cool as Arcturus,
but they can afford to do this
because the satellites are so much less expensive and
because they're so much more adaptable.
- In the old days, each satellite was custom, bespoke built
for the part of the world that it was gonna be serving
because every part
of the world has actually slightly different frequencies
they're allowed to operate on.
There was no digital signal processing happening on board
those satellites of any kind,
and many of the satellites
that they're still launching today are purely
analog satellites.
It'd be like getting a radio
where you can't change the channel
after you get it from the hardware store.
So it is only in the last few years
that we've had the processing power, the silicon in order
to do the kind of digital processing that we want to do.
- The idea behind all this is more than just
satellites and internet connection.
It's about how we build the systems
that make our world function.
- This is a hard reset for the type
of internet infrastructure that you build.
We wanna have micro projects
that we are deploying exactly when they're needed, exactly
where they're needed anywhere in the world.
- So, picture a scenario
where the grid doesn't grow out from the center,
but from everywhere at once.
Imagine you didn't need to wait
for some giant utility company
or government to invest billions of dollars to run fiber
to your small town or state or country.
And because those investments are smaller, it's easier
to recover from setbacks
and makes the whole thing more resilient.
- So instead of investing a billion dollars over 20 years
to provide, you know, a whole continent connectivity,
we want to invest, you know, tens of millions
of dollars over 18 months
to provide connectivity exactly
where it's needed-to one state
- Astranis and other companies like Ukama,
which makes hardware
for DIY, cell phone networks
represent a new bottom-up approach
to building infrastructure.
It's an approach that can reach people in places
that are mostly overlooked.
- If you have the next 4 billion people all connected
to the internet, all of a sudden they're part of
that global conversation, right?
Like they're contributing their own YouTube videos
and they're contributing their own Reddit posts
and they're, they're teaching the rest of the world things
that the rest of the world just doesn't have access to now.
There's a two-way street to the internet, right?
It's a thing that we're all creating together.
- So how many more amazing people will join into the world
we take for granted when the internet is something
as universal as the stars in the sky?
Well, we'll find out soon.