Starlink’s newest competitor is using next-gen satellites to create internet for all | Hard Reset

- This satellite could be your

next

ISP. Ask yourself if your Internet is fast or slow, like that of an old truck. 'The Internet is not a big truck. It is a series of tubes. Well, we came to meet the people who are taking the Internet out of tubes and into space. - There are between 3 and 4 billion people in the world who do not have reliable broadband Internet access. They have smartphones like us, but those smartphones are still stuck on a 2G

internet

connection. You know, the equivalent of dial-up. And that's what we have to fix. - Why do this?

Well, ever since the

internet

burst into the mainstream, it has become increasingly essential in our daily lives. Now, if you don't have reliable access to the Internet, you are basically isolated from modern society. - Traditional ways of connecting people to the Internet simply do not work for the

next

4 billion people. You would never think that the only way to connect someone is to strap something to a rocket, launch it into orbit, and be bathed in radiation for 10 years. How come that is the cheapest and most effective way? But, but it is. - But it's about more than just

satellites

.

This is a completely new approach to building infrastructure. Something that is very important when things go wrong: stay there to see why. This is "Hard Reset", a series about rebuilding our world from scratch. This is my old office building. That's right. I used to work in this unimpressive looking building. And while I was working 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 a microwave receiver that would communicate with an antenna on Mount Diablo, about 40 miles away, or a satellite dish that could communicate with an orbiting satellite.

At that 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 high-speed Internet that works anywhere in the continental US.' - You can see what I mean. - 'Interested? Thought like this.' - There are 4 billion people around the world who are not connected to the Internet. These are not people who are, you know, in remote parts of the world. Some of these people are in the United States. If a hospital in Alaska wanted to have a gigabit line, what would it be in San Francisco? $80, $100 a month?

It could literally cost them $20,000 a month. - That's a Christian. He's the chief of staff for a new company right next door to my old office that aims to change all that. - We came to Astranis to see how they are connecting millions, maybe billions of people to the Internet with

satellites

in space. - This is what an elegant satellite factory looks like. It's very clean, but let me tell you, it turns out there are a lot of different ways to die here. Anyway, you've probably heard of satellite internet companies like Starlink before, but this is very different.

The Starlink satellites are in LEO, which means low Earth orbit. That means they have to orbit the Earth very quickly to avoid falling back into the gravity well. It also means that any satellite dish here on Earth has to track those satellites as they move across the sky. And every time that antenna needs to jump to track the next satellite, you'll lose your Internet connection. - The challenge with low Earth orbit is that you have to launch thousands of satellites to provide any sort of usable service, because each satellite is really only overhead for five or six minutes at a time. - This is John.

He is the co-founder of Astranis, he took an idea from one of our favorite science fiction writers and turned it into a business. - Arthur C. Clark invented the geostationary orbit. He came up with the idea that if a satellite could be placed just the right distance from the Earth, its orbit would match the rotation of the Earth's surface and signals could be bounced off it. - Astranis is putting small satellites into GEO or geostationary equatorial orbit, which is about 20 times farther away. - Oh, no, no, it's like a hundred times. - Oh, well that's very far away. - Yes, it's about a tenth of the way to the Moon. - Anyway, because these satellites orbit at the same speed as the Earth's rotation, from our perspective, they stay in one place in the sky. - Each geostationary orbital position is exactly 35,786 kilometers from Earth and is located exactly on the equator. - In fact, we call it "the most valuable real estate in the solar system" because in every place that a satellite, or in our case a group of satellites, could occupy, there is a limited number of them to go around.

So we really have to make sure we make the most of them. - That means you don't need a fancy satellite dish that can track LEO satellites back and forth across the sky. And it means that a single satellite can cover a much larger area. This is all possible because it has become much more affordable to launch things into space, thanks to companies like SpaceX. Astranis started with a 3U CubeSat, about the size of a loaf of bread, but now they are launching a larger model, closer to the size of a small refrigerator. - Today we have satellites that move data in this way, but they are 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 this by completely throwing out assumptions about how to build

hard

ware for high orbits and starting from first principles. - But space is tough: between the flight computer, all the software that runs on it, the entire sensor suite, and then all the cutting-edge radio technology that has to be included.

Getting all of that to work together with all of the ground systems, all of the network systems – everything really has to be aligned for something like this to work, especially on the first try. - Well, let's just call that statement "foreshadowing." Getting all these different parts to work together requires a lot of testing, which starts with these gowns. - Let's see if someone named Nick works here. - B Money. - That's pretty good. It's okay, I'm just jealous. I don't have a custom one, but that's okay. - That is why we refer to this area as "panel integration ground".

Basically, the satellite is made up of six panels. - Is that big reflective sphere in the middle the fuel tank? - Yes. It's one of our tanks and it's wrapped in MLI. So we call that integration stage 'Tie Fighter', we look like the Tie Fighter and in a way we adapt to it: engineering company, so we like Star Wars jokes. - Yes. It's not unusual. - This is Effie. She is the Mechanical Integration Lead and Googly Eye Specialist. More on that later. - This is basically what a fully assembled vehicle would look like. He's in our breakout match.

So the purpose is to take all the panels that you've built here, put them here, shake them and make sure they don't break, - Yeah. - I'm guessing and doing all kinds of tests on this kind of fake version of the final satellite. - Yeah. The first one... - You guys have like a giant paint shaker from... - Yeah, I mean, this is our spaceship-level shake table right here. - Oh, is this the shaker? - Yeah. So now it's set up to do x, y and then the shaker head will spin up and that's how it does the Z axis.

Wow, okay. - But yeah, this is our shake table for some low level racing, we put some googly eyes on it. - Oh yeah. - And it was like, it's actually really adorable to see the eyes roll. We always joke that we space-grade those eyes, but passing the literal vibration test isn't the only thing being done here. Tests are performed in thermal vacuum chambers, where the satellite experiences wild temperature fluctuations, just like in space. A propulsion test chamber inspects the propulsion systems behind this sinister structure with a bulletproof curtain. And there's also an RF dead zone so they can test the electronics and make sure they don't interfere with each other.

Basically, they test everything because once you send it into space, it's not possible to send a repairman after it: a fact that will be important later in this story. Anyway... Things are going to get hot, things are going to get cold, things are going to shake up and down, left and right on that rocket going up. You'll have stars exploding around you and sending you a ton of ionized radiation. Can your

hard

ware handle it or will it literally explode? In our case, not the latter. -That's Brady Salz: he's the electrical integration leader and he has the coolest coat in the entire factory. - I have to ask this, is B Money the name? - Yes, that's right, so my dad's name is Rich Salz.

And when, when they were inventing email, he invented our dollar sign long before anyone else. So, you know, it's passed down from generation to generation. I have stolen it. - Oh very well. If any of my brothers asked, I did it first: Brady's brothers haven't asked. Anyway, B Money is making sure that all this expensive hardware they launch into space is powered on and returns the highest quality data. -How do you make sure that thing works in space? Good? If you have a lot of high power or high frequency stuff, spoiler alert, circuits are like people, they want to talk to each other, right?

Everyone will be bouncing around, making noise at each other, going up, down, left, right, figuring this out and proving that that's not going to be a problem and actually getting it right is really hard in the simulation, and it's even harder. in real life. - Good. - So you spend a lot more time in the R&D cycle, getting it right. - All of this R&D, production, testing and assembly is done right here, on site, so that all teams can coordinate much more quickly before preparing for launch. - Oh Effie, that's amazing. - Yes. That's the box we used to transport Arcturus to Cape Canaveral. - That is where Astranis sent its first geographic satellite, 'Arcturus' into space.

Can satellites finish the job Al Gore started? - 'I took the initiative to

create

the Internet.' - Let's find out. - This is our San Francisco Mission Operations Center. In fact, we have a backup in Utah, Eagle Mountain, Utah. In the event of a major earthquake in San Francisco, we can quickly move our operations there. Wow wow. You couldn't get Houston. Because I hear it's a great place for Mission. - Everyone wanted to go there, but everything, yes, it was all busy. - This is mission control for the Astranis satellites. Right now, they're only looking at Arcturus, the one with its antennae pointed toward Alaska. - We are monitoring for a long time, but things happen on the spaceship, but now everything is spread out and it's chilling.

Yes. I wouldn't want this to be an exciting job for you. Yes, a lot like that. Yes. - But they soon hope to build and launch up to 24 satellites each year to cover other places where people need access to information but can't get Comcast to return their phone calls. Right now you are probably watching this video online connected to the Internet. Pause and think for a moment about how that is possible. Think about the vast network of computers, cables, and other transmission media that bring you millions of bits of information every second. Now remember that the Earth is huge and connecting humans with this kind of fidelity and coherence across great distances is not easy at all.

But with technology like Astranis satellites, you could be a thousand miles away from the nearest person or the nearest phone line and still be able to stream "Friends" in 4K: "Ground control to Major Tom." Or this program; Either one is fine. - The experience will be very similar to what people are used to enjoying satellite television. And this is not 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 that a small dot in space will replace the need to lay thousands and thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cables to all those remote locations.

Satellite connections are not good for everything. They are terrible for low latency applications like gaming. - I would not recommend you play with a geographical connection. You won't do very well. You'll be last place or something, but it's limited by the laws of physics. The question is how fast the speed of light can be. - If you can find a way to accelerate the speed of light, tell me and we will implement it immediately. We are building four more satellites that will launch on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later this year and will deploy and provide this service to countries around the world.

And then we will add satellites over time as we see increased demand to add capacity to those countries. - But it is important to remember that this is a new company; what Arcturus isits first geosynchronous satellite. So it's not surprising to learn that not everything went perfectly as planned. A month into filming, we learned that one of the solar panel drive assemblies supplied by a third-party supplier experienced an anomaly, which, spatially speaking, is not working properly. That means Arcturus will not be able to provide internet service to Alaska. Also, playing with the power cord outside had nothing to do with this.

Sorry, Alaska. - We're pretty sure. But this anomaly, despite being a very costly problem, goes some way to proving Astranis' point. If this had happened to a satellite that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, it would have been a staggering blow. But Astranis is betting on smaller infrastructure projects and more flexible hardware. So they're already planning to launch a new set of satellites, which definitely doesn't sound as cool as Arcturus, but they can afford to do it because the satellites are much less expensive and because they're much more adaptable. - In the old days, each satellite was custom, custom built for the part of the world it was going to serve because each part of the world has slightly different frequencies that they can operate on.

There was no digital signal processing on board those satellites of any kind, and many of the satellites still launched today are purely analog satellites. It would be like buying a radio where you can't change the channel after purchasing it at the hardware store. So it's only in the last few years that we've had the processing power, the silicon, 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 work. - This is a hard

reset

for the type of Internet infrastructure you build.

We want to have microprojects that we are implementing exactly when they are needed, exactly where they are needed anywhere in the world. - So, imagine a scenario where the grid does not grow from the center, but from everywhere at once. Imagine if you didn't have to wait for a giant utility or government to invest billions of dollars to bring fiber to your small city, state, or country. And because those investments are smaller, it's easier to recover from setbacks and makes everything more resilient. - So instead of investing a billion dollars over 20 years to provide connectivity to an entire continent, we want to invest tens of millions of dollars over 18 months to provide connectivity exactly where it is needed: in one state.

Astranis and other companies like Ukama, which makes DIY hardware, mobile networks represent a new bottom-up approach to building infrastructure. It's an approach that can reach people in places that mostly go unnoticed. - If you have the next 4 billion people connected to the Internet, suddenly they are part of that global conversation, right? Like they're contributing their own YouTube videos and their own Reddit posts and they're teaching the rest of the world things that the rest of the world just doesn't have access to right now. There's a two-way street to the Internet, right? It's something we're all creating together. - So how many more amazing people will join the world we take for granted when the Internet is as universal as the stars in the sky?

Well, we'll find out soon.