This Small Satellite Could Predict the Next Hurricane | Short Film Showcase
What NASA did with the Apollo program was amazing, but the amounts of money that you had to spend to do that work 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.
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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 of it as 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, a company that believes it's on the cusp of revolutionising a satellite industry.
This is Joel Spark, one of their co-founders. The birth of Spire was a bunch of us in 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 onboard that satellite is 30 years old.
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 constellation. But first, we 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 sail out. A couple of crazy students in a garage 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 and hit our target in about three days. So, okay, now we actually have to do this.
In about 12 months, we went from napkin sketches to a satellite in space. T-minus 10, 9, and it's a weird sense of scale. We're watching the livestream of this rocket blasting into space, where you have all your hopes and dreams and all these expectations cramped 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—a verified satellite.
They deployed. Congratulations on it all! The appointment—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 actually business people. What we really needed to do was kind of go out to customers and various markets and see what our customers are interested in, what our industry is interested in.
One of the things they found was that there was a real need in the area of weather prediction. So, in 2017, we were starting to see a lot of NOAA and NASA satellites that are primarily used for weather reaching the end of their useful lifespan, 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 could be extreme weather events like hurricanes and tropical storms. And the idea is, even though the satellite that I'm simulating goes around the Earth every hour and a half, it doesn't mean you see the whole world every hour and a half. This one satellite travels around. It's going to see this target, but it's not going to see it again until that target has rotated all the way around to the other side—twelve hours later.
And that could be along twelve hours. A hurricane can change its direction in less than an hour, and depending on how much direction it changes—whether it shifts inland or not—when you're looking at a hurricane, the loss of life can go from zero to a thousand or tens of thousands of 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 CubeSat.
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 lives.
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 we're 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 to 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 real old ones, they say this was built from this time to this time. Sometimes the span of when they started and when they finished the cathedral was hundreds of years. So, the people who started, 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.
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 CubeSat. It's not what it is; it's what it is going to be.
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