csteubs

I'd venture a guess they could mean using Starlink as the backbone for off-planet comms? I've heard that referenced a few times. The true end game is probably all of the above and more. If the need fits the bill and the pockets are deep enough, it'll probably be using Starlink.

Underpinning much of this is the costs associated with image capture and the lack of fine-grain temporal resolution. You can write software to analyze and pinpoint certain "things" the customer is looking for, but in all cases that analysis is a snapshot of a moment in time. Stringing along multiple snapshots helps paint a broader picture, but revisit rate is still a few times a day in the BEST case (and the customer likely has deep pockets if that's true). The bottleneck is image capture.

The satellite industry is an incredibly high-walled garden. Launch costs are falling and the use of off-the-shelf hardware combined with smaller satellite forms is improving revisit, but it's a steep hill to climb no less. Custom-built monitoring algos are subject to diminishing returns based on a variety of factors and the number of images in a data set is certainly part of that.

A colleague of mine created TypeSense (https://typesense.org/) a few years ago. I think it may make sense for your use case.

Ditto on the toolkit recommendation. There are some good sets out there but you could also go the DIY route and assemble one if the recipient has a niche they typically work on. Walmart's HyperTough brand tools are cheap and works well for the price, but the selection of electrical tools and supplies at Harbor Freight are immense if the giftee does a lot of soldering/wiring/etc.

I remember a DevOps engineer at my last job telling me about a "cheat code" where we could type 'push' into the VPN 2FA prompt to have it pushed as a notification to the enrolled device. I've been typing the same command into every 2FA prompt I encounter since then with no luck. I wish that was a standard convention.

Those suspension bolts are no joke. The control arm bolts on my sedan took 25 minutes of the 'blow torch --> upside down canned air' cycle get them to budge with a breaker bar. And the first drive to the alignment shop is enough to induce cold sweats on occasion.

Coolant is typically pretty easy and the intervals are longer, although I end up sticky with glycol every time I do a flush. If you ever decide to tackle the brakes, I picked up a $10 vacuum hand pump on Amazon that saved me from jury-rigging a 2liter bleeder bottle and finding someone to pump the brakes for me. Highly recommend.

By a large margin, definitely. I was hesitant to attempt repairs on my daily before I picked up car #2 because it was my only mode of transportation. Being able to switch between the two now gives me a much wider time margin for potential errors and my feelings about DIY repairs have gone from "keeping this car alive is going to bankrupt me" to "this is a fun hobby."

When confidence in repairability is low and stakes are high, it probably makes sense to opt for a shop.

You're absolutely right, I hadn't thought of that. Very interesting (and affirming) way of looking at those savings.

No better feeling though! Especially when running the numbers post-fix (insert CS joke here) and comparing to shop quotes. I keep spreadsheets for two cars and an older jet ski and I've saved ~$12k this year alone by wrenching solo assuming $100/hr = standard labor rate. I've learned a TON of cross-functional skills, have full control over the parts and repair, and it's just a feel-good way to step away from my desk when things slow down at work.

I remind myself of the the 5-digit savings whenever I'm in line at Harbor Freight... which is often.

Might be anecdotal but on top of that, I've noticed that many car owners who previously only had services performed by a shop began doing their own maintenance. A friend who works as a service manager at CarMax had similar observations in conversations with some customers, including one DIY-er who forgot to torque their oil drain bolt correctly, lost the oil, and is now the recipient of a refurbished engine.

I had only done light maintenance/upgrade work on my cars prior to the pandemic. In the last year I've replaced a rear main seal, front + rear rotors + pads on all my cars, new control arms, shocks, and struts on a sedan, a ton of electrical work, cold air upgrades, every single fluid drained and filled, etc. DIY content on YouTube is getting to the point where a middle schooler can fab a car from scratch given enough time and motivation. YMMV (literally).

Maybe--time will tell. We run revisit estimates with FlightRadar so I can say that there's a good amount of deviation in routes generally, but I also think narrow corridors are the mechanisms that makes rapid revisit even more powerful. When you can achieve minute-level temporal resolution for heavily populated areas using smartphones (to start), the cost is more or less negligible compared to satellite imaging.

I know of one market-maker HQ'd in Manhattan that currently pays $16 million/year for two satellite images per day of the oil storage tanks in Cushing, OK. Analysts determine tank volume by looking at the shadows cast by the floating lids on the tanks and use that data to set oil futures prices. There are roughly 1,500 flights over the same area every day. We're very much a hypothesis-become-startup at the moment but I'm optimistic!

Exactly--one such example is Toyota's export lots sitting in the western approach path at PDX, and Liberty International sitting right next to the Port of Newark. We have a ton of examples on social media if you care to see more.

I've been trying not to get too in the weeds with use cases right now as we're building because they really are endless, but supply chain intelligence and insurance are massive categories based on those who have expressed interest.

Weather is certainly an issue, but one that is shared with optical imaging satellites. SAR definitely helps with clouds and night shots, but with 100k flights per day the odds of getting at least one usable shot from a plane is far greater than a satellite due to revisit rates in orbit not matching weather changes in the troposphere.

Thank you! You're correct about (most) existing planes--from what I understand, there was a "gentleman's agreement" between cold war powers that kept manufacturers from pursuing those designs. Since 2000, many models have added onboard cameras on the belly and tail for pilot awareness and in-flight entertainment systems.

Our system is 100% internal which allows us to sidestep massive expense that comes with tunnel testing, retrofit, maintenance, etc. Customers using our Beta receive free in-flight wifi for recording out of their window seat for short increments during their flight. We cache the previous image and compare with the new image on the device itself, transmitting only the raw diff which dramatically lowers our bandwidth needs. All orthorectification and advance photogrammetry occurs on-ground, but we outsource a ton of that processing to the edge device.

We're also designing a physical hardware camera array that can be fixed to the window and is about the size of a headphone case. If you're interested in examples, our social media accounts are full of them: https://www.instagram.com/notasatellite/

There's still money on the table for airline operators where routes are concerned. It sounds a bit fringe, but most of these flights take off and land at airports in large cities. International airports are often zoned around industrial centers that are typically set off away from the city core. Coupled with the high frequency of inbound and outbound traffic depending on the airport, commercial flights are excellent candidates for capturing high resolution aerial imagery in near-real time. In many cases, those images can be transmitted back down while the plane is in the air thanks to in-flight internet.

There have been past attempts to harness the passive residual capabilities of air travel for photography, but none have stuck based on the difficulty of scaling such a system. If successful, crowdsourced aerial photography for cartography could add a layer of temporal resolution we just can't achieve with fewer than 500 imaging satellites currently in orbit, and for 1/10,000th the cost of satellite-based imaging. Add on concerns about LEO crowding and the thousands of use cases near-real-time aerial imaging could provide at a fraction of the cost, it becomes an interesting problem to solve.

There are plenty of barriers to this kind of scheme, regulation in particular, that could keep airlines from participating; the first major carrier who does, however, may find themselves with a new multi-billion dollar revenue stream.

(Disclosure: Founder @ https://notasatellite.com)

Space-adjacent seems like a subcategory that will eventually fall under the "space" umbrella as well. There's a massive amount of terrestrial infrastructure (digital and physical) that will be needed to facilitate all the upcoming orbital activity. Services like constellation management, procurement, pad construction, material handling, etc., will all likely count startups among their ranks in large numbers. All that to say nothing of "actual" space tech.

There are certain bottlenecks that have developed based on our use of space in the last half century as well. I'm definitely biased here (working on such a problem), but abstracting some of our space-based capabilities to other existing and established formats will free up some much needed room and support bigger endeavors. It is and will continue to be a very complementary industry IMO.

Always great seeing new companies in the space... space. Eager to see if these startups will end up standing on their own or become no-brainer acquisition targets for the incumbents. I think the outlook is good in general.

"Never Lost Again" is an excellent read for anyone curious about the origins of Keyhole-become-Google Earth.

Congrats! Its amazing how much fruit HN can potentially bear in exchange for a few minutes writing a post or comment. The Who's Hiring threads in particular have been incredibly valuable and I too received my first angel check from someone who noticed a co-founder search post. I can't think of any other site that has the staying power + network that is HN (though I'm sure they're out there).

Appreciate the kind words! We think so too :)

Not A Satellite Labs | Co-Founder (Mobile Sensing - iOS and/or Android) | Remote (U.S.) | https://notasatellite.com

We're building the world's first real-time map using a network of cameras aboard 120,000 daily commercial flights. Our approach lets us gather thousands of times more earth observation data at a fraction of the operational cost of building, launching, and maintaining satellites. Our competitors (Maxar, Planet, Airbus) advertise daily updates; we've demonstrated 1,430 updates on a single coordinate in early tests using just a cell phone camera.

We've recently filed 6 patents related to the core sensing methods and will be filing 6 more in Q3. We have a 3-member advisory team consisting of a retired Air Force Lt. General, CTO of a Bay-Area tech company, and the former CEO of MetroCall. I'm a technical founder looking to bring on a co-founder who can assist me with building the mobile application that handles in-flight sensing. We currently have 450 customer commitments running on a negligible burn rate and are in the process of raising our seed round.

If you'd like to hear more about the business concept, current challenges or the product roadmap, shoot me an email (chris@notasatellite.com) or check us out on social media @notasatellite.

FWIW, this is also great advice from an insurance point of view. I went on a 3 month trip and took pictures of all the appliances before leaving--mostly for peace of mind, but also because the building was fairly old and had a history of leaking pipes, faulty outlets, etc.

Sure enough, a month into the trip and my downstairs neighbor has his bathroom ceiling fall in due to a leaky drain pipe in my shower. I had photo proof that the water wasn't on or leaking and the building's insurance policy ended up renovating both of our bathrooms. Came back to a brand new rainfall shower and granite countertops.

I think the overlap may be surprising. The CTO of the last startup I worked for (well-known e-commerce shaving co.) had a massive lifted F-250 and I've seen a fair share of tech-truck-bro types.

I get what you mean, though.

Ditto on the large vehicle purchase. I've been spending more time out in the wilderness and my 2WD Volvo sedan wasn't cutting it on dirt roads and with little-to-no suspension, so I bought a 2005 Yukon from a good friend. He bought it from the original owner last year for $1100, used his employee discount at CarMax to fix a bunch of small issues, and I picked it up for $2000. It's a beast of a truck, has tons of options even with its age, and the V8 Vortec engines in these cars are known for their longevity. The Volvo has become the long-distance runner while the Yukon is more of a utility truck. With the used car market looking like it is, I could probably unload it for $5k-$6k. Right now it's basically a mini-shop/storage shed/camp site on wheels.

UX on the flight contributor side is currently a low-touch app that accepts the user's flight number and prompts for their seat selection (assuming a commercial flight). We load an image correction profile based on whether the seat is fore or aft of the wing in order to correct for the blur caused by engine exhaust, after which we cache the image task coordinates we anticipate they'll be flying over. We provide a code for free in-flight wifi (actually 2--one for each side of the plane) that can be redeemed after completing a simple calibration task while taxiing or shortly after takeoff. The calibration looks at window opacity, occlusions, and considers atmospheric conditions for each leg of the flight.

In order to maximize battery life and prevent user fatigue, we only alert the user to begin recording when they're approaching a task coordinate by referencing the cached coordinate with the current GPS coordinate which is readily available even in Airplane mode. The "workload" for test users so far averages about 5 alerts per flight or 5-10 minutes of "recording", typically shortly after takeoff and prior to landing. We're using Lobe to train an ML model with the image feeds, so we're working on implementing a Captcha-style post-flight survey where a few sample images taken in flight are presented to the user for first-pass labeling. If a user completes this survey, they're rewarded with additional airline miles as a thank you

There are plenty of other opportunities to gamify the recording process and we've been taking cues from apps like Waze and OpenStreetMaps to inform some of these potential reward features. Possibilities include revenue sharing, free flights after reaching milestones, travel gear, etc. I remember flying Spirit years ago and they always had a fun way to reward the unlucky souls in the middle seat by putting a sticker on one of the tray tables. The passenger sitting in the "lucky" middle seat got a free round-trip ticket which I've always thought was really cool, so perks like those are top of mind as well.

Tl;dr - we're intent on keeping the UX transparent, engaging, and unobtrusive for the recorder--point, shoot, disembark--while rewarding them in kind for their time and effort.

I think it does for a few very specific reasons. I'll answer your questions in order:

1. Resolution is a function of altitude, atmospheric conditions, and camera capabilities. At 30,000ft with zoom, we can get results around 10cm/px on an average smartphone (iPhone SE 2). That's still pretty sharp but we can further enhance the image using satellite base maps, upscaling, and other inference techniques. Obliques can be corrected and used to assemble a "full image" when the opposite oblique is captured, but remains useful (to a certain point on the horizon--right now about 15 miles at cruising). There's still a vast amount of information we can obtain at higher altitudes including crop yield data, snow pack, reservoir/lake water levels, forest density, etc.

2. The physical device we're prototyping is about the size of a headphone case--I actually used a Bose QC25 headphone case to cast the model! There are a few potential avenues to deploy physical sensing hardware on flights including revenue sharing with airlines, using passengers to deploy, and other partnerships in the general aviation space. The DoD in particular has expressed interest in a purpose-built device for aerial sensing but for now, mobile device crowdsourcing in the commercial markets is the focus.

3. There are huge spots in and around US airspace where planes cannot (or generally do not) fly. Satellites will remain the key players when optimizing for coverage, but the high-frequency revisit I believe is best obtained using aerial imagery. I always like to tell people that's why we're "Not A Satellite" instead of "Anti-Satellite". There's more than enough room for both, and we see a huge opportunity to increase revisit and provide a complementary offering to satellite imagery.

We've looked at revisit frequency against ADS-B data and about 80% of the US sees at least 2 flights within a mile each day, exponentially more so around cities and developed areas. Many of our customers are interested in monitoring sites within 15 miles of a major international airport, so we're able to obtain high-resolution images using mobile devices because aircraft are typically below ~8,000ft within that radius. LAX for example can see as many as 500 takeoffs and landings each day, and there are hundreds of industrial sites (ports, fulfillment warehouses, other infrastructure) within the approach path.

I genuinely appreciate your questions. We're still early-stage and the discussions I've had on HN alone have vastly improved the quality of our pitch, business plan, and exposed major blind spots. Thanks again for the kind words, and I'll be sure to drop you a line!

We do, search ’Not A Satellite’ and our social accounts will pop up. Instagram has the most descriptive content/examples.

Check our Instagram for examples: @notasatellite

Correct. It sounds a bit far-out (and it is) but we've proven the feasibility with a testing group of around 300 passengers using a multitude of different phones/altitudes/conditions/routes. GPS works in airplane mode, so we pre-cache target coordinates based on the filed flight plan and alert the passenger to hold the device to the window when overflying the target. The gyroscope is used to provide feedback on phone orientation so we can get as close to nadir as possible, but we're still able to correct for obliques at around 20miles on the horizon using some general inference. Resolution is a function of altitude and device, but upscaling techniques enhance the images even further after they're transmitted.

We've also developed our own sensing device prototype we call "The Box" that's equipped with a much more powerful array of sensors, but the mobile device-sensing approach makes the most sense for a scalable MVP.

I'm the founder of a company working to solve this exact problem. Revisit rate of Planet's 200+ Dove satellites are quite good (multiple/day) but are comparatively low-res compared to their Rapideye satellites, of which there are fewer. There are a slew of others (Maxar is the next biggest name that comes to mind) but the thesis is low earth orbit is getting crowded, satellites are incredibly expensive even with off-the-shelf parts and falling launch costs, and hardware capabilities are locked-in at launch.

We're taking the approach of using "free energy" in the form of 100,000+ daily commercial/freight/general aviation aircraft to crowdsource aerial imagery using mobile phones to start. Passengers who opt-in are rewarded with free in-flight wifi (where equipped), and we use the device to do orthorectification and photogrammetry at the edge before transmitting it back down via satellite internet. I'm glossing over much of the actual process, but this frees up a ton of computing that would otherwise have to be done on the ground. In the event the flight is not internet connected, we cache previous images based on flight path and upload the difference after comparing old vs. new on the device once signal is restored. End result is a massive boost in both temporal and spatial resolution at a dramatically lower cost. Think Google Maps, updated every few minutes.

We're on IG @notasatellite if you're interested in looking at some samples.

Revisit is getting better and satellites have an edge when it comes to total coverage of the earth, but the 120,000 flights around the world each day typically fly predictable routes at low altitudes near urban centers (takeoff and landing). This presents a massive opportunity to leverage all of that "free energy" and use aircraft for earth observation. Coverage can be supplemented with satellites, but revisit of aircraft is far greater for many terrestrial locations.

2x/day revisit for most of the world is probably sufficient for the majority of use cases, but that assumes good weather (for images). On the other hand, LAX for example sees hundreds of takeoffs and landings each day, so if you were interested in modeling retail foot traffic by parking lot volume, pace of urban development, rate of containers moving in and out of port, etc. you could get a massive boost in temporal resolution using aircraft and far cheaper than launching + maintaining a satellite constellation.