kartikkumar

It's kinda funny how strategy and tactics can cross over between totally unrelated businesses.

We've taken a pretty similar approach to keeping companies honest. What we realized was that in niche markets, trust drives transactions and people are often aware that burning relationships for short-term gain has a drastic impact on lifetime value, especially if there are strong network effects.

Fortunately, we've only had to threaten to use the contractual stick a handful of times, and in each case, the mere appearance of the stick in the conversation served to recalibrate things, bringing the dialogue back to the fair center.

The cold start problem is real and one that really took us a lot of time and effort. The time spent to understand the mechanics of our marketplace manually paid itself back later on, when we realized that it helped us understand churn, and specifically how to mitigate it.

Enjoy the read!

This is quite a popular idea but there's a lot of challenging economics that haven't been figured out yet.

CisLunar Industries [1] for example wants to harvest and process metal from debris on orbit.

Their initial application is to create metal fuel rods for thruster technology being developed by Neumann Space [2].

[1] https://www.cislunarindustries.com

[2] https://neumannspace.com

Congrats on your launch!

Back in 2015, I was part of an EU Marie Curie ITN network called Stardust [1] working on something similar.

We utilized robotic arms and a novel non-contact, detumbling technology (using eddy currents) to approach and remove Ariane rocket bodies [2].

It was a fascinating project and I subsequently worked on investigating mission analysis approaches to compute multi-target rendezvous sequences, specifically assessing the impact of orbital perturbations on the use of semi-analytical transfer leg design algorithms [3].

You might be interested in the follow-up to the Stardust network, dubbed Stardust-R [4]. Happy to connect you with any of the organizations involved if it's helpful.

It was the frustration of trying to manually deal with collecting information for component, subsystem, and system trade studies that led to me wondering if an 'amazon for space' [5] wouldn't help engineers focus on the really hard engineering instead of Googling :) [shameless plug]

Would love to learn more about your Droid platform if you're interested in chatting!

[1] https://www.stardust2013.eu

[2] https://www.dfki.de/web/forschung/projekte-publikationen/pub...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02731...

[4] http://www.stardust-network.eu

[5] https://satsearch.com

Sounds good!

Congrats! Great to see YC supporting more software companies that are working towards finally bringing the "boring" parts of the sector into the 21st century.

If you're interested in exploring the idea of supply chain integration, I'd love to chat. We're an ESA-backed, online marketplace for the space sector [1], and we've built a few integrations already to bring tools and data together for engineers.

[1] https://satsearch.com

LIDAR has interesting space applications for Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC).

For instance, I worked on the design of a mission concept for multi-target Active Debris Removal [1], for which flash LIDAR was an important part of the GNC package, in addition to stereo visual cameras, and various other sensors. For non-cooperative targets, LIDAR is a pretty important technology, due to possible varying lighting conditions.

LIDAR has been used for close proximity GNC for the International Space Station too [2].

Compact, low-power flash LIDAR will open up a slew of applications like on-orbit satellite servicing and refuelling.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301359099_Agora_Mis...

[2] https://neptec.com/products/lidar/

Eric Berger has a lot of really great stories about what's going on in the space industry. Smallsats have been the story of the sector for going on two decades now.

I've got a background in both space engineering and planetary science. One of the most exciting things that I see happening over the coming decade is commoditization of planetary probes. There's so much more of the Solar System that we still have to explore and the traditional flagship missions just don't give us enough access.

The best way to think of how smallsats augment our space science and exploration capability is in terms of the marginal value over traditional missions. For planetary science, the cost per bit of science data can drastically be reduced through the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components.

There are a number of private companies looking to leveraging smallsats to deliver all-in planetary science missions, like Xplore [1].

As a space engineer, access to suppliers was really a major hurdle towards finding the optimal cost and risk sweet spot. If you're interested, we've published a series of articles shedding light on different products & services available on the market [2]. We've now got 1000s of space engineers every month from all over the world using these articles to drive better sourcing.

Better sourcing will ultimately lead to better missions, and drive the smallsat revolution towards completely remaking the way we think of both space science and exploration.

[1] https://www.xplore.com

[2] https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-12-03-space-technology-on-sat....

It's leveraging Lockheed technology [1].

[1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html

Lockheed is building out the ground infrastructure network [1]

[1] https://spacenews.com/amazon-lockheed-venture-casts-shadow-o...

The satellite ground station market is quite dynamic at the moment. As the data generated on-orbit continues to grow, the need for robust ground infrastructure becomes that much more important.

Ground-Station-as-a-Service (GSaaS) is something that AWS stepped into given the fact that AWS is used quite extensively for the data processing chain, so it was a logical play for them to verticalize. AWS partnered with Lockheed to build out the hardware network [1][2].

They've got some decent competition in the market. We published a round-up article of ground station providers a while back [3].

The move to higher frequencies is changing the market substantially. This year, a number of optical ground stations were supposed to be deployed, given growth of satellite terminals [4]. We'll have to see with the virus what actually ends up happening.

[1] https://spacenews.com/amazon-lockheed-venture-casts-shadow-o...

[2] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html

[3] https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-09-25-ground-station-service-...

[4] https://blog.satsearch.co/2020-01-22-optical-communications-...

Edit: Added/updated references

Here's our round-up of optical comms systems for small satellites: https://blog.satsearch.co/2020-01-22-optical-communications-...

The optical comms market is quite dynamic at the moment, There are a number of ground stations being deployed around the world, in addition to terminals for satellites being brought to market for ground communication and inter-satellite links (ISL).

LoRa in/from space is a thing [1].

[1] https://lacuna.space/technology

Everyone is focused on the precipitous drop in launch costs, but the supply chain is really where the biggest opportunities now lie.

Many suppliers are struggling with finding the right balance between economies of scale, lead time, modularity/standardization, reliability, and (backwards) compatibility.

As industry volume increases, this should start straightening itself out. The challenge is that there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem at the moment: there's a severe lack of transparency, meaning that commercial market forces are largely missing.

So greater transparency = greater competitiveness = better price/value ratio = faster, better, cheaper satellites

There's a massive, evolving body of work on space law and a lot more than meets the eye. This article doesn't really canvas the extent to which the community to working towards tackling the long-term issue of space sustainability.

Every IAC, there's a space moot court run by the International Institute of Space Law (IISL) [0]. This is an excellent opportunity for space law young professionals to engage in pressing issues like Space Traffic Management (STM).

The issue with space debris is much like the climate change challenge: it's serious and nuanced. A few years ago, I co-authored a paper on the applicability of the IADC's 25-year guideline ,mentioned in the article, for Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites [1] (happy to send anyone a copy of the full manuscript if interested).

I've also done some work on the technical side of Active Debris Removal (ADR), and published a paper on figuring out how to target solutions to the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) for multi-target missions using low-thrust transfer trajectories [2] (likewise, happy to share the full paper if interested).

I'm sharing this is to highlight that the problem of space debris is not trivial. I find that it's often trivialized in articles intended for a general audience, when the devil really is in the details.

For instance, the article misses the important topic of addressing object ownership. There are no salvage laws in place for space assets. What's more, the fundamental definition of what is considered "junk" is in the eye of the beholder. Russian rocket bodies are often cited, however what's missed is the fact that Russia continues indefinitely to retain full ownership of these objects: hence, you can't touch them even if you could safely and economically remove them, without Russia giving explicit consent. This speaks to how intractable space law actually is: it's a massively complex geo-political maze.

The article also fails to mention that despite space being big, we witnessed the effects of a collision back in 2009 [3]. I had the pleasure of grabbing a drink with TS Kelso, the genius behind CelesTrak, last week during the conference. Fact is that we're hampered on all side (technical, economic, legal, political) to deal with the space debris problem.

There's an idea being floated to develop a Space Sustainability Rating (SSR), recently announced at the World Economic Forum [4]. I'm currently working on an idea with one of the participants in the consortium (Prof. Moriba Jah at UT Austin). He's got this quote that he loves to use to describe the right approach to Space Situational Awareness (SSA): "to know it, you must measure it; to understand it, you must predict it!" To that end, we're looking at connecting our global space supply chain database [5] to the knowledge of the space debris population, to better assess risk and enable lawmakers to understand what needs to be regulated (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch).

In short, this article only skims over a highly complex topic with many dimensions.

[0] https://iislweb.org/iac-2019-technical-programme-iisl-colloq...

[1] https://iafastro.directory/iac/archive/browse/IAC-15/A6/IP/2...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311771...

[3] https://www.celestrak.com/publications/AAS/09-368/AAS-09-368...

[4] https://phys.org/news/2019-05-space-sustainability-aims-amou...

[5] https://satsearch.co

I have "datasheet-envy".

I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch [1], where we're working on fixing procurement in the space industry. We're constantly battling shitty datasheets.

As a space engineer, I found it infinitely frustrating to work with flyers that suppliers provide on their website, that also double-up as preliminary datasheets. They're messy, inconsistent, and subject to whatever the supplier thinks their buyer might want to know.

We wrote a blog article about the mess that exists in the space industry [2], and a follow-up about what we think can be done to improve this through Electronic Data Sheets (EDS) [3].

The EEE industry seems streets ahead in this regard, which is perhaps primarily down to strong commercialization and rapid growth of the market over the past 20 years. I think with companies like Octopart [4] making it patently obvious who does a good job of supporting engineers, it might also have pushed suppliers to improve their documentation.

I'm curious though about the consistent use of PDFs. I understand from a usability point of view that they're great for documents, but I would have imagined that the EEE industry would have started distributing "smart documents".

To give you an example, the AD datasheet in this article includes a number of high-res graphs: why has the sector not moved to the point where these graphs are interactive elements that you can zoom into, programmatically read off of, export data from, etc.? The way I look at it, a Juypter notebook or something similar would be an awesome way to share datasheet content, allowing much more interactivity.

Anyone with any thoughts as to why datasheets haven't progressed in that direction?

[1] https://satsearch.co

[2] https://blog.satsearch.co/2018-02-21-building-better-datashe...

[3] https://blog.satsearch.co/2018-01-23-the-challenges-of-an-en...

[4] https://www.octopart.com

I've thought of building a KSP integration with our database, so who knows, maybe we'll figure out a way that you can actually pull in real parts on the market into KSP in the near future ;)

Thanks for the suggestion! We can definitely set up a couple of articles to touch on the different smallsat form factors on the market. Launch is also a really interesting part of the market to cover. I've added both to out roadmap, thanks!

Do you mean comms systems like transceivers, antenna, etc.? There's some really exciting stuff going on with phased arrays and optical comms at the moment. Software-Defined Radio (SDR) is also becoming an increasing important area of innovation for satellite comms.

Thanks for the suggestion! Star trackers and sun sensors are in the pipeline over the next couple of months :)

Thanks for the feedback!

That's exactly the direction we're heading towards :)

We've already noticed that suppliers are starting to open up their product data because of the value we can bring to them through our website.

Our long-term plan is indeed to structure data sheets, so that you can actually start comparing products without having to spend hours wading through PDFs docs.

We've soft-launched our API [1], which we're using to build tools like our Data Explorer [2], to help engineers navigate design choices much more easily. Under the hood, we're working with suppliers to convert their data sheets to a standardized format.

We'll work on trying to extend this article specifically with your feedback.

Thanks again!

[1] https://api.satsearch.co

[2] https://satsearch.co/explorer

TS Kelso at AGI put out an interesting white paper with more details: https://www.agi.com/resources/white-papers/analysis-of-the-i...

Kelso is also the brains behind CelesTrak for debris tracking: https://www.celestrak.com

There are also a number of videos on YouTube of the collision profile, made using AGI's Systems Toolkit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oRC9dHKI9Y

Hey folks, nice to see this article hit the frontpage. I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch. We're working on building more content like this to open up the space industry to more people.

After some initial feedback, we're already working to expanding this article. We've also published articles on small satellite thrusters [1] and reaction wheels [2]. We'll be publishing one on ground-station-as-a-service soon.

Would love your feedback/input on what you'd like to see next.

[1] https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-07-10-cubesat-thrusters-an-ov...

[2] https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-07-25-reaction-wheels-an-over...

Space tugs have been a topic of research for quite a while in the space community. A number of companies targeting the in-space space transport market over the last few years, e.g., [1][2]. There's also a recent YC alum targeting this [3].

Propulsion is itself a really hot topic in the NewSpace market the moment, ranging from tiny thrusters for precision attitude control of smallsats, to large systems for orbital transport. We recently published a review of smallsat thrusters, highlighting the rich spectrum of solutions being brought to market [4] (Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch).

There's a lot of systems innovation that enabling fuel-efficient solutions to be developed. Particularly, there's a lot of progress being made on developing high-efficient electric propulsion. One of the trending areas is water-based propulsion, given that it's clean, non-toxic, storable, and also abundantly available in the Solar System [5].

With companies also look at building fuel depots to refuel spacecraft on orbit [6], there's a wide array of new solutions that are going to emerge for repeat use of tugs.

The traditional GEO market went through a massive dip last year [7], but there's renewed interest with the real prospect of small GEO missions materializing in the next 24 months. Another YC alum is targeting this market [8].

So in short, this is a really dynamic sector, going through a lot of changes at the moment. I'm eager to learn more about Epic, to see where they're carving a niche for themselves. Also, interesting to see YC's continuity in funding hardtech space startups.

[1] https://spacenews.com/airbus-to-challenge-ssl-orbital-atk-wi...

[2] https://www.atomosspace.com/

[3] https://momentus.space/rides/

[4] https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-07-10-cubesat-thrusters-an-ov...

[5] https://www.thespaceresource.com/news/2019/2/propelling-dema...

[6] https://www.orbitfab.space/

[7] https://spacenews.com/amid-geo-downturn-launch-operators-loo...

[8] https://www.astranis.com/

There's actually strong synergy. There's a lot of spin-in and spin-out going on between space and non-space sectors.

COTS and general commodization of "discete units" (parts, subsystems, assemblies, etc.) is one of the biggest drivers for the commercialization of space. It's enabling people to move towards the use of advanced manufacturing techniques, cutting lead time and cost, and enabling batch production.

We recently published an article on how manufacturing lines are changing in the space industry, inspired by best practices in mature commercial sectors like the auto industry: https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-08-08-demystifying-auto-indus...

We see a lot of this happening through our website: https://satsearch.co. We're effectively building a B2B marketplace because of this specific change in the way supply chains are being architected.

Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch.

This is where SAR imagery comes into play [1]. There are a few SAR constellations online and being worked on that are shifting the discussion about what we can track [2][3].

[1] https://medium.com/from-the-macroscope/its-always-sunny-at-o...

[2] https://www.iceye.com

[3] https://synspective.com

1. They launched by piggybacking on rockets that were launching larger satellites. For instance, they launched 88 on this record-setting PSLV launch: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/02/indias-pslv-record-1...

2. People generally have a poor understanding of how vast space is. Congestion in specific low-Earth orbits is definitely a concern, but the devil is in the details. For instance, launching to Sun-Synchronous orbit (SSO) [1] above ~600 km is considered to pose significant risk to on-orbit assets, because of how many satellites are in SSO and the kinetic energy their carry, however to really assess the risk, you need to do a lot of detailed population studies (I've done some of this stuff). In a nutshell, launching more satellites can be generally considered to increase risk of on-orbit collision and fragmentation, but quantifying it requires a lot of maths and physics.

3. Yes! There's is extensive and on-going research on this topic. Most people know the Kessler Syndrome [2], but honestly space debris research goes a lot further than that. This review by J.-C. Liou is a great starting point: https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&co...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

LSF FTW! :)

Great to see the SatNOGS network going from strength to strength!

@tectonic: thanks for including mention of our website/resources in this newsletter! Looking forward to meeting next week at SmallSat :)

If you're interested in understanding the state of the global space supply chain, check us out [1]. We're working on digitalizing the entire global marketplace and CubeSats are a huge part of the on-going commoditization within the sector. Kinda like "Octopart for space".

The supplier ecosystem is really a lot larger than people think (including myself until we started this project). There are some legacy and strategic reasons for "hidden hubs".

The supply chain is undergoing a lot of change, as organizations try to figure out how to not stay hidden and instead ride the on-going growth wave through international business/projects.

[1] https://satsearch.co

The risk of falsely predicting that someone is going to shoplift, based on models that are driven by correlation, is not a problem?

How is it not about policing thought?

If you present physical attributes/symptoms of someone who is thinking about shoplifting (nervousness, anxiety, fidgetiness, etc., as mentioned in the article), the models can classify you are "about to shoplift".

That's pretty close to thought policing if you ask me.

How is a validated chain of causation not important for these systems to arrive at ethical predictions?

The causation gap for these models presents a really terrible scenario.

Without causation, these models are capable of correlating things like race, gender, etc. with outcomes like shoplifting.