Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Drones Take Flight: Peter Platzer, NanoSatisfi”.
Thank you all for having me. I want to stay too long between you and the first coffee break. Thank You Dale for having me, I’m really excited to be here, and I want to tell you a story of one of the things that truly inspired me to leave my my 10 years of investment management and do something you know slightly crazy, and so I want To tell you the story of you know, artists at and we get to in a second and the power of open access. I think Chris has done a phenomenal job in talking about the power of Moore’s law driving accessibility to technology, and I want to elaborate a little bit on the open access that I think he pointed out already as well. So I’ll tell you the story about a company, it was a relatively successful technology company and they invented a new user interface for rather common device.
Now the one thing that wasn’t entirely obvious to them is like how our consumers going to want to use that technology and that interface. So one thing that it is like: why don’t we have an absolutely crazy idea instead of telling consumers how they’re going to use our technology, why don’t we go out and crowdsource the use of our technology, so they basically gave open access to their technology. They made it them very easy to access and then let the world innovate. So they had a microprocessor.
The device had four senses and it had this really really simple user interface, and so they added an SDK and API and an app store. And then they let the world innovate, and I think by now, you’re going to get a sense of what this you know unknown technology companies that i’m talking about national talking about apple and the outcome was that over the course of just four years they will generate It over 850,000 applications for this device that has been downloaded. I think morning is 50 billion times and generating you know billions of dollars of revenue for the company, and I think that revolutionary aspect off we have a technology, but instead of telling people what to do with it, we let people figure out what to do with It, and that is like an aspect of crowdsourcing, of open sourcing access to technology that really inspired me to do with it, with a bunch of friends that I’ve met at the international space university and build build a satellite. So what we do is same to them.
They have like this interface iphone technology, there’s moves law. I think Chris talked about that and some really really creative applications that you couldn’t even come up yourself, and so what we do with other set is, first of all, it’s a crowd source project. So we put it out on Kickstarter last summer and say we’re going to have a satellite fill it with Arduino processors and we all let you program and control it, and that was pretty successful.
You raised a hundred thousand dollars which, for normal space budget with people think of billions of dollars shouldn’t get you very far, but it does today. So what we said is we make it an open platform like our satellite here. That’S like our engineering model.
This thing before is the first pictures that we took literally three months after the Kickstarter campaign. Our payload went into the edge of space and and took this picture here. This is our engineering model is in our office right now. This is the flat top model and those are our two satellites within 12 months of having the idea with in about seven months of being on Kickstarter, we have to fully build satellites, and so that you get a sense of of the size of this. This is the physical size of a satellite, that’s it and this thing is going to fly. Actually two are going to fly relatively soon, but we didn’t stop there.
We add it an open development environment, so we have an out of control center where you just go onto the internet and you see where the satellite is. You see your applications and you see if any data that is available to you, there is a learning environment. You know the idea was inspired by sebastian, thrun zi class, in which i participated as well, and you get to learn everything you need to know about programming, a satellite from programming to physics, to you know, team management coming up with ideas, and if this thing works And then you can program it online. So one thing that we took out of the Arduino processing environment is that downloading off software right.
So it’s still quite a bit of download and go the web page and you download drivers and an IDE and stuff like that. And that isn’t hurdle, and you know point Chris mentioned about bringing down the hurdle of access. So we took all that out and created a website where, if you have an account, you can take one of Dale’s, wonderful, re, no processes and you plug it in and you can program it without having to download anything. And then we did the other thing as well, so we just released our API.
There is an SDK and there is even as an app store where you can sign up to become a developer for this application. So, within a time at time span of about 12 months, we took an area that was generally considered massively expensive and completely inaccessible for the public space and space exploration and basically open sourced it. So you have now a web page where you can go on and you can buy a little argues that kit with a few sensors – and you can buy time on a satellite where we actually give you about a full weeks time to control the satellite and run Your very own application for 250 bucks and we are trying to make given that cheaper, and what do you get for that? So this is our artists that one is going to be launched in in August fifth, and it has about 15 different sensors, some of which have never been flown on a device this size, and some of them are going to look really large.
When we look at it again in five years and that moves laws and the economies of scale from drones, from cell phones from security and surveillance in general is going to continue to drive down the mass and power factor of those sensors, and it has other you Know, processors, and so one thing you see is we have fully taken advantage of those improvements, our kicks that our campaign at a camera that we threw out after two months and replace it with a camera four times the size. Those satellites here have a certain type of Arduino processor and one of them you’re going to throw out and replace with an upgraded one in the one you’re going to launch in November. Just a few months later. So there is massive economies of scale is happening on earth, but in space we are not taking advantage of them so far. The average technology of our satellites today is equivalent to a 486 PC running Windows. 95. Raise your hand if you still use a 486 PC at home. So that’s what we do. We have a microprocessor.
We have 15 sensors, we have a simple user interface, you just go onto the internet and log on to your satellite. You can write your code, you upload it to the satellite, we give you an SDK, we have an app store, we had Moore’s law, we talked about it and every crowd source space exploration through open access. Now, what are some of the applications that we’re thinking of one of the things that I’m personally very passionate about education and lowering the barrier and letting literally high school kids experience space exploration? Hands-On? Because I think the story that is told about is how hard it is to get kids engaged in science today is absolutely true. The other side is also true. We as a country rely on finding ways to get them interested. We are short over a million graduates in those fields. Science, technology, engineering and math just over the next few years alone and part of the problem is, is because we think given them, a tax book is exciting.
Well, if I have a choice, I mean this is some of the applications here. If I have a choice of looking at a textbook picture or if I have a choice of programming, a satellite to measure Earth’s magnetic field, I mean you kinda, like can figure out which one I’m going to meeting towards. But i think what is even more powerful is the experience that we take this experiment and when the kids actually write the application measure, the Earth’s magnetic fields, they’re going to say, miss jones on my experiment. It looks different than this picture here and then you’re going to find out that their experiment is correct and that this picture is actually wrong because thing called the sauna.
It’S blown against the Earth’s magnetic field, and so this kid has the experience that they can do. Something, and that is smarter than a textbook right, but I think that’s not the end of the story. If you think of a constellation of satellites – and I think sorry, I forgot your name – you talked about you know what a constellation of Jones can do.
If you think of a constellation of satellites, what they can do, that is following Moore’s law, so that you always have the most processor up there. We can get eyes on disaster within minutes and not within days. We can have a way to have ships that are in struggle on the ocean, get access to help when right now they don’t have any access to land. We can help emerging market countries getting much better sense of Agriculture, which is still a their largest income source. The largest economic driver and is really the key driver of them being able to feed themselves so having a big videos.
Real-Time access to space, 24 7 will dramatically change what we can do on earth and what we understand about our planets. One last thing I want to leave you with is: we were lucky enough to be selected by nasa for their space f challenge a few weeks ago, and there was a group in a believe guatemala we’ve never heard of, and they came up with this really brilliant Idea of one of our sensors to measure what percentage of earth’s landmass is covered in green, and so they wrote an application for our satellite to see how green is our planet and what can we do to make it more green? Thank you. .