- This satellite could be your next ISP. Ask yourself if your internet is fast or slow, like an old pickup truck. 'The internet is not a big
truck. It's a series of tubes.' Well, we came to meet the folks who are taking the
internet out of the tubes and putting it into space. - There are 3 to 4
billion people in the world that do not have reliable access to
broadband internet. They have smartphones just like we do, but those smartphones are still stuck on a 2G internet connection. You know, the equivalent of dial-up. And that's what we've gotta fix. - Why do this? Well, ever since the internet
broke into the mainstream, it's become more and more
essential to our daily lives. Now, if you don't have
reliable internet access, you're essentially cut
off from modern society. - The traditional ways
of connecting people to the internet just don't work for the next 4 billion people. You would never think that the only way to connect somebody is by
strapping something to a rocket, having it blast into orbit and like be bathed in
radiation for 10 years. Like how is that the cheapest and most effective way? But, but it is. - But this is about more
than just satellites. It's about a whole new approach
to building infrastructure. Something that's extra important
when things go wrong- stick around to see why. This is "Hard Reset," a series about rebuilding
our world from scratch. This is my old office
building. That's correct. I used to work in this not
impressive-looking building. And while I worked 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 either a microwave
receiver that talked to an antenna on Mount
Diablo about 40 miles away, or a dish that could talk
to a satellite in orbit. At the 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 the high-speed internet that works anywhere in
the continental U.S.' - You can see what I mean.
- 'Interested? Thought so.' - There are 4 billion
people around the world that are not connected to the internet. These aren't people that are, you know, all in far-flung places around the world. Some of these people are
in the United States. If a hospital in Alaska wanted
to have like a gigabit line, which in San Francisco it's like what? $80, $100 per month? It might literally cost
them $20,000 a month. - That's Christian.
He's the chief of staff for a new startup right next
to my old office that's aiming to change all of that. - We came to Astranis to see how they're connecting millions,
maybe billions of people to the internet with satellites in space. - This is what a fancy
satellite factory looks like. It's very clean, but let me just say, it turns out there's a lot of
different ways to die in here. Anyway- You've probably heard of satellite internet
companies like Starlink before, but this is very different. Starlink satellites are
in LEO, which stands for low Earth orbit. That means they have to
orbit the Earth very quickly to avoid falling back
down into the gravity well. It also means that any
dish down here on Earth has to track those satellites
as they move across the sky. And anytime that dish needs to jump to tracking the next satellite, it'll lose connection with the internet. - The challenge with low Earth
orbit is you have to launch thousands of satellites
in order to provide a sort of a usable service, because each satellite is
really only overhead for five or six minutes at a time. - This is John. He's
the co-founder of Astranis, and he took an idea from one
of our favorite sci-fi writers and turned it into a business. - Arthur C. Clark actually
invented geostationary orbit. He came up with this idea that if you can put a
satellite out at just the right distance from Earth, its
orbit will match the rotation of the Earth's surface and you could bounce signals off of it. - Astranis is putting
small satellites at GEO or geostationary equatorial orbit, which is about 20 times further away. - Oh, no it's, no, it's
like a hundred times. - Oh, well that is very far. - Yeah, it's about a 10th
of the way to the Moon. - Anyway, because these
satellites orbit at the same speed as the rotation of the Earth, from our perspective, they
stay in one place in the sky. - Every geostationary orbital
slot is exactly 35,786 kilometers away
from Earth and is exactly at the equator. - We actually call it the "most valuable real estate in the solar system" because each
spot that a satellite, or in our case a cluster of
satellites could take up, there's only so many
of those to go around. So we really have to make sure we're making maximum use of those. - That means you don't need a fancy dish that can track LEO satellites
back and forth across the sky. And it means a single satellite can cover a much larger area. All this is possible because
it's gotten far more affordable to launch things into space, thanks to companies like SpaceX. Astranis started with a 3U
CubeSat, roughly the size of a loaf of bread, but now
they're launching a larger model, more like the size
of a small refrigerator. - We have satellites
up today that move data around in this way, but they're 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 of this by completely throwing away
the assumptions about how to build hardware for high orbits and start from first principles. - But space is hard: between the flight computer, all the software running on
it, all the suite of sensors, and then all of the
cutting-edge radio technology that has to be packed in. Getting all of that to work along with all the ground systems,
all the networking systems- it really all has to line
up for something like this to work, especially on the very first try. - Well, let's just call that
statement "foreshadowing." Getting all these different parts to work together requires a lot
of testing, which all starts with these smocks. - Let's see if anyone here
works here named Nick. - B Money. - That's pretty good.
All right, I'm just jealous. I don't have a personalized
one, but that's fine. - So we refer to this area
as "panel integration land." Basically, the satellite's
composed of six panels. - Is that big reflective
sphere in the middle of those the fuel tank? - Yeah. It's one of our tanks
and it's wrapped in MLI. So we call that stage of
integration 'Tie Fighter,' resemble the tie fighter,
and kind of rolled with it-company of engineers so we like Star Wars jokes. - Yeah. It's not unusual. - This is Effie. She's the mechanical integration lead and a googly eye specialist.
More on that later. - This is basically what a fully assembled vehicle would look like. It's on our breakover fixture. So - So the purpose of is is to take all panels you've built over here, put 'em on this, shake the heck out of 'em,
make sure they don't break, - Yep. - I'm guessing and do all the sort of like testing on this sort of fake version
of the final satellite. - Yep. The first you-
- You guys just have like a giant paint shaker from- - Yeah, I mean, so this
is our spacecraft-level vibe table right here. - Oh, this is the shaker? - Yep. So right now it's set up to do x, y and then the shaker head will rotate up and that's how it does the Z-axis. Wow, okay. - But yeah,
this is our shaker table for a few low-level runs, we put some googly eyes on it. - Oh yeah. - And it was just like, it's
actually just like really adorable seeing the eyes like roll around. So we always joke that we
qual those eyes for space, - But passing the literal
vibe check isn't the only thing that's done here. There are tests done in
thermal vacuum chambers where the satellite
experiences wild temperature fluctuations, just like in space, A propulsion test chamber
inspects propulsion systems behind this ominous structure
with a bulletproof curtain. And there's also an RF dead zone so they can test the electronics to ensure they don't
interfere with each other. Basically, they test for everything because once you send it up to space, there's no sending a repairman after it: A fact that will become
important later in this story. Anyway- - Things are gonna get hot,
things are gonna get cold, things are gonna shake up and down, left and right on that rocket going up. You're gonna have stars exploding all around you sending a bunch of
ionized radiation out to you. Can your hardware handle it,
or will it literally blow up? In our case, not the latter. - That's Brady Salz: He's the electrical integration lead and he's got the coolest
smock in the whole factory. - I have to ask this,
is B Money is the name? - Yes, this is, so my dad,
his name is Rich Salz. And when, back when they
were like inventing email, he invented our dollar sign
way before anyone else did it. So it's, you know,
passed on down. I've stolen it. - Oh, very nice. If any my
brothers ask, I did First - Brady's brothers have not asked. Anyway- B Money is making sure that all this expensive hardware
they shoot up into space is powered and returns the
highest quality data back. - How do you make sure that that thing is gonna go work in space? Right? If you have a
lot of high power things or high frequency things, spoiler alert, circuits are like people, they wanna talk to each other, right? They're all gonna be bouncing
around, introducing noise to each other, going up, down, left, right figuring this out- and proving that's not gonna be an issue and really getting that right is really difficult in simulation, and it's even harder in real life. - Right. - So you spend a lot more
time on the R & D cycle, getting it just right. - All this R & D, production, testing and assembly happens right here on site so that all the teams can
coordinate much more quickly before getting ready for launch. - Oh Effie, that's amazing. - Yeah. That's the, that's the
box that we use to transport Arcturus down
to Cape Canaveral. - That's where Astranis sent
their first geo satellite, 'Arcturus' into space. Can satellites finish the
job that Al Gore started? - 'I took the initiative in creating the internet.' - Let's find out. - This is our San Francisco
Mission Operations Center. We actually have a backup in
Utah, Eagle Mountain, Utah. In case the big earthquake
hits in San Francisco, something happens, we can quickly shift our operations over to there. Wow, - Wow. You couldn't get Houston. 'cause I hear that's a
great spot for Mission. - Everyone wanted to go there, but all the, yeah, it was all taken. - This is mission control
for the Astranis satellites. Right now, they're just
watching Arcturus, the one with its antennas
pointed towards Alaska. - A lot of time we're monitoring, but things do happen on the spacecraft, but everything is deployed
now then it's chilling. Yeah. I wouldn't want this to
be an exciting job for you. Yes, very much so. Yes. - But soon they're hoping to have as many as 24 satellites built and launched every year
to cover other places where people need access to information but can't get Comcast to
return their phone calls. Right now you're probably
watching this video online connected to the internet. Pause and think for a moment
about how that's even possible. Think about the vast web
of computers, cables, and other means of transmission
that bring millions of bits of information to you every second. Now remember that the Earth is immense and connecting humans
with this kind of fidelity and consistency across vast
distances is far from easy. But with technology
like Astranis' satellites, you could be a thousand miles
away from the nearest person or the nearest telephone line and still be able to
stream "Friends" in 4K - 'Ground control to Major Tom.' Or this show-either one is fine. - The experience is
gonna be very similar to what people are used to
for like satellite TV. And this isn't 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 one tiny dot
up in space will replace the need to string thousands and thousands of miles
of fiber optic cables to all those remote locations. Satellite connections
aren't great for everything. They are terrible for low-latency
applications like gaming. - I would not advise that
you game on a geo connection. You will not do very well. You will be last place or something, but it's limited by the laws of physics. It's just how fast can the
speed of light go. - If you can figure out a way to speed up the the speed of light, lemme know and then we'll implement it immediately. We are building four more
satellites that'll be launching on SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket later this year, and they'll be going up
and delivering this service to countries all over the world. And then we are gonna be
adding satellites over time as we see that increased demand to add capacity to those countries. - But it's important to remember
that this is a new venture; that Arcturus is their first
geosynchronous satellite. So it's not shocking to learn that not everything
went perfectly to plan. A month after filming, we learned that one of the solar panel drive
assemblies supplied by a third party vendor
experienced an anomaly, which is space talk for,
it's not working right. That means Arcturus won't be able to provide internet service to Alaska. Also, me playing around
with the power cable outside had nothing
to do with this. Sorry, Alaska. - We're pretty sure. But this anomaly, despite being
a big expensive snafu, sort of proves the whole point of Astranis. If this had happened to a
satellite that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, it would've been a staggering blow. But Astranis is banking on smaller
infrastructure projects and more flexible hardware. So they're already planning to launch a new satellite utility set, which definitely does not
sound as cool as Arcturus, but they can afford to do this because the satellites are
so much less expensive and because they're so much more adaptable. - In the old days, each satellite
was custom, bespoke built for the part of the world
that it was gonna be serving because every part of the world has actually
slightly different frequencies they're allowed to operate on. There was no digital signal
processing happening on board those satellites of any kind, and many of the satellites that they're still
launching today are purely analog satellites. It'd be like getting a radio where you can't change the channel after you get it from the hardware store. So it is only in the last few years that we've had the processing
power, the silicon in order 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 function. - This is a hard reset for the type of internet infrastructure that you build. We wanna have micro projects that we are deploying exactly
when they're needed, exactly where they're needed
anywhere in the world. - So, picture a scenario where the grid doesn't
grow out from the center, but from everywhere at once. Imagine you didn't need to wait for some giant utility company or government to invest
billions of dollars to run fiber to your small town or state or country. And because those investments
are smaller, it's easier to recover from setbacks and makes the whole thing more resilient. - So instead of investing a
billion dollars over 20 years to provide, you know, a
whole continent connectivity, we want to invest, you
know, tens of millions of dollars over 18 months to provide connectivity exactly where it's needed-to one state - Astranis and other companies
like Ukama, which makes hardware for DIY, cell phone networks represent a new bottom-up approach to building infrastructure. It's an approach that can
reach people in places that are mostly overlooked. - If you have the next 4
billion people all connected to the internet, all of
a sudden they're part of that global conversation, right? Like they're contributing
their own YouTube videos and they're contributing
their own Reddit posts and they're, they're teaching
the rest of the world things that the rest of the world
just doesn't have access to now. There's a two-way street
to the internet, right? It's a thing that we're
all creating together. - So how many more amazing
people will join into the world we take for granted when
the internet is something as universal as the stars in the sky? Well, we'll find out soon.
