"Anybody in this room can build a satellite," WIRED innovation
fellow Emiliano Kargieman told the audience at WIRED2014. "We're at a tipping point in
technology where we have the tools and the knowledge for anyone to
build things and send them into space. It's the new Wild West."
With Argentina-based Satellogic, Kargieman is staking out his
own claim in the space race, designing, building and launching
satellites for a thousandth of the cost of traditional models. The
company has already launched three, planning to follow them up with
a further 15 next year. "The vision is to have hundreds talking to
each other," he said. "Even if a few individual components fail,
and they will, the overall system will still be reliable."
Given these aspirations, Kargieman said, "I should be
telling you I always wanted to be an astronaut -- but that wasn't
the case. Yet my history in space started from a young age when I
was asked to repel an alien invasion -- unfortunately poor motor
coordination meant I'd play Space Invaders for about ten
seconds before losing and having to restart the game."
The life-changing moment came when Kargieman realised he could
hack the computer to cheat the game. "I had three lives, but I
figured that number was somewhere in the computer. So if I could
find out where it was, I could go in there and change it. My life
has been a continuation of basically hacking into things and poking
around inside different computers as they got more and more
complex."
It is this hacker spirit, he argued, that drove the
technological revolution. "The early computers you ordered by post,
assembled, and then couldn't do anything with them," he said. "But
some people saw in these toys an amazing opportunity. These
visionaries, entrepreneurs and hackers took this and transformed it
to something that everybody has in their pockets and that changed
lives of billions."
This did not happen to the space industry, however. When
Kargieman visited Nasa Aimes in 2010 he was shocked to find that
under the dashboard of one of their newest space shuttles lurked
five modified IBM system 360s from the late 60s. "We are still
flying technology from the Apollo era," he exclaimed.
Because Satellogic's systems are so much quicker to build and
significantly more affordable, they plan to deploy enough
satellites to cover every point on Earth, providing live hi-res
imaging of the entire world. The aim is to help address the
pressing issue of how we manage and distribute our limited natural
resources. "If you want to be nice you say we've been using
heuristics to deal with this -- actually we just have no idea what
we're doing," Kargieman said. "If we want a sustainable society we
need to base the decisions on actual data not hand waving. And how
do we get this data?" he asked. "Through satellites."
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-10/16/emiliano-kargieman-satellogic http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/d_f/Emiliano-Kargieman-5-Michael-Newington-Gray
Satellogic: space is the new Wild West
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