Posted: May 11, 2006 05:06 pm EDT
"Failure is not the same to us as it is to others. If our experiment fails and we learned something new by it, it's a success." Professor Robert Twiggs from Stanford University had sound grounds to his statement - his satellites are cheap enough to crash.

Explorers are increasingly more dependant on flying dishes. We use them to call our sweetheart, to transmit impressing images, to yell for help, and to navigate our way over GPS. The handheld units are not the big deal - the satellites are - putting them in orbit being the most expensive part. But what if you could have your own, personal satellite, skip the expensive airtimes and add some cool features to your K2 climb? Actually - you can. Sort of.

At the big space convention in LA, Professor Robert Twiggs was sharing stage with Siegfried Janson from AeroSpace and Brian McLendon from Google Earth. Following private space rockets, time had come to private satellites - and small ones at that: They are the Peoples satellites.

To begin: Drop some weight

When we climb, row an ocean or ski to one of earth's poles on the cheap, weight becomes extremely important to us. Going alpine style or unsupported is a big difference to having planes browsing by with resupplies or an army of Sherpas fixing routes and camps.

All of a sudden - strong and determined is not enough. We must also become smart and inventive and that's when it becomes complicated. Sure we can make a run for it in good weather and keep our fingers crossed - but that is boldness over intelligence and can result in early death. To keep succeeding and surviving on the cheap in the long run, we must come up with ways to continuously make it on a fraction of gear and supplies.

The same goes for rockets and satellites. It's far easier to build a rocket or send up a fleet of dishes if you have a brutal budget and unlimited resources. It becomes a different story when you need to do it on a shoestring. But the reward is worth the extra mile: Freedom, agility and unexplored terrain awaits. Among the most talked about satellites right now are the nanosatellites.

Nanotech - the Alpine Style of Science

In case you wondered - a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Nanotechnology instead, is an idea. It simply means thinking small (in the fields of atomic physics, chemistry, and electronics); to manipulate things down to the atomic level.

Nano-thinking began at about the same time for both adventurers and scientists: Up to the 1950s, explorers and engineers were thinking big, not small: Peary enrolled a large number of Inuits to pave his way to the North Pole, Scott tried big tractors to the South Pole, and Hillary used thousands of Sherpas to get to the summit of Everest. Engineers likewise built big jets and oil tankers, tall skyscrapers and big bridges, and - planned huge expeditions to space. Big was beautiful, powerful and showed you were important.

But sometime around the mid century - maverick explorers an scientists began to have a change of heart. Bombard rowed across the Atlantic in a tiny vessel that laid ground for the zodiac, and mountaineers such as Shipton and Mallory promoted climbing big mountains by small means - light and fast. In science, the same movement emerged. People began thinking small: The transistor was born, DNA was discovered, chips emerged and the rest - including Bill Gates and Apple - is history.

It wasn't until the 1980s however when this alpine style of research and invention got its cool name: Nanotechnology.

Dramatic change in past ten years

Mountaineering and other adventure have changed dramatically in the past ten years. A large number of people are suddenly getting increasingly farther "out there", traveling light and cheap. Decades of experimentation and ingenuity by our fellow free-thinking (and financially disabled) explorers have boiled down to inventions allowing an explosion of solo ocean rowers, light style climbers and unsupported polar skiers - achieving feats unimaginable only 10 years back.

Contact 1.0 was created in 1999 - laptops, power generators and webmasters were replaced for a small PDA, a tiny battery pack and a self publishing software - all stripped down to work over slow satellite connections. The setup has since become standard on all lightweight expeditions.

The battle for cheaper, lighter, faster - the idea behind nano - now spans over all kinds of human endeavors. Also in nanotech, the biggest changes have occurred only since the late 1990s. Corporations and Governments are now pouring tons of money in the idea.

Murano satellites?

Back to our Space convention - a senior scientist of Aerospace took the center stage. The company does 3D digital precision etching in pretty dishes made of durable, lightweight glass. The result not the latest Murano accent plates - but tiny nanosatellites, only 1 percent of the usual size.

These babies weigh only 1-10kg - less than a Kevlar polar sled! Photonic (light) pattern communication is used within the satellite instead of cables and wires - and the glass dish is maneuvered with wireless telemetry. There are currently limitations to their performance - but just look at the chip and Moore's law to get an idea of the future.

As Siegfried Janson was describing his miracle babies, Brian McLendon from Google Earth looked as if he felt a bit out of place. Google satellite maps are the latest rave and Brian was invited to make a talk on the wonder. How had the Google guys made it?

The images

"Well," Brian hemmed, "the images were actually already there. We just made a browser and put them in the hands of people." What are the biggest challenges for Google maps today, then? At this question the audience expected a long talk about bandwidth and a bright future of super smart Google satellites.

"The biggest challenge is the currency of data, the authenticy of data," said Brian. In other words: The main complaints the Google guys get are "that's not my house" and "that's not my car." Google maps satellite images are not in real time, they are several years old.

Team ExWeb might have laughed had it not been for our own experiments with satellite imagery layers for exploration maps. The pics arrived too big, too late and in very poor resolution. We delivered them over slow connections to North Pole skiers stuck by huge leads. The project was shelved when yet another image on the skiers PDA showed a black blot of solid ice where they were currently in fact seeing nothing but water.

The project satellite imagery engineers had a hard time grasping our complaints: The satellites had delivered images as they were supposed to and that was that.

Two kinds of genious

Now imagine this scenario for fast clouds approaching the south face of K2 - you shouldn't count on sat images to help you there any time soon. So what about 3D satellite imagery of mountain snow conditions? Detailed topo is another problem everyone in the room agreed - you'll need regular fly by pictures - and that will cost you big time.

While engineers are happy as long as their their satellites deliver - someone has to make the resulting products useful to people or they are worthless in all their brilliance. And therein lies Google's worth on the satellite stage. In spite of their drawbacks, a Ranger in Mammoth proudly brought up a Google map on the computer when advising us on a good coastal route in California to check out. In fact a whole bunch of folks use satellite images these days, thanks to Google who transformed them into peoples' maps and that's another kind of genius.

The next step for Google is Google Moon and Google Mars. The browser allows you to surf (limited parts) of the Mars' and the Moon's surface using NASA imagery. The next step for ExWeb is to find and make satellite images useful to explorers.

Building smart products

Before he came to Stanford, Professor Twiggs helped to build and launch the NUSAT 1 satellite for NASA. The professor is now into small low-cost satellites - and cheap spacecraft missions. He wants to create the PC's of space, peoples' satellites, and he had one word for us: Radio Shack.

That's right - the same place that sold the first PC, remember?

"It's not as complicated as they all make it sound," the professor laughed and described how he fooled around with his first NASA satellite - using a toy for size and then watched it become world standard. These days, he is into CubeSats - small and cheap enough to allow hands-on experiments and - failure. "When you fly your own experiment 50 percent die - but the cost is only 40 thousand," he pointed out.

"Our failure is if they don't learn anything from it," he concluded on the subject of students lacking fear of failure and being very good at developing new tech to solve problems in nanotech satellites.

Current limitations are mainly related to power - but the Professor and his students are your guys if a private satellite is on top of your wish list. (Check links section for resources).

The Japanese man

In an adjacent room, a blurry eyed Japanese man entered. Like most of the speakers on the conference, he battled a borrowed Apple computer for a while on stage, while the rest of us watched his desktop interface on the big screen - only this time the private folders all had names in Japanese. The man explained he had flied the redeye from Japan to LA that very night for this seminar. His topic was space solar satellites.

Here are some quick facts for you: Current oil prices are $70 dollar per barrel. Only last week the energy minister of Iran predicted that the price will increase to $100 this summer. Fact is, we are running out of juice. Two thirds of the current oil producers can't increase production anymore - while demand is skyrocketing - mainly in fast-growing China. The oil that's left is a dirty, clammy concoction - almost impossible to refine at a reasonable cost anymore.

A tree house in Nepal

So what to do? Most explorers are familiar with solar power - and its drawbacks. A few weeks back, an eremite traveler called up HumanEdgeTech. He said he wanted to build a tree house in Nepal and live there away from it all. But he needed power to run his laptop, 8-10 hours per day. Considering the location of his pad, he wanted to go solar. A quick calculation gave at hand he'd need up to ten panels and a huge truck battery to pull it off. With such outrageous information, the lone traveler hung up on us.

But it's a reality and even more so for the entire earth. Wind and water is not enough, nuclear has proved historically somewhat unsafe, and oil and gas are running out. But to power America on earth based solar power - we'd have to build an array the size of Arizona and we'd still run low. Every explorer who have lived and died by his solar panel knows the limits: There are only so many sun hours each day, there's bad weather, and the gear has to be twisted and turned with the sun for maximum efficiency.

NASA - no reply

That's when geo stationary space solar satellites all of a sudden become such a great idea. No bad weather, eternal sun, always at the perfect angle. The efficiency is in fact so great, that the size of a space solar panel array becomes only 15% of the size required down on earth. Small gangs of solar panels can hover over their assigned state and beam down eternal power without any need for storage.

So, when are we leaving? Well, not so fast. This is in theory - in the real world we still have quite a few glitches to work out when it comes to those satellites.

The Japanese man finally got his computer fired up. A crude Photoshop power point image of circles and squares emerged. Perhaps it could be done something like this? He went on to describe a complicated system of an inflatable center unit, surrounded by a net where robots randomly crawled around. The man complained that he had intended to build two units - one by ESA and one by NASA, but the latter didn't reply to his emails.

Me and my friend at Iiisa

Then he clicked to the next image: "This is me and my friend at iiisa," he grinned. The pic showed the man and an ESA scientist posing by a miniature vomit comet. The next video clip showed the plane launch, turn and make a rapid fall back towards earth. Cut and to the next clip - showing the inside of the plane - and two Japanese students floating around while trying to stretch a net between them. Now a robot emerged - but abruptly jetted off the mesh and out of the image.

Ha! ESA had allowed the experiment and although not all had turned out good - it had been an important step, the man explained. The next video showed some kind of a University in Japan - and a setup which resembled the playgrounds at MacDonalds. Except this was a replica of the Japanese space solar satellite and students were busy fixing with it.

SpaceShip ichi

We all smiled courteously and glanced at our watches. Now, the Japanese man set off the final video. A huge rocket blasted off, and it had cameras on. We saw the familiar images of earth disappearing in a swirl - far, far below! "Uhuh - how high is that?" someone asked. The Japanese man scratched his head, "Oooh, it was, how do you call it...one...one hundred kilometers." We checked around at each other. "Isn't that how high Rutan's rocket went?" someone whispered.

Now we watched the curvature of earth and then - darkness. Silence. But all of a sudden, right there in empty space - a huge thing started inflating. Next a net unfurled and - lo and behold! - a robot came crawling straight for the camera!

"Wow!" we all jumped to our feet. "What was that?!" It was a friggin' space solar satellite. And the cost? "Oooh, how do you say...two...2 million dollars," grinned Dr. Kaya. Welcome to the future, guys. Simple as that ;)

Next, final: The money, the future, and going to Mars - if you dare!

The typical Geostationary communications satellite ranges in on-orbit mass from 1000kg to over 4000kg. Trends are for the in-orbit mass to increase to 8000-12,000kg. A mass below 500kg is considered a small satellite.

Large satellite >1000kg
Medium sized satellite 500-1000kg
Mini satellite 100-500kg Small Satellites
Micro satellite 10-100kg
Nano satellite 1-10kg
Pico satellite 0.1-1kg
Femto satellite <100g
Smart dust - one cubic millimeter










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