Capacity Building Ia

Foreign, I'm good. I'm good. Um, I don't know if you wanted to provide a brief introduction to our. Maybe let me do that. Started. Let me do a very quick one. All right, so we'll wait for everyone to show up, but if you wanted to provide the introduction about now, that would be fine. And, uh, from there, yeah, it will be a quick one. Sure, just to save time for the capacity building, which is the, uh, the most important part of this call. Just again, to let you know, uh, for the participants to this training, is a Rwanda Space Agency together with the Ministry of ICT are working on a project to bring a satellite ground station in Rwanda. That will, we, we are still considering the uses of this ground station, but potentially be more for receiving satellite data, be it for observation and IoT and other types of services that can be used to impact different sectors of Rwanda. This capacity building is a part of the feasibility study that we are conducting to ensure that, as we prepare this project, we also prepare a pool of potential people who can help, who can participate on these projects. That's how, that's why some of you were invited for this capacity building. I really urge you to follow anything again. In case you don't understand something, just not hesitate to ask questions. Be politely, politely aggressive. And, um, again, this is, this, it will be a series of capacity building. You will not know everything in this session. We have other sessions. Um, yeah, so, uh, enjoy the, the training. Um, thank you. That, that's that was it. Um, thank you very, thank you very much, George. And I'd like to welcome everybody to this initial, um, part of the capacity building program. I've prepared a number of slides. And for today, I'd like to talk about really two issues. Number one is the market opportunity, what's happened in the space industry over the last 10 years and what's motivated that. And number two is a brief introduction on, uh, the, what I would call, just sort of the fundamental topics of, uh, satellite communications. So, um, you know, we'll have some additional topics, uh, later on, but let me just, uh, dive into this. Uh, first, a couple of, uh, bookkeeping items. And let me, uh, I am recording this, uh, webinar, so it will be available later on. Right now, everyone is muted because I find that when you have, you know, a dozen plus people on the, on the line, there's always some background noise. But feel free to unmute yourself, uh, if you need to ask a question. I'm also monitoring the chat room and, uh, you know, if you prefer to just type in your question, then, uh, I'll keep an eye on, on the chat discussion as well.

So, as we've, uh, uh, broken this down, we really identified a number of sessions. The next two sessions, this session, the next session, really talking about what's been happening in the, uh, in the industry, uh, what I call the past, present, and future. So for this session, again, uh, talking about the market and then some fundamentals of the, of, um, of radio communications. The next session, I'd like to dive in a little bit more to who some of the players are, uh, what kind of constellations they're flying. Uh, also talk about, um, the transition between hardware and software that we see in the industries. Talk about the disruptive technologies, touch base on research programs, and then international regulations. We have two technical sessions planned where I'd like to dive in to the different types of antennas, um, what their, uh, requirements are, uh, a deeper dive into the various transmission bands and the requirements of satellites, the link budgets, and some of the issues associated with, with propagation. The, the second part of the technical session is a deeper dive into some of the encoding and modulation schemes associated with satellite communications, uh, the teleport infrastructure, and, uh, what's required for site testing. I will also get into, well, you know, what I would call the onboarding, what we typically do for field engineers and some of the issues associated with the day-to-day operation of, of a ground station. And that includes, um, uh, the security, the network configurations, um, you know, day-to-day maintenance and the associated risks and the, and the mitigations.

So, um, I have a list of participants. Um, I believe we've got about, uh, you know, close to 15 people online. Uh, a number of people replied to my email and some of them, uh, replied to the calendar invite. I'll be sending an updated calendar invite for everybody for our Thursday sessions. Uh, you know, I, I appreciate you replying, but feel free to, to drop in and you can also send me, uh, emails if you have any questions or follow on, uh, activities on this. In my initial email to everybody, I was particularly interested in your own background and your interest and motivation for participation in the Rwanda Space Agency capacity building effort. Any previous work that you've done on ground stations or RF modeling or just satellite development, and your goals over the next couple of years. I know I've received a number of PDF and Word documents on this and just emails. So if you haven't sent that to me, please do. I find it very helpful to know what is your own motivation and, uh, what your own background is because, um, you know, we come at these, um, programs with differing experiences and I'd like to make sure that everybody has an, um, uh, an informative, uh, you know, engagement with, with the material that I'm presenting. I don't want to present it at too low a level, don't want to present it at too high a level, so it really just needs to be just right. I would also add that if you haven't connected with me on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, please feel free to do so. Uh, that way we can get to know one another and, um, you know, I can also see what your previous experience was. Of course, for the organizers, George and Fidel, um, you know, if there's anybody that hasn't received any email from me, please let me know and we can update our, our email list. As I mentioned, I'm going to record these, uh, presentations and so they will be available later on. And, you know, as we get through this, use the chat window for questions. And if you're so inclined, you can enable your microphone and just ask the question in real time. So I would like to take questions as we, uh, go through the material and not hold them to the end, so that we have an opportunity for discussion. Today, I've penciled in, um, two hours, of which I figure we have about 90 minutes of presentation, probably in two 45-minute slots, and then time for 30 minutes of questions and answers. So feel free if there are any issues to pipe up and, you know, we can have a discussion about it.

So, one more slide here. Um, the material that I wanted to cover today, as he said, is we're really focused on, uh, CubeSats. And this picture here shows, uh, two of the commercial CubeSats that are being launched from the International Space Station. But I'd like to start with a market analysis and touch on some of the existing and new players. I'd also like to call out some of the, uh, other players that are involved in ground station communications, just to introduce, uh, who they are. And, uh, we'll talk more about them later. Then I have a second presentation talking about RF communications and satellites and ground stations. So I think that will cover what we want to talk about for today. And if there aren't any questions at this point, I'll just get into our next topic about, uh, about markets.

So, um, hopefully everybody, uh, uh, can see my screen. I can actually see it on my phone here, so that looks like it's coming along now. Um, here we are in, uh, 2021. And I don't know how many people are following this, but I think pretty much everyone is aware that the space industry is undergoing a revolution. If we look at just one company in particular, SpaceX, which is run by Elon Musk, the entrepreneur extraordinaire, we can see that over the last, really 22 years, over the last, actually, it's the company is about 20 years in the making, but clearly over the last 12 years, they've, um, achieved some very incredible milestones. In 2008, they had the first launch of the Falcon 1 from the Kwajalein Atoll. This was followed by, after several, uh, successful launches, the first orbital, um, uh, orbit of the Dragon capsule and its successful return to Earth. Four years later, uh, they, uh, achieved, um, a successful docking with the International Space Station. There were a lot of regulations that were required in order to make that possible. In the subsequent years, SpaceX has demonstrated the reuse of their, uh, Falcon 9, uh, vehicle, which was pretty extraordinary. This is, uh, showing that in 2016, the Falcon 9 landing on a, um, uh, ocean vessel, off the coast of, uh, off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic. And, um, the Falcon 9 is intended to do probably, uh, 100 flights per vehicle with routine maintenance happening every 10 flights. This is really, 10 flights. This has really revolutionized the industry and put the rest of the industry unnoticed, a lot of the established players. And then, uh, just last year, in 2020, um, the Falcon 9 was rated for human spaceflight. And so here are some of the two, um, NASA astronauts that were the first to fly on the Falcon 9 and dock successfully with the International Space Station. So it's really incredible how SpaceX has developed their company over, um, you know, the last two decades, really, to meet these, uh, phenomenal, uh, milestones. But SpaceX's is not the only one. And this picture actually shows two of the Falcon 9, I mean, two of the Falcon boosters from the Falcon Heavy, landing in, in Florida. And a point I like to make is that innovation, disruptive innovation, is what's driving SpaceX. And disruptive innovation is what's driving the new space industry. And it's not really a question of money. If you, and I'll talk about, uh, the investment that's gone into the new space sector, but it is a question about mindset. That if you look at the top 10 public aerospace firms and what they pay out per year in dividends, that's about eight billion dollars a year. Well, eight billion dollars a year is about four times the amount that's typically gone into, uh, investment in the new space sector. Uh, 2021 has actually been a boom year for, uh, space entrepreneurship. But, uh, compared to the monies that aerospace firms have, what venture cap, venture capital was a small fraction of that. So, it's not about the money. Established aerospace firms have the money, but perhaps they're not innovating. And SpaceX has really pointed, uh, pointed to that lack of innovation.

I won't talk a lot about the investment sector, you know, just globally here in the United States. Price Waterhouse, PricewaterhouseCoopers prepares an annual report about venture capital investment, just across all verticals. That's for healthcare, that's for information systems, that's for, uh, IT, that's, you know, you, you name it. And what we've seen over the last, uh, couple of years, and in 2020 was also a boom year, but between, uh, 2018, 2019, and 2020, uh, the investment that has been part of the venture capital industry has exceeded about 100 billion dollars. And we haven't seen this level of investment since, uh, 1999. You know, I say here 2000, but since the internet bubble. I don't know if, um, I think for most of our listeners here, the internet bubble is almost history. But, uh, being here in Silicon Valley and having, uh, experienced it firsthand, um, we haven't seen record levels of venture capital investment, you know, over the last 20 years, is like we've seen in the last, the last few years. And if you look at global venture capital investment, and I don't have a slide on this, you'll have to take my word on it, but it's pretty much divided between the United States and China with equal sort of comparable levels of investment. And then, uh, about, uh, 20, you know, 20 to 30 percent of what the U.S. investment is, uh, is in Europe. So, uh, China and the United States, you know, have those sort of the lion's share of venture capital investment. And that, with that, only two to four percent of the total U.S. investment goes to, uh, the new space sector. And historically, 50 percent of that has been involved in really just two companies, SpaceX and, uh, and OneWeb. So there are some major players that have been, um, uh, uh, you know, pri, primary recipients of venture capital investment. But that still means that you're looking at probably about 500 million dollars that's going into the investment in the U.S. for, um, you know, mere mortals, I would say, you know, run-of-the-mill startups, um, in the, in the space sector. In China, just as a note, um, the amount of money going into, uh, investments is about the same as in the U.S. for just general venture capital investments, but there are actually fewer deals. So actually, the deals in China are bigger than, um, what, uh, what, what typical deals, uh, in the United States. But that's just sort of general hand-wavy, uh, discussion. But a key point to take away from this is that 2018, 2019, 2020, and probably 2021 are going to be banner years for the venture capital industry. And we haven't seen this level of investment since, uh, the year 2000, literally over the last 20 years.

So, uh, now I have a question for everybody. And in particular, hopefully, you can see my slides. And I'd like to ask everyone, what are we looking at? What is this a picture of? Any, uh, comments or suggestions? And you can either type into the chat window or unmute your microphone. Let me know what you think. And I could perhaps give you a hint. It's a mosaic of, of images. So number one, it's a mosaic. And number two, it's images taken from space. So I'm looking at the chat window. I don't see anything. Hopefully, everyone can hear me. Comments, questions? Does anybody want to volunteer as to what this image might be? Well, type into the chat window to make sure that you're actually hearing me. Yeah, squares and circles. Hello, sir. Yes, go ahead. Okay. Can we have another hint, like, uh, just to lead us? Is it a device that is sure? Well, here's, here's another hint. Um, if you were to, uh, uh, once you get the oil out of the ground, you've got to put it in a tank somewhere. That tank is typically round, and, you know, it's, it's rectangular, but when viewed from the top, it probably looks like a circle. So these are actually oil tanks, so that are used to, uh, store oil. And if you've ever seen a refinery, what they typically do is take the oil out of the ground and then store it in a repository. And so these are oil storage tanks. The thing about an oil storage tank is that the lid floats on top of the oil. So if you look at these images, you can actually see there's a shadow. And so the shadow tells you how much oil is in the tank. So, for instance, this one, you can actually see that the lid is below, you know, the full capacity of the tank. This one, uh, tells you that the tank is actually full. Again, this one, it's kind of not quite so full. And then the shadow that's in front of the, that's at the top part of the tank, well, that's just telling you what the sun elevation angle is. So from these images, you can actually tell what the repository, how much oil is actually being stored. So this is a mosaic of satellite images of oil storage tanks. What is this satellite image of? And as a hint, it's related to the energy sector. So, and this is actually a railroad yard. So any suggestions as to what this might be? Any comments, questions, suggestions? Well, it might be, although I don't know, hydro power. So this is actually a railroad yard with coal cars. And so this is all the coal that is being stored at one location that's getting ready to, uh, getting ready for transport. So someone said fuel container yard, and I would say yes, that's correct. So the, these are, um, railroad cars full of coal. And you can use this image if you understand, you know, you have an assumption about the carrying capacity of one car, you can count up the individual cars here, one, two, three, four, five, and you can show how much coal is actually being shipped out of a particular area, once it's mined, once it's available for shipment, how much coal is being exported, or on the other side, how much coal is being imported. Um, this photograph is actually from one of the naval shipyards in Virginia. And so this is coal that's actually being exported out of the United States. So, um, companies could tell you, hey, this is how much coal we've mined, and this is how much we've shipped off. But this is a way of validating and verifying exactly how much coal is leaving a shipping port in Virginia from a daily snapshot of the shipping port, you can see how much coal arrives and how much coal is loaded onto boats and how much departs. The point about this is that Earth observations can provide you a verification and validation on topics that you may or may not, you know, have any insight into. So there are many other images that I could have shown, but I thought these are two that kind of point to the economic benefits of this. And, you know, I know we're probably all very excited about space and it's very exciting to see SpaceX and their, uh, launch of, uh, of human spaceflight capacity. But as Peter Platzer, who's the founder of Spire, once said, there is no investment in space. And what he means is that space itself is not investable. But what investors are looking for, what is the basis of any successful company? And that is, he says, investors are attracted to disruptive technologies applied to large markets. And the benefit of space observations is that they are global in nature. When you fly a satellite, you can map out many different parts of the globe. Satellites that are over Africa are also over the Americas, they're also over Asia, they're also over the Middle East. They, depending on the orbit, we'll get into that, uh, they track far above the equator, um, they could track solely just the equator, um, but it's interesting that it's not just, it's not investors are like, hey, we need to invest in space, but investors are looking towards disruptive technologies like the landing, the reusability of spacecraft, applied to very large markets like global markets. That's what's driving investment in the space sector.

Here, if we look at the space sector, we can identify a number of verticals. I've highlighted two that we typically spend a lot of time talking about. One is spacecraft, and two are, uh, launch vehicles. But there are actually a number of others. And I think these verticals, um, have been established, but are perhaps not as well, uh, developed. Certainly human spaceflight, we're really just beginning to see the start of that. Of, uh, SpaceX's, uh, six has been successful in human spaceflight. Blue Origin is another company with Jeff Bezos, they're working on human spaceflight, and also, uh, Virgin Galactic for some of their suborbital, uh, uh, suborbital vehicles. Microgravity research work that's going on in the International Space Station. There are a number of companies that are developing their own versions of the space station. They'll probably leverage the internet, you know, what's available on the International Space Station, but there are several other companies that are thinking of building and launching their own. Um, one of which is, uh, Bigelow, that's noted here, that's, uh, down in, uh, down on, down in Las Vegas. But we expect to see a lot more activity in, uh, low Earth orbit with regard to, uh, habitats. Companies like Made In Space are doing 3D printing in a microgravity environment. People are also making, uh, low-loss fiber optics. Another important area is in-space services. We've seen companies that are talking about refueling, building depots, fuel depots in low Earth orbit, doing operations in low Earth orbit, removing orbital trash. But not just launching and orbiting the satellite, but having satellites rendezvous and, uh, dock with one another. Do you, do you mind getting closer to your mic? Oh, I can barely hear you. Oh, you really? Okay. Um, I don't know if it is just me. Uh, guys, do you, can you hear Sean very well? Can someone chat if, uh, oops, sorry. Here, sorry. I didn't, uh, I didn't know that that was a problem. George. Oh, maybe it is me. I can see that, uh, standby. Let me, uh, let me get my headset on. Hi, Sean. Your audiobook, it's all good. Don't worry about it. Oh, is it okay? Okay. Is that any better or is that much better for me? Is it okay? As, and, and so that's, I'm sorry, I just, um, I'm using a microphone on a computer, but I also have a headset that I can use, and, and I use that when the, someone says much better, I can also hear him. I can hear him too. Okay. So, uh, thank you for, thank you for mentioning that. Um, um, I wasn't, I was thinking that the audio would be okay anyway. So, uh, and if there are any questions, feel free to pipe in and say, you know, hey, I've got an issue. So, uh, so in space services, I mean, we're starting to see that, that's a hot topic right now. And likewise with space resources, uh, there's a resurgence of interest in going back to the moon. And I would say probably over the next 20 years, you know, if, uh, NASA and ESA retain their focus on lunar activity, yes, we'll see, um, uh, moon missions happening. That's probably going to be happening in the next couple of years. But that's pretty much been a decade in development. And then, of course, there's also space solar power, which is that a viable or not, I don't know, TBD. The Japanese have some missions. But if we look at this full spectrum from spacecraft to space solar power, I would say we have existing capabilities and developing capabilities. And all of these areas, I believe, are what we're going to see develop over the next 20 years. If you would ask me between low Earth orbit, the moon, and Mars, clearly we're successfully operating in low Earth orbit. That's going to continue over the next 20 years. We'll see, um, in-space services, you know, robotic operations, and space resources, lunar operations, and, uh, then pretty much in this century will be, uh, a focus on Mars. And you can look at how the aviation industry has developed over the 20th century from initial, uh, vehic, initial aircraft, you know, at the, at the beginning of the 20th century, all the way to the jet aircraft that, uh, that we have today. So the 20th century was about aviation. The 21st century is going to be about aerospace.

And if we just double-click, I would say on market disruption in spacecraft, what's happening in spacecraft is we have a number of disruptive technologies that are being applied to spacecraft. And we'll talk about CubeSats. But in some sense, CubeSats come from, um, the economies of scale associated with, uh, mobile devices. The development, the fact that you have a cell phone that has incredible capability, incredible computational power, low power, incredible computational ability, while the same time having low power. These economies of scale are things that are just happening in general in the economy. The impact of mobile communications has disrupted the spacecraft industry. Likewise, um, the disruption of robotics. We've seen, you can go to YouTube and you can see Boston Dynamics and many of these robots. They're certainly robots in factories. These things are happening in the economy, but they will have an impact in space. The robots that are used for manufacturing, um, are developed for separate purposes, but that technology can have an impact on space. Autonomous vehicles, the autonomous vehicles that we have that people are developing for transportation here on Earth, that will also have an impact, application in space. For singularity, this is talking about artificial intelligence, and the technologies that are being developed for AI for terrestrial applications, they'll have an application in space. And the same for, uh, same for energy. So if you step back, you'll see that there are technologies that are being developed for techno, for terrestrial applications that can impact space. Startups are taking those innovative technologies and applying them, uh, to the space sector. That's what, when, when Peter Platzer says disruptive technologies applied to large markets, this is what he's talking about. He's talking about what are the technologies that are out there that are capable of disrupting industries and applying that to an industry sector that can have a global, a global impact. And one example of that is a company called Planet Labs. Now, this company started here in the Bay Area around 2011. This is from a webpage of 2019. Today, it's kind of common, common knowledge, but over a 10-year period, Planet has built and deployed a constellation of satellites for Earth observations. Today, this is something that I think everyone is, is pretty much aware of. A comment about what is Planet Labs, what are these CubeSats? This is a picture of two of the founders of, um, Chris Bauschhausen and Will, Will Marshall, with Steve Jervison, who is an early investor in, uh, in Planet Labs. He's holding one of the Planet Lab imaging satellites. And the goal of Planet Labs was to deploy 200 plus of these CubeSat, set CubeSat satellites to provide daily images of the, uh, of the Earth. Uh, just as a point, for people that know, um, this is a 3U satellite. It's divided up into three segments of, of 10 by 10 by 10 centimeters. So it's 10 by 10. This satellite is 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters, which makes it 3U. The picture also shows the deployment from the International Space Station. This is the arm of, uh, from the International Space Station. There's the solar panel, and you can see that that satellites are just being jettisoned, uh, off the side. They orient with regard to the Earth's magnetic field and have been actively involved in taking a daily snapshot of the planet. When you talk to the guys at Planet, they were really thinking of themselves as a hardware company, but in reality, they're a software company. Because it's not about the hardware is an enabling fac, enabling factor, but it's really the software that allows you to stitch the images together and to monetize that data. A point about, uh, Planet Labs, the company has grown such that they've acquired other companies. They acquired BlackSky, which was a European infrared satellite constellation, and they also acquired Terra Bella, which was one of the first Earth observation constellations, previously called Skybox. It was acquired by Google, and then Planet acquired Terra Bella from, uh, from Google. And that was, you know, pretty much over the last, over the last couple of years.

Just to emphasize this, this is again, this is actually, it's got the three founders in front, includes, uh, Robbie Schindler, there, Robbie Schindler, Will Marshall, Chris Bauschhausen, and, uh, what's shown in the lab are the collection of Planet Lab satellites. And I think the point I want to make is that, um, these satellites have all the functionality of a much larger satellite. Down below, I see one of the O3b satellites, which was being developed under a standard satellite manufacturing contractor, and you can see the size difference between those. But the CubeSats, they have a bus structure for communications and computing. They have their own solar panels. Uh, the previous slide showed the solar panels deployed on the satellites. They have a communication antenna. They still have to manage their thermal environment. They have attitude control. They've got momentum wheels to control how the vehicle is pointed. Um, they have star trackers and horizon sensors. These days, CubeSats can also have fuel for propulsion. And then, of course, software is, is everywhere. So one of the things about the CubeSat technology is that it lowers the barrier to entry for companies to build and fly, uh, space hardware. And that can be very important, especially when it comes to building a, uh, building an early stage, building any early stage company.

So let's look at how this CubeSat technology has really impacted the industry. This is a, um, general, oh, sorry, a, uh, a lot, a general plot of launches over the last, uh, over just the last year for, uh, for 2020. And down below, uh, this, this plot doesn't really have a y-axis, but it shows you here's in 2020, we had over a thousand, uh, uh, spacecraft, uh, that were launched. It's a huge plus up on what was done previously. You can see that, you know, between the birth of the space age and, uh, you know, here's 2020, I mean, 2000, thereabouts, it was a plus up, uh, here around 2010 with the launch of the first small satellites, and then another plus up, and then just a big plus up last year. Where are those launches coming from? It's a balance between the U.S. and China, with Europe and Russia also having considerable launches. And that most of these vehicles, uh, are commercial vehicles. They're, uh, commercial spacecraft, uh, that are, uh, being built by, uh, by private companies, with a smattering of governmental and non-profit activities here. I'd like to say, this is a historical plot. This was something from 2018, talking about what's the nature, uh, what's the, uh, uh, what's the launch capacity and the number of launches. And as that previous slide showed, uh, there was a big plus up in this 20, um, uh, 2016, 2017, 20 time frame, with the expectation that the number of of small satellite launches would, uh, continue to grow. And, you know, we've, in fact, seen these numbers, and they actually, you know, launches in 2020 actually exceed what these, uh, predictions are. This is a recent report from Bryce that does an analysis of, uh, of the market. And again, we can see that, uh, the growth of the commercial sector, the commercial sector is shown here in yellow, again, shows a number of small satellites launched. We're talking about, um, in the last couple of years, almost 400 satellites per year. There's a caveat on the commercial sector in that most of those satellites were SpaceX, Planet, and Spire. But that's because SpaceX, Planet, and Spire, you know, were started in the 2010, 2011, uh, 2012, uh, time frame. So the, um, launches that you, the satellites that you see here that are being launched, actually got their start way down here in 2010, 2011, and 2012. So there's a time lag, let's say a five-year time lag for, uh, the dominance of those launches. What's the nature of the satellites that are being launched? It's a balance between remote sensing technology development and communications. And again, what we see in, in 2019 and 2020 is that, uh, Planet is half of the remote sensing satellites, and SpaceX is half of the communications satellites. And SpaceX has really changed the number of small satellites that have been launched in 2020 and 2019 with the development of their Starlink constellation. People looking at the crystal ball. This is a report from Northern Sky Research that says what do we expect to see going forward. And, um, you know, I think the number one takeaway, uh, on this slide is a lot of satellites going into non-GEO orbits. So, and I'll get into low Earth orbit, MEO, GEO, geostationary orbits, uh, later on. But number one, uh, satellites going to GEO, perhaps that, that growth is flat. Satellites going to, uh, LEO or elsewhere, again, a big plus up here, going from hundreds, you know, hundreds of satellites to a thousand satellites. I don't think this, this graph is not representing what's going to actually happen with Starlink, because Starlink is not talking about thousands of satellites, they're talking about tens of thousands of satellites. But that said, you know, the expectation is that the number of satellites launched going, uh, going to non-GEO orbits is just going to continue to grow, pretty much over the next, over the next 10 years.

This is a slide that I, I prepared to talk about launches. And so down the side here, we have a number of launch vehicles. So we have SpaceX, the Electron is actually Rocket Lab, here's the Astra vehicle, Antares is, um, one of the, uh, uh, Lockheed, Lockheed vehicles. We also have Virgin, Blue Origin, and the, uh, and the Atlas V. Clearly, you can see this is the number of launches. SpaceX, uh, from 2017 up till, uh, 2020 has been doing close to 20 launches a year. 2019 was a down year because of a launch mishap, but 2021 is expected. SpaceX expects to double the number of launches that they did in 2020. Their goal is to do 50 some odd launches, um, in, uh, in 2020, 21, and 2021. Um, that's far in excess of what everyone else is doing, as you can just see from these numbers. About Rocket Lab, Rocket Lab, where, um, uh, where Rocket Lab is today is where SpaceX was five to six years ago. So if Rocket Lab follows the SpaceX trajectory, they could easily be doing 50 launches per year, in, let's say, the 2026, uh, time frame. Astra is probably where SpaceX was in, you know, 2010. They've done, uh, a couple of suborbital launches, um, and, uh, are working on their launch, their launch vehicles. So Virgin Orbit, um, is a launcher one, they just did their first launch this year. So if you look at these companies, Rocket Lab and Astra and Virgin, they are five to ten years behind SpaceX. But what that's telling you is that this industry is going to see a dramatic increase in launch capability over the next 10 years, between 2020 and 2030, as Rocket Lab, Astra, and Virgin Orbit mature, along with Blue Origin for New Shepard. So we're going to see dramatic launch capabilities coming online by the time we get to 2030. Another point about this slide, uh, down below, is talks about constellations. And that of the Falcon 9 launches in 2020, nearly 60 percent of those launches were geared towards Starlink. Likewise, in 2021, 80 percent of the launches. And what these launches are, is this is the vehicle reuse that SpaceX has with their Falcon 9 vehicle. I don't have a slide here, we can talk about it in our next presentation about Starlink, but the plans for Starlink is not to have several hundred satellites, and not to have thousands of satellites, but to have tens of thousands of Starlink satellites providing, uh, you know, internet connectivity on a, uh, on a global scale. And this is just from this figure is based on FAA launches. So these are just what's happening, happening in the U.S. If we step back and we say, what's happening on a global scale? There are, you know, now over the last 10 years, thousands of companies that are distributed across Europe, the Americas, Asia, um, you know, Africa, the Middle East, everywhere, uh, that are looking towards building space, uh, space-related companies. I've called out a couple of boxes here. This is somewhat of an eye chart, and, you know, you can refer to Seraph and Seraph and Capital as a UK venture capital group. And they've, everyone's got their own model about how they design, how they carve up the space sector. But here they're talking about those people that build hardware, those people that launch hardware, here's data services for satellites, here's the downlink, the communications, communications infrastructure, so, along with data analysis and, uh, various data products. So here, um, we've touched on the previous slide, touched on the launch capability. SpaceX is clearly in the lead there. But Virgin and Blue Orbit are, are not want for any, uh, any money. You also have Rocket Lab, Relativity, that hasn't, uh, demonstrated a flight yet, but also a company like Astra, which hasn't demonstrated orbital flight, but for some reason is going to have a public offering. So it's kind of a crazy time in the launch sector. But as I said, if you look over the next 10 years, they're going to be a lot of capabilities that are coming online. A recent news story was Firefly, just had their very first successful orbital launch. So expect to have lots of, uh, launch opportunities. Satellites, uh, here I've mentioned Planet. There are a whole host of other, um, satellite companies that are coming online. We'll talk about that later. But then there's also, you know, for ground station communications, a number of other companies, either existing or newly formed, that are coming online to serve the satellite communications market.

So this is a slide that just points to, at a very high level, some of the companies that are out there. And I would say there are really three classes of existing ground station companies. One is, uh, existing competitors, those that have been around for, you know, 10 plus, 20 plus years. That includes, uh, KSAT, the Swedish Space Corporation, and Telesat, just to mention a few. I also put AWS in there because of the resources they have, um, enormous leverage, based on their association with, uh, Amazon. But the AWS ground stations, and we'll talk about that in a future presentation. But, uh, KSAT and SSC and Telesat, they've been in the industry for satellite communications for, um, you know, two to three decades. They have well-established relationships with ESA and NASA. And so, um, they are aggressively pursuing this small sat, this small sat market. In KSAT's case, they came up with KSAT Lite, which was geared towards companies like Planet, Spire, and, uh, and others. We then also have the new competition, companies that have just been created in the last five years. And those are listed here. We have RBC and Leaf and Infostellar and Atlas, um, uh, a number of these, or some of them are using, are leasing existing ground stations like RBC. Others are building, have their own ground stations that they're building to deploy globally. Infostellar sort of focusing on the cloud solution part of this. And Atlas, I think, has really demonstrated the virtualization of the ground station. They were the first to adopt the AWS model of of cloud computing, even before AWS ground services came in line. So, and they also have a multi-target ground station configuration. So, and then aside from those network companies like Atlas, Infostellar, Leaf, RBC, we have just standalone ground stations. USCI is, uh, as a ground station based in Seattle and Mount Vernon here in the United States. We've got Capricorn in Western Australia, and then other individual stations such as, uh, uh, Dundee Sat, in Goonhilly up in the, up in the UK. And there are a number of others that just say, hey, I've got a teleport, you know, how can I, how can I play? Well, on this. So, you know, there's a lot of activity happening in, uh, in the ground station area. And, you know, in future presentations, we'll get into, uh, you know, what some of that technology and competition, uh, looks like. And as I mentioned, on the customer side, there's a growing number of of customers on this. And that includes, uh, launch companies. I've listed a few here. We've mentioned them, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Orbit, uh, launch companies. They need, uh, communication setup. I mean, they need communication hardware, as the vehicle is launched and it goes downrange out of, uh, over the limit of the Earth and out of the line of sight of the launch location. They need additional ground stations in order to receive telemetry and perhaps to command their, their vehicle as it does orbital maneuvers or drops off, drops off satellites. Earth observation, we mentioned Planet, but that's just one of many companies that are out there. Astro Digital, AstroLogic, some of them are Earth imaging companies, some of them are spectroscopic, uh, companies, um, um, and they go from, uh, AstroLogic, which is, uh, located in, uh, South America, to BlackSky, it's here in the United States, to Actual Space, which is Japan. And I have Umber Labs here, but Umber Labs actually belongs in the category below. So regular passive Earth observations, which is you're using sunlight, you're collecting sunlight that's reflected off the Earth. Synthetic aperture radar is the next company, and this is where those cut, those satellites are actually broadcasting a microwave signal that reflects off the Earth and then interpreting, interpreting that data. So those companies like ISA, Capella, Predator, Trident, Umber Labs, there's another one of those companies that are receiving just radio signals from things on the ground, such as beacons on ships at sea, or doing what they call, um, GPS occultation measurements, whereas their satellite is picking up GPS signals from the GPS satellites, and as that signal transmits, transits to the Earth's atmosphere, they're interpreting the effect of the atmosphere on those, on those signals. So, um, Spire has been very successful on that. They use it to, uh, measure, uh, wind and temperature profiles of, of the Earth. Likewise with Planet IQ and Celes, they're looking to do the same sort of things. Or, you know, with IoT, the Internet of Things, satellites that are picking up not high data rate signals, but sort of low data rate signals from sensors that are on the ground, sensors that are deployed in agricultural environments, or sensors that are deployed on vehicles. And, uh, there are a number of companies that are working. Then we haven't even talked about companies like, uh, Astroscale, that are for focused on on-orbit, uh, access, on-orbit maneuvering, any of the lunar companies like Masten or Moon Express, or, uh, others that are building landers to, um, to go to the lunar, lunar surface. So, but with this, yes, the customers are out there. But for any ground station, it really boils down to two things. One is customer acquisition, and number two is customer retention. There are a lot of companies that are out there that need ground station services. There are a lot of other companies that are providing ground station services. And the two things any crowd station company needs to think about is one, how do I acquire customers? And number two, is how do I keep them? So I think from this, what you can say is that over the last 10 years, we've seen an explosion of space activity. We've seen companies that are wildly successful like SpaceX. We've seen other companies that are following in the tracks of SpaceX, that include Virgin Orbit, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Astra, Relativity, lots of launch companies coming online. We've seen a host of companies that are building their satellite constellations on that CubeSat technology and somewhat larger. And this is pretty much just the start of the industry. What we've seen in the last 10 years, and we've got a lot, lot, lot more to go. So that's what I wanted to talk about for, uh, the market aspect of, of what's happening. And I'd like to open it to questions if there are any questions or comments on this. I have some additional slides too, but let me just pause there and see if there are any comments from, uh, from anybody about the material I've covered, uh, so far and what the takeaways are on, uh, on the market opportunities. So if you want, uh, type a question into the chat room, or, you know, unmute your mic and be happy to answer your questions. Yeah, sure, go ahead. Thanks. This has been a very good overview. Um, I think it will obviously serve everyone there well, um, you know, to take this material to heart. And towards the end, do you mind just maybe taking another minute to differentiate the different competition on what their value proposition is or, you know, what what makes them unique or different? Sure. Yeah, let's, let's go back to that. Um, uh, I would say between existing competition and new competition, one of which is, uh, we've been there before. For the existing competition, you'd say, hey, we've got decades of of experience in this area, and so come to us. We're a low-risk solution. One of the issues with early stage companies is, early stage companies are all about risk. So if you look at Planet, Spire, Capella, on down the list, you'll say, hey, I've already got enough risk. So if I'm looking for a ground station solution, why would I want to partner with a company that's also an early stage company, which has its own risk on that? So, um, that's, that's, that's one issue. Um, for the new companies, you're exactly the opposite. We're like, we're a new company. We're not about heritage hardware, we're not about heritage software. We understand the technology that you're using, which are cloud-based. We understand how you want to work as a team, and we're responsive. The established companies, they're used to do dealing with ESA and NASA, and working with them can be, uh, perhaps somewhat intimidating because they're used to dealing with a companies that have a lot of resources and request a lot of, you know, require a lot of paperwork. So the new competitors, they can be more responsive to customer needs and actually, um, cater to the unique requirements of, of an early stage, of an early stage company. Everyone benefits from having seasoned people.

As part of their organization and so to the extent that I'd like to think of it as kind of a yin and a yang. The because there's a saying that in the mind of the beginner all things are possible and in the mind of the expert there's only only a few things are possible, and the truth is is that both of those statements are actually true. You'd like to come at a problem with the mind of the beginner, but at the same time have the mind of the expert where you can look at what all the options are at the same time know, "Well, you know, here's pretty much the way we've got to go. Got to make that work."

So existing competitors, long track rec, long track record. How have they been doing on the adoption of new technology? Um, KSAT, for instance, up until very recently had no cloud-based solution for their ground stations. In 2020, they've decided that they wanted to partner with Microsoft, which I think was driven by by uh the work that Atlas had been done working with Amazon and also AWS. Microsoft has been sen, Microsoft is thinking, "Gee, how do we get involved in the space industry?" And so that a partnership between Microsoft and KSAT probably uh uh probably makes sense. Um, a number of other companies like um uh RBC and Infostellar, you know, they're sort of working on their own uh cloud-based uh uh cloud-based solutions. Um, but uh, you know, things like uh RBC, depending on their customer base, you know, you've got to be careful about, you know, who you have as as as as investors. So, um, way, especially if you're looking at uh at government customers. For Leaf, Leaf is focused on the development of their own ground stations, and you might say, "Well, you know, are you bringing any disruptive technologies to the table in the development of the ground station, or is it just you're doing your own version of ground stations that are commercially available anyway?" I mean, I think that that would be one of my own uh questions on this. For the standalone groups like Capricorn and SatDundee, those are groups that have the support of their governmental partners that are saying, "Hey, we want to uh have a role in the space sector. You know, can you guys go out there and provide services?" They on the other hand are just one point, and I'll get into this later on about what's the value of a network of of ground stations. It's not just one ground station, but how is that ground station connected to a network? Because, you know, a satellite flies overhead just a certain number of times per day depending upon what the latitude is and depending upon what the orbital inclination is. And so it's not just one ground station, but it's the, but it's the whole network.

So, key value propositions for new space customers: One, low risk. Don't give me any more risk than I've already got. Number two, while being low risk, bring me the best technology that's uh that's already out there. And number three is work with me. And I've actually seen, you know, personally, a number of companies that have kind of gone off to some of the established players because they're like, "Yes, we're getting, we're building our net, we're building our constellation, we want to connect to your network." They work with the existing competitors, but then after a year or two, they're like, "Uh, we'd actually like to see who else is out there because we're not entirely happy with what we're getting." And that's because as you go to an an existing system, they have all of the baggage that they developed over decades, which is part of their standard operating procedures, which is, you know, not the same as a newly developed company that's thinking on what are the best technologies and the best ways to work with customers. And you see it in spades with SpaceX. Amazing how SpaceX has brought disruptive technologies to the industry and has garnered the support of of both government and commercial satellite providers as part of their growing their growing customer pool. So, but I'll get into some of those differences uh later on. But in a nutshell, that's kind of the way uh I see it right now. Those three uh those three areas uh are important. You know, don't give me any more risk, give me the latest and greatest in technology, and oh, by the way, be available to work with us uh as we uh uh design, launch, and operate our satellites.

I have I have one question here about the light and make their needs known. I'm sure everyone in Africa, you know, in Rwanda has an opportunity to get outside the city and see the night sky once you're beyond the city lights. And uh it would be a travesty that future generations not have that same benefit. How this is going to play out, we shall see, but I think it's a very important issue. Um, with thousands of satellites and tens of thousands of satellites for astronomical research, and I would also say uh for for like radio radio astronomy research. The radio astronomy community has been very aware with the growth of with both the growth the radio astronomy, the growth of radio communications, that there need to be frequencies that are isolated that allow researchers to do their uh to do their work. As we have more satellites that are broadcasting in their radio frequencies, you've got to constrain those broadcasts to, you know, particular frequencies just so that other other groups aren't broadcasting on top of one another. That's sort of another form of light pollution. For optical uh astronomers, uh, you need to uh, you know, you've got a telescope, it's taking pictures of the sky, and you can go from the 1950s up to today and just see the explosion of satellites that are now part of a regular uh a regular observing program for all-sky images. What they're, what's going to happen when you're flying tens of thousands of satellites? I mean, it just boggles the mind. But that's the industry. That's where the industry is uh that's where the industry is headed. So uh my view on it is the International Astronomical Union and others need to make their needs known.

The impact on satellite waste. I have a slide that I can call up later on that talks about what the lifetime is uh based on the orbital altitude. Um, and uh satellites like Planet can have life if times of up to a decade, depending upon what their robot altitude is. Um, you've got to manage the debris problem much like you have to manage the trash problem in any big city. That's uh uh and I'm sure it's it's a problem that people are very capable of very capable of dealing with, much like how we deal with air traffic control. Um, but we do have the after the satellite is has served its useful purpose, as the satellite no longer functions, how do we manage that problem? And companies like Astroscale are geared towards, "Well, here's how we're going to manage debris." A fortunate aspect is that satellites can be designed such that they burn up on reentry to the Earth. Maybe that's a good answer. You know, as you start to see material raining down on different parts of the globe, maybe it's not such a good answer, but it's certainly one that you have to address. And people are worried about it, not only from the regulatory standpoint, but also from the companies themselves. No company wants to be the one that shows up in the newspaper as being the result of some horrific collision uh in space.

We also have uh additional technologies that are coming online that improve the management of in-space assets, much like with the development of aviation. If you went from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the end of the 20th century, from 1910 all the way up to the year 2000, we saw a whole development of infrastructure associated with aviation. How to how to keep planes uh from uh, you know, flying on top of one another. How do you manage the airspace? You're gonna have to apply those same technologies to uh to the space sector. So where are we in space? We're kind of like where we were in aviation in like the 1930s or maybe even the 1920s in terms. You know, there are regulations in place, but given the number of satellites that people are planning on flying, we're going to have to refine those regulations and we're going to have to provide new technologies that uh allow for the implementation and and and monitoring of those regulations.

So, um, other other questions? Go ahead. I know somebody else was trying to unmute their microphone and say something. Comments, questions? Going once, twice, three times. So, um, if there aren't any other questions, I'll go on to the next presentation I have, which is pretty much just about uh, you know, the rudimentaries, rudimentary elements of of satellite communications on this. And I don't know if there are any other slides I wanted to show here. I actually wanted to show one one other slide on this topic, um, which is uh, um, where we are. I don't know, do I want to? Let's talk about uh, geospatial data on this. How big this market's supposed to be, and that there's um, when you talk about geospatial data and analytics, the market itself, if you believe, you know, what people have to say about it, is growing at like a 10% cumulative annual growth rate, and that it's kind of a division between uh software and solutions and services. And I think one of the things that's really important about geospatial data is that last mile solution. A lot of these companies that, whether it's Planet, whether it's uh Umbra Labs, whether it's Capella, yes, they can get the data, but as I mentioned, it's about customer acquisition and customer retention. So how do you sell that data and how do you um how do you monetize it? Customers have questions. Customers don't want data. What customers want are answers to their questions. And so the goal of geospatial services is not just to give people data, but to give people answers. And so a key element of the industry is being able to analyze the data and use that data to derive answers. So that comes from knowing the software, knowing the software about how to manipulate the data, using the software that's used to large data sets, and then being able to, quote, as I say, "turn the crank" to analyze it and produce answers for people. And that's answers for government customers, that's answers for commercial customers, that's answers along the lines of, "Tell me how my crops are doing. Tell me who's, how many minerals they're extracting from our region. Tell me about what the expectation of produce is supposed to be for financial markets." And, you know, any any other issues, you know, about disaster relief. So the software is really key, and the analysis of the data is key. Industry is going to keep growing at that 10% clip. As I talked about disruptive technologies, this is a similar slide from Geospatial World, and it said, "What are the drivers of geospatial data?" And you can see for yourself, you know, they rank things on a scale of one to five, but cloud computing, big data, uh, IoT, artificial intelligence. For, they got blockchain down there. I don't know whether that's real or real or not, but there are some people that are using blockchain for uh for for space issues. But it really shows that a knowledge of cloud computing and a knowledge of big data analytics are are the top two items that are associated with uh with geospatial data. So, uh, aside from the radio technology and antennas and encoding, it's really the fundamentals of how do you use cloud infrastructure properly, and then what are the tools that are needed to do to do big data analytics? In working on the feasibility study, a number of people have mentioned the Digital Earth Africa program. That again is a combination of those two things: cloud computing and big data, big data analytics.

So that being said, let me go on to uh my next presentation. And of course, uh I like to say on phone calls and and webinars, silence is consent. So if I don't hear anything from you, I'm assuming you agree with what I have to say. "Sean, we totally agree. Don't worry about that. A lot of people are taking notes." "So, okay." "Feel free, feel free to prepare an exam at the end, and you can analyze anymore." "Okay, all right, all right." Well, like I said, I encourage a dialogue and feel free to pipe up. And uh I'm keeping an eye on the chat window. And anyway, let's uh let's go in here. And I know that um a number of you are seasoned RF engineers, but I wanted to make sure that we're sort of on the same page with regard to uh radio and and satellite technologies. So, uh with this, I like to start with something we, you know, some common base point. And I don't know if you guys have seen any of these movies, but clearly satellite dishes have intrigued both the public and Hollywood as to um what they're capable of and what they've done in the past. There are movies like Contact, which is where the movie poster shows the Very Large Array, which is here in the United States, down in New Mexico, and it's used for contacting aliens. I mean, there's a lot of popular press of of science fiction and using real hardware for science fiction movies and so forth. So, um, maybe it's interesting, but I intend our presentation is really grounded in reality. We're not uh delving into the realm of science fiction. Um, uh, and there's another movie called The Dish, which is actually very entertaining, and it talks about the Parkes Observatory and its role in receiving the signals from the Apollo 11 mission. And if you haven't seen uh The Dish, I suggest you uh rent that or maybe it's on Netflix or Amazon, whatever everyone uh watches movies on these days. But it shows kind of the working of a radio facility uh out of the uh out of the 1960s. It's kind of a touching, touching movie. But I think the starting point for this is that we're pretty much grounded in reality, and we're not going to focus on science fiction fiction aspects of radio telescopes, but on their real-world applications.

So, and as a starting point, I'm sure everybody knows that uh the electromagnetic radiation is combined of many different uh wavelengths. And this is purely, you know, easy example where sunlight is cast through a prism, and you can actually see the different wavelengths, the different colors that make up the white light spectrum. As you all know, the light we see is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it has differing properties um across a multi, a orders of magnitude in what they term wavelength and energy, and uh, and frequency. So, um, we're very familiar with how light behaves, and radio waves behave much the same way as uh as light does. When you talk about um the detection of light, people are normally thinking about just the amplitude, but with radio waves, you can detect actually the amplitude and the phase of the wave, and an electromagnetic field, which happens at all wavelengths. So this shows the visible, there's the infrared, which is at slightly longer wavelengths, there's the ultraviolet, that's at slightly shorter wavelengths, and then as you go from the infrared to the microwave to longer wavelengths, the wavelength is changing by orders of magnitude, and that's that's shown here. That um, you know, green is typically, um, you know, like half a micron in wavelength. Uh, you can go from half a micron, which is, you know, which shown here on this logarithmic scale, to uh centimeter, um, to uh, I'm sorry, microns to millimeters to uh to centimeters to meters, and then longer. So, uh, and then at the shortest wavelength, you've got x-rays and gamma rays. But all of that is pretty much the same phenomenon. It's all part of the electromagnetic uh field, and the electromagnetic field is a combination of both the electric field and the magnetic field, oscillating in uh in unison.

A couple of basic terms that we have here: one for that oscillation, we talk about uh number one, what is the frequency of the oscillation? And that means how many cycles it goes through per second, for instance, per unit of time. We also talk about the wavelength, um, which is the separation, uh, the, we might say, the physical separation between peaks of the wavelength. And the analogy is like water waves, um, water ripples in a pond. They have a wavelength and a frequency, the repetition of those wavelengths. And the wavelength and the frequency are related to are related to its speed. So there's also a direction, direction of propagation associated with electromagnetic waves, and some other things that are here, but primarily it's the wavelength and the frequency and the speed.

So, um, on this, there's a lot to talk about with electromagnetic radiation, and what I'm going to mention are the things that we're probably not going to talk about in discussions of electromagnetic waves. Number one is we're not going to talk about particle-wave duality because, um, Isaac Newton uh showed that um waves, uh that light behaves like a wave and uh uh, you know, set put forward the principles that, "Oh, if you're talking about electromagnetic radiation, it looks like a wave." Later on in the 20th century, these they said, "No, it also behaves like a particle too." If you do the photoelectric effect, um, you know, a photon of energy can has a certain amount of a photon, a particular wavelength has a certain amount of energy, and it can liberate electrons off of a photovoltaic cell, and it pro, pretty much a clear demonstration of the particle nature of waves. So we're not really going to talk about particle-wave duality, um, which I sort of captured in a little portrait of Isaac Newton up there. James Clerk Maxwell came up with the mathematical formulation of electromagnetic waves. We're probably not going to be dealing with Maxwell's equations and uh the relationship between the electric field and the magnetic field and those sorts of things. And we're probably not going to be dealing with the relativistic effects of radiation, any relativistic issues. So it's pretty going to be pretty basic and simple. And down below, I have the relationship between C, the speed of light, the wavelength, and its frequency. And this is something that you, I'm sure you've already committed to memory, that the speed of light is constant, thanks to Albert Einstein, and its constant is shown here. And so the relationship between frequency and wavelength is as I've industriated, illustrated, such that a three-meter wave has a frequency of about a hundred megahertz. So below up here is your typical radio dial, and it shows the AM radio, amplitude modulation, and the frequency modulation bands. We can talk about that, you know, at a later date, but I think what it shows is the frequency. So it shows that the FM frequency goes from about 88 megahertz all the way up to 110 megahertz, whereas the AM frequency is at much lower. It's going for, it's at kilohertz range. And so megahertz is one with megahertz is, um, one one thousandth of what the kilohertz uh frequency is. So that's uh uh, so that's a hundred uh kilo cycles, a hundred thousand cycles per second, and this is 100 million cycles per second. So if we look at one megahertz, the equivalent wavelength of one megahertz is about three meters. So that's kind of around 10 feet. So you can see that the FM band, when you tune to 100 megahertz, whatever station that might be, you're looking, you're picking up radio waves that are about three meters in uh in size, peak-to-peak. So hopefully that's uh hopefully that's clear.

Here's a timeline of what's happened in the history of radio: with the first description of electromagnetic waves from James Clerk Maxwell uh in the late 1800s to the development by Marconi of uh of the radio some 20 years later, and then pretty much the whole 20th century has been about the development of radio. And that's radio broadcasts, commercial radio broadcast. It's it's funny, I have a slide that talks about Marconi. Um, he actually went very quickly from uh developing his first uh radio to actually building the Marconi Radio Company and um licensing or leasing radio sets to ships at sea. So, for instance, the Titanic had a Marconi radio room, and if you wanted to send a message to people on the land, you would go to the Marconi radio operator, pay him a fee, give him your message, and he would send your message um to a station on land or to another uh ship at sea. So already very early on was the commercial application of radio through the Marconi uh Radio Company. Big history in radio. Uh, the development of the transistor meant that you could shrink the package of the radio package receiver package and the broadcast package to a much smaller volume. And then starting in the '70s, we had the first cell phone, and all the way up today to where we've got cell phones that are capable of doing voice and data and uh and many other services. So if you'd like to say that, um, you know, uh right here in 2011 is where we stop saw the birth of SpaceX, the birth of Spire, the birth of of uh of a Planet, Planet Labs. And, you know, look at how the cell phone industry has developed pretty much over a 40-year time frame. You can imagine what the development of the new space sector is over this comparable baseline if you were to say, you know, you're down here in 1906 with the spark gap transistor. Let me see if I can. There you go. Okay, I think they muted themselves. Great. So, um, I think I think with that, you know, the purpose of this timeline is to say, look at how far uh things evolve over a a 50-year period from the first cell phones to where we are today. There we go. It's that easy. So, um, anyway, uh, let me get back to where we were. Great. So, um, look at how far cell phones have evolved over uh the last 50 years. Now imagine that uh applied to the new space sector. The first cell phones in 1970 all the way up to where we are today. Let's take 19, 2020 up to 2050. Um, I think you've got to be ready uh for what's coming down the pike. Radio technology developing over the last 100 years, space technology pretty much developing over the last uh 60 years.

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Just as interesting book about uh the use of the uh German rockets both in the US and in the former Soviet Union uh in order to expand our realm of operation. And one of the early tests done out of White Sands Proving Ground. But this allowed us to really access the highest altitudes possible and to launch vehicles uh into orbit. Certainly many people have understood what it means to uh for one object to be in orbit around another. Uh, the initial um physical laws of orbital motion were developed by Kepler. And just a one of Kepler's laws is that the the period, the square of the period uh scales with the cube of the of the axis. So that as the orbital diameter increases, the period uh changes, and the period becomes slower. There are actually a wide variety of orbits, and I just want to introduce the vernacular on here. We've got circular and elliptical, we have polar orbits, and we'll get into that more. But one of the first people to realize that an artificial satellite could serve a commercial purpose was Arthur C. Clarke, the art author of author of 2001, along with a number of other other books. Recognized that if you took a satellite and you put it at the right distance, it would actually become what they call a geostationary satellite, which means its orbital period corresponds to the rotational period of the Earth. So we all know that the the moon orbits the Earth every uh every 30 days. It goes through its cycles, you know, from one full moon to another is is 30 days. The period of a geostationary satellite is not 30 days, it's not 15 days, but it's exactly one day. So a geostationary satellite will orbit the Earth at the same rate at which the Earth is rotating. If you go in even farther, then you're going to go from an orbital period of one day to half a day to, you know, six hours to, you know, let's say 90 minutes. And the orbital period of low Earth orbit is on the order of about an hour and a half.

So, uh, a couple of parameters to uh to consider. I have here, um, what is a low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, geostationary orbit. As I mentioned, the geostationary airport, what its altitude is from the surface of the Earth, its period, the round-trip travel time for light, um, some other things about the number of satellites per plane and the number of orbital planes, and then a comment about the the satellite lifetime. But let's look at the geostationary one. Geostationary is at a distance of 30, 35,000 kilometers, which is basically one-tenth of the way uh to the moon. The moon is, you know, as I say here, about 384 million meters away. Uh, the geostationary orbit is period is one day, and the light travel time, the round-trip travel time between um a point on Earth and a geostationary orbit is um close to 300 milliseconds. Now compare that to low Earth orbit. Low Earth orbit is, let's call it about, you know, a couple hundred, a couple hundred kilometers. It's period, rather than being one day, is actually a lot shorter. It's about 90 minutes. They're about, you know, 195 minutes. So that's about 16 orbits per day. The round-trip travel time of light between a point on the point in the Earth and something in low Earth orbit is about 20 milliseconds. So, uh, there's a number which is, you know, when you're having a conversation and if there's a delay in the conversation, you can pick it up, and it's kind of annoying, and that depends upon what this latency is. Also note that the round-trip travel time between um uh the moon and the surface of the Earth is about 2.6 seconds. So I know if you're having a conversation, it certainly is irritating if there's a three-second delay between what you say and what somebody responds to. And then some comment about the satellite lifetime. And uh this is actually the lifetime of the satellite, which is uh takes into account radiation effects, as well. But things that are above, I've got another slide I can talk to. Um, the lifetime, the satellite lifetime is actually in decades. For the moon, it's a different story because of the anomalous gravity, gravitational field.

There we go. Yep, you got it. So let's uh get back here. Okay. Um, one of the other things to consider is the space environment. And you might ask, well, what's, why, why is LEO called LEO? I mean, what, what, what is that boundary? If you look at LEO, we're saying, you know, low Earth orbit is somewhere around a thousand kilometers. MEO is like 10,000, 12,000 kilometers. GEO is defined by its orbital period. And then lunar is where the moon is. But what defines LEO and MEO? Well, um, one of the things you have to uh be thankful for is that the Earth has a magnetic field, and this magnetic field is what protects the Earth from energetic particles. This is actually a good thing because the sun, even though it provides beneficial sunlight, it also provides UV, a whole host of energetic particles that are from this uh nuclear reaction um that's happening at the uh at the center, and then it's also has ex particles that are accelerated by uh um the Earth, the solar magnetic field. So the Earth's magnetic field provides a protective barrier for energetic particles from the sun. That that magnetic field also serves to trap a number of energetic particles. During the early days of space flight, it was discovered that around the Earth are what are called the radiation belts, and there's an inner one and an outer one. Well, the inner one has an inner diameter of about a thousand kilometers, and an hour diameter in an outer outer radius of about twelve thousand kilometers. So the inner radius is basically where LEO orbits are, and the outer radius is where MEO orbits are. So this defines the Van Allen belts, defines what is the definition of low Earth orbit, and the outer part of the radiation belt defines what is the medium, medium Earth orbit. So the expanse of the radiation belts goes all the way out to 60,000 kilometers. So that's out by where uh the geostationary orbits are. Geostationary orbits around 35,000 kilometers. So the geostationary, where it is, out here in the outer radiation belt. And, um, there's another aspect of radiation belt which is called the South Atlantic Anomaly because the Earth's magnetic field is not aligned with the rotational axis of the field. So there is a part of the radiation belt that actually goes down to much lower altitudes, and this is typically called the South Atlantic Anomaly, and it becomes important for uh for satellites that are orbiting, you know, anywhere, um, but certainly in uh in low Earth orbit. Differences between the inner belt and the outer belt. The inner belt is mostly positrons, I'm sorry, uh protons, and the outer belt is actually mostly energetic uh electrons. But, you know, there's a lot of physics uh in in those things.

Geostationary satellites, there are lots of them. We've had 50 years of development and operation of geostationary satellites. They provide television service and radio communications around the globe, phone networks, and data pathways. So, a very important component, uh, and uh, well-established. And there are a few parking orbits. So you can see that a lot of the orbits are occupied by a whole host of satellites that are that are owned by a whole host of company countries.

One of the uh remaining points I want to talk about is the effect of the Earth's atmosphere on this. And as we mentioned, the sun provides light at optical wavelengths, but that light has to get through the Earth's atmosphere. Likewise, all hosts of electromagnetic waves interact with our Earth's atmosphere. Short, very short wavelength radiation, gamma rays and x-rays, are pretty much blocked by the upper portions of the Earth's atmosphere. Infrared radiation gets through at select wavelengths, but a lot of it is blocked by water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere. Radio waves, on the other hand, pretty much come right through the Earth's atmosphere. There aren't a lot of absorption features in the Earth's atmosphere. So that radio waves, you can observe from space on the ground. If we look at the radio wave spectrum, it goes all the way, as I as we mentioned, from kilohertz all the way up to gigahertz. So kilohertz is thousands of cycles per second, and gigahertz are billions of cycles per second. Megahertz are millions of cycles, and and so forth. Typical satellite frequencies are anywhere between 1 to 40 gigahertz, and we typically take that band and divide it up into a number of different frequency slots. And these are totally arbitrary. I believe they're actually working on renaming those, but, and there's a history. But from like one to two gigahertz is using the L-band. Two to four gigahertz is usually the S-band. And there's the C, the C-band. A lot of that has been under discussion for what's allocated to satellites, but may be used by cell phones. Then there's the X-band, and then the Ku and Ka bands. So a lot of satellite communications, the telemetry goes up and down at S-band, and a lot of the data comes down at X-band. So a ground station will typically have S and X-band capabilities. And then there's also K, Ku, and Ka.

Now, this I thought was, someone just said, "Well, let's talk about uh antennas on this." For the reception of electromagnetic radiation, we have a wide variety of antennas. I'm sure you've seen these, the dish antennas that are parabolic dishes that are associated with television. They are a large collecting area, but we also have monopole antennas, which is usually just a single line, Yagi antennas that we typically use for for television, along with loop antennas and bowtie antennas. So what do these antennas mean? Well, every antenna has its own quote "antenna pattern," which is the radiation field associated with a particular kind of antenna. And what this slide shows is the radiation, the radiation field associated with different designs of antennas. A dipole antenna, like uh, you know, a strip antenna that used to be part of AM and FM broadcast, has a radiation pattern that looks like it looks like a dipole. It's got two components, a northern component and a southern component, and its radiation field and its broadcast capability and its receive capability correspond to that radiation field. So, another type of antenna is the Yagi, which is like your commercial television antenna. And based on the design of the antenna, it can have a different radiation pattern, which is forward-looking. And the size of the size of the pattern is a measure of the antenna gain. And we'll talk about that before, but a low-gain antenna is basically a wide, has a wide field of view, and a high-gain antenna has a very narrow gain field view. So this throws 3 dB antenna versus a 12 dB antenna. Likewise, with a parabolic dish, a parabolic dish also has its own antenna pattern, but it is typically much narrower than a a Yagi antenna. If you want to get for a high-gain antenna, it's probably going to be a parabolic dish over uh a Yagi. And the gain of a parabolic dish could be like 25, 25 dBi. I also note that for a parabolic dish, there are a number of different kinds of antennas, a number of different um optical arrangements. You can have an on-axis feed, which is typical of most antennas, where the light, the radiation comes in, and then it's focused to a point. You're going to have off-axis, where it just has part of a dish and it's focused to a point down here. Then you have Cassegrain and Gregorian, which has has to do with the nature of the secondary structure, whether it's convex or concave. Most of the antennas that we're dealing with are of the Cassegrain variety, and we'll primarily be focused on that here. There are a number of antennas that are front, a front feed, where the actual electronics resides up here in the uh in the secondary structure.

So, um, what is in a typical antenna configuration? Well, I show here, uh, here is a parabolic dish. Uh, it's a Cassegrain feed in this case, where it's reflecting off of what is the secondary structure down into the feed horn in the uh in the antenna. So that the radio waves are bouncing off of the primary onto the secondary, and then down into the feed horn. Here is typically the antenna pattern, showing that it has most of its sensitivity in the forward direction. That signal is then received down here in the in the feed horn. You typically have some cabling that goes to a receiver and an amplifier, and then that signal is digitized and sent to a computer. You know, and just a comment about uh an isotropic antenna has a gain of zero, whereas a forward-looking antenna has, you know, some gain of 10 or 12 or or 30 or so. As I mentioned, on satellite communications, all of this applies to signals at a range of different frequencies. We have um, uh, as I said, the L on the S band. S and X are primary receive and transmit and uh receive-only frequencies. Ku and Ka. Well, what is the deal about Ku and Ka? Well, Ku, there's a, if we look at the water, if we look absorption in the Earth's atmosphere, there's a strong water line up at around, um, uh, 30, uh, 30 or so gigahertz. You know, it's a little bit shy of 30 gigahertz. Ku and Ka refer to frequencies that are short word and long word. Ku is K under, and Ka is K over, above of the uh peak. So Ka refers to frequencies at this portion, and Ku refers to uh frequencies at this portion. There's also work being done at much higher frequencies, V, W, but what happens is you go to higher frequencies, then you have all these other uh absorption features. So this is oxygen.

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More oxygen features and water features that are in the Earth's atmosphere. Strong absorbers. What's in the Earth's atmosphere can and cannot, you know, can have an effect on radio, radio frequencies. So with that, um, we've kind of gotten to the top of the hour. Let me break for questions. But as we move forward here, we'd like to discuss additional aspects of what uh satellite customers, how satellite customer, what satellite customers are wanting, and then the breakdown of ground stations. So I'll pause right now for questions and see uh what uh what everyone might have to say here. If people are still on the line, I know a number of people had to drop off. "Hi Sean, um, George here, just a quick one. Um, so do you see a potential use of V-bands, maybe V and Q bands in the future? Maybe if you can just celebrate tomorrow." "I ab, you know, apps, absolutely. I mean, there are a number of people that are developing it. Um, I think they're developing it for uh, you know, 5G, you know, for cell phone communications, and it has some benefit. But I definitely believe that for orbital inter-satellite communications, you'll definitely see a V and W band uh have a home and places where the Earth's atmosphere is less of an issue, like on the moon. Definitely V and W, um, at those frequencies. You know, the radio astronomy community is typically working at uh frequencies above this, so, uh, you know, 100 gigahertz and above. So it's the technology exists. Uh, how how often it's used for commercial applications, um, I know people are developing those technologies for like 5G, and, you know, I know the satellite industry is is looking at that. But I think definitely for inter-satellite communications, most definitely."

So any other uh comments, questions for people, or disagreement with what I may have said? You should have uh about two questions in the chat. "Sure." "Um, oh, again, how water and let's see, what's the round trip uh mean time for LEO other orbits?" "Okay, we we addressed that. The tenth slide. Satellites per plane, mean for orbit. I think that's um, you know, that's a slide that I prepared before, and I would say that if you're in a particular plane, if you look at the line of sight travel time, I'm sorry, if you look at the period, if you pack more satellites in a particular plane, eventually they're all observable at the same time. And so from a LEO satellite, from a LEO orbit, the transit times about 10 minutes. So you can't say, if you take a 90-minute orbit and you separate each satellite by 10 minutes, then when one satellite is setting, the other one's rising. So I think that number of satellites per plane, it was kind of an arbitrary number. Uh, I think SpaceX is packing even more in there. So I I might not have much of a leg to stand on. But what happens is that if you have more satellites per plane, then uh you start seeing them all at the same time. You know, satellites are, several satellites are up during that one plane, and you've gotta pick and choose uh how you actually communicate with one of those." "Please explain how uh, yeah, sure, go ahead on the satellite plane. I think he wanted to understand, um, he wanted to understand more about the planes." "Oh, I I think I'll defer that question to next time as we talk about the different planes uh for orbits because I just wanted to, you know, get the discussion going on this, and I'll I'll say we've got more, we've got more to say on this whole topic of orbital dynamics later on. We just touched on it right now." "So, um, I have H2O is related, how H2O and O2 are related to frequency bands? I'm not quite too sure what um what that means, but I've got one slide here that's probably just a little bit too busy. But if you look at water, let's just focus on water. Water is a molecule, and it has vibrational modes. These vibrational modes associated with the water molecule correspond to um uh frequencies of vibration, and in turn, wave, you know, vibration at particular or absorption features at particular wavelengths. And so, um, for water, there are two different vibration modes. One of which is the hydrogen pulling away from the central oxygen atom, and the other is the hydrogens bouncing um, you know, perpendicular to their uh to their bond dimensions. These vibration modes show up as absorption features. So if you look at the water vapor absorption, there's one at one vibration mode at 2.7 microns, and another at 6.3, and those show up as very strong absorption features. And so it's these vibrational modes of molecules that damage that uh determine the absorption features in the Earth's atmosphere. Um, you know, climate change is related to the CO2 absorption, and that's probably a topic for another time, but I'm happy to talk about that if there's more questions about absorption bands. But the absorption features that you see here at at these frequencies so correspond to those vibrational modes, the vibrational modes of water, and the vibrational modes of of oxygen atoms. And it's just, it comes from the quantum mechanical, um, the quantum mechanics of those molecular bonds, and they are very unique to that molecule. So, um, you know, if there are more questions, feel free to shoot them in an email. So, um, I think that's, yeah, go ahead."

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"Can I have a question about, recently I've heard that there is uh new, I don't know if it's new or it's just me who's not aware of it, of spectral management where they're using uh TV uh bands in satellite communication. Why, why are they like, do you have any notion on that?" "Well, I think, you know, one of the things that I mentioned is that if you look at the C-band, there's been a lot of discussion about using portions of the C-band that were allocated to a satellite and using those for um for the phone ser, for cell phone, for 5G cell phone service. And I don't know if I, I think I went through and I scrubbed all that. But for all of these frequencies, there are a lot of regulations um that are geared towards uh the ar, the RF spectrum, and how countries manage their own RF resources. So, um, the ITU is intended to coordinate all of these uh inter-country regulations, and you have to work with the ITU, and you have to work with the licensing authorities in individual countries in order to procure frequencies needed for downlink and and uplink. So there's a whole regulatory framework that one has to work with, and RF spectrum is a limited resource. We're asking about going to higher frequencies, V and W band, and part of that is that those are parts of the spectrum that aren't really used. Well, they're not really used because as they have um greater absorption within the Earth's atmosphere, so there's not a lot of commercial applications for that. There's technologies that allow you to use those frequencies, but, um, you know, all much of it is absorbed by, you know, point-to-point in in the Earth's atmosphere. So there's, I would say there's ongoing, what we call horse trading, um, ongoing negotiations between what radio, what frequencies are used, and how are they used, and whether it's radio broadcasts or television or satellite or cell phone. That's a whole debate that happens both in with internal to a country and then on a global scale." "So does it mean like that other like Ku and Ke-band can't uh support those, the the 5G and other generation of technologies?" "I think that's that's always, it's always, it's always an issue, and it's an ongoing, ongoing issue of how can you secure the radio frequency bands that you need for a particular application, and how do you keep other people out of your bands? So, uh, I'll, and I'll, I'll kind of, we'll get to that too on on more of the licensing and so forth." "Okay, thank you."

"But and and this is to just get the discussion going, to kind of gauge everyone's level of understanding of these of these issues. And, you know, we can certainly go deeper on things. And I, as I said, I intend to, you know, go through and cover a lot of the issues associated with ground station antennas and licensing and and the different technologies. But I wanted to highlight here just a few issues associated with satellites and their orbits and radio frequency communications, and some of the things that are of issue: the types of antennas, the effects of atmospheric absorp, atmospheric absorption, and why uh, you know, how atmospheric absorption kind of determines what are the frequencies that we that we use here. But well, this is not the end of the discussion, but really the beginning of the discussion. So, um, one of the uh slides we were talking about orbital lifetime. Here's a uh slide that I came up with, um, which is talks about the orbital lifetime."

For the planet satellites, they call their uh um individual uh satellites doves, and then a co-constellation of doves makes a flock. And so this is a calculation they showed of the orbital lifetime in years for various planet satellites constellations at various altitudes. So if you note here, at about 650 kilometers, the overall lifetime according to Planet is about 20 years.

A separate study that I found that was doing some modeling talked about a 1U satellite, and for a 1U, Planet is actually 3U. As I mentioned, for a 1U satellite at about 650 kilometers, um, I believe their their model is like 40. We have to divide this out. Says 10. I don't have my calculator on here, but you know, 10,000 days divided by 365 days. So there's a difference here between what the orbital lifetime is for this 1U program versus 3U. And I believe that this is because of the atmospheric drag on a much smaller, much smaller satellite that's a 1U volume as opposed to the Planet 3U volume with those solar panels sticking out there. But you can see that as you get above 600, you know, even if you get above 600 kilometers, the overall lifetime can be over 10 years.

So we had a comment about orbital debris and what do we do about it? It's pretty much an issue for LEO and beyond. So, um, hopefully that answered some questions here. And, you know, I've got some other slides here on historical radio astronomy topics, but maybe I can uh see if there are any more questions, uh, either in the chat window or [Music].

All right, so, uh, go deeper, more detail? Yes, for slide 19. I believe that's, uh, yes, we will. That's just to wet your, wet your appetite. We will get another chance. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. We're going to delve into all those different topics, node by node, correct? So, and that will get into, uh, as we talk about here, I wanted someone to talk about a few, uh, a few other things on, uh, global constellations, research programs, regulations, and then as we get into the technical background, antenna types, link budget, and then details of everything associated with the ground station here. So I wanted to delve into a little bit more about some of the global constellations, what's Planet doing, what's Spire doing, what's Starlink doing, but we will, we will get to it. So stay tuned.

So I think that's, uh, that's about it for me, uh, for now. Um, please, uh, as I said on our, if you haven't sent me a note about your interest and motivation and capacity building, certainly we've had this initial discussion. Um, if you could include on that, uh, you know, the things that you'd really like to hear more about, what are, what are the topics that interest you most about this? I'd welcome your input on that. But please send me a note about your interest and motivation and the capacity building effort, whatever previous work you've done on ground stations or RF design or CubeSat development. I know a number of people have been involved in some of the CubeSat programs that have been involved that have developed with the Japanese and others, and kind of where you see yourself in the next couple of years here on things that that would be great.

So, uh, Joseph and George, I think that's, uh, all I wanted to cover today during the time we have. Um, any other questions, uh, from George or Joseph or anybody else? Tran, thank you so much. I think this was, uh, like you say, they did wet the appetite. Um, we really appreciate it. Um, it's my understanding this has also been recorded, so the recording shall also be, uh, put like on a shared drive or something? Will, yes sir, what's the easiest? Will do, right? Um, and then, um, we can only as and see how many of the, um, of the notes you've not yet received, so that maybe you can have them before the next meeting. But other than that, if there's any other questions, um, on this first, uh, for the reason why we need the recording is because some people may need to, right, to you know, um, review, listen to where you did have, uh, move a little bit fast, or oh, we need to do a bit more research on, so they can send questions via email.

Sure. Any, any, any feedback on the presentation? I'm open to that. Uh, this is, I'm amazed that we're able to do this intercontinental, uh, discussion between where I am here in the Bay Area and where you are in Rwanda. It's a miracle of modern technology that we're able to do this this fashion. So I welcome any feedback you have, either as to the material, the speed I'm presenting, or anything. I'm happy to tailor this, uh, to serve the needs of, uh, of our, of our students here. So, well, well, yes, with with Fidel to get maybe initial feedback from, um, or or if you have just a Google survey that that we can just, it can be a documented, um, they can provide anonymous feedback on that kind of thing. Oh, of course, I'll get you that before the next one.

I see Reggie's size is hundreds. Yes, Regis. Yes. Can you hear me? Uh, hello? Yes, yes. All right. Uh, I want to know if there's any textbook you can recommend, maybe for people who want to go deeper. Yes, suggestions on things, and I can send those out, uh, to you. I will send those out in a separate email. All right. Thank you very much. Not a problem. Sean, while still on that, it might be good just to attach maybe also those that might be, uh, open source, weights on Coursera, edX, etc., or links, or even just high-level topics, so they can, they can also follow them up on their own. Okay. Yeah, will do. I'm, uh, pretty much a fan of self-study. What I found is that on the radio communications, on satellite communications, there's, there's, yes, three good, good textbooks, but I haven't been able to find anything on like Udemy or Coursera. Um, and, uh, anyway, if you have any suggestions on that, um, you know, happy to entertain those, but, uh, uh, certainly, uh, provide, uh, you know, textbook examples because there's some standard textbooks on this, uh, that we'll be using for some of our, uh, technical sessions on this. Okay. Thank you.

Any other comments or questions from people that are online? So I'd say going once, twice, three times. Remember, silence is consent on any telecon. Hey, we have, we have one more. Hundreds, sorry. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah, thank you very much. Uh, I would like to ask, uh, on this radio receiver, maybe the receivers, if you do a kind of some collections, maybe based on the source of information or maybe on the transmitters. Um, can you, yeah, can you be a little bit more explicit on that? By radio receivers and transmit, what do you, what do you have in mind? What were you thinking about? I don't have much information on this, but what I want me is like, let's say you want to collect the information on a particular place and then we're receiving information from either a given satellite. I don't know about how much here or how based it is in the Achilles stuff, but I want to know if there is a process of collecting the position to the active body that you want.

Sure. Uh, right, we can, we can cover that. Typically, uh, when a satellite is launched, it's tracked, and so it will have, uh, once it's tracked here in the United States, it's given a NORAD ID. That NORAD ID corresponds to the orbital elements of the satellite. The orbital elements are updated on every two weeks. So if you have a particular satellite, and we can do an example for like the International Space Station or, um, one of the Rwanda sets or or something, you can query a database which will say, oh, here are the orbital elements associated with that satellite. And then you can use those orbital elements to predict when that satellite's going to be overhead because of atmospheric drag. And, you know, what I haven't talked about is the effect of the sun on the Earth's atmosphere. It can have an effect on the satellite's orbit depending on where it is, if it's in LEO. So, uh, it's important to get orbital elements, you know, frequently updated, and they're typically government services that are keeping track of what's where and, uh, and, uh, what its track is across the sky. So is that what you were thinking of? Is if I know a particular satellite, how do I determine where it is and when I can see it? Yeah, sure. So we'll, I'll, I'll make a note of, uh, going into that, and we can talk about the orbital elements that are associated with, uh, with NORAD IDs. But that's pretty much what you do. You get the, get the orbital elements, and then if you have a [Music] satellite dish, it usually has a controller, an antenna control unit. The antenna control unit is the responsibility of the antenna control unit is to point the dish in the direction of the satellite and to track, to move the dish to correspond to the, uh, on-sky motion of, uh, of the satellite. So the satellite will like ride, if it's in a polar orbit, will rise from the south and say, go directly overhead, or it could go the other way if you're catching on the ascending or descending node. And it doesn't have to go overhead, could be off to the east or the west or something, you know, off to one side. So, but you have to do the, um, [Music] orbital calculation and then translate that into, can I see it from where I am? So, but if you have any more questions on that, please let me know. [Music] Yeah, Sean, thank you so much. Okay, there's no, I question. Let's leave the good old doctor to start his day. Great. Well, thank you very much, everybody. And feel free to, um, send me an email if you have any questions or or comments on things and, uh, uh, connect with me on LinkedIn and do send me, uh, kind of your profile, uh, what your interests are, what you'd like to get from the program, and, um, you know, how this factors into your, uh, near-term plans for the next couple of years. They greatly appreciate it. So thank you so much. Sean. Yeah, you're more than, yep, more than welcome. Yeah. George, any other questions? No, no question. Goes to really, thank you for trying to summarize the amount of information around RF and satellite communication in general in just a few, few minutes. Yeah, well, well, yeah, we've got more of an opportunity to discuss this. So I think that's it. Going once, twice, three times. Thank you very much, everybody, and I look forward to speaking with everybody again soon. Take care. Have a good one. Sean. Thank you. Bye-bye.