Loft Orbital is a startup that provides end-to-end solutions for organizations that want to launch satellites, but not necessarily operate them. To describe the company’s satellite network architecture, Loft Orbital’s co-founder and COO Alex Greenberg uses the analogy of our smartphones being a node in a broader network, as Loft Orbital’s “satellites are a node in a space-based mesh network.”
Constellations spoke with Greenberg in January 2020 on the podcast episode New Accessibility to Space, Start-Ups and a Changing Value Chain. In the following interview, Constellations sat down with Greenberg again to further discuss the benefits of an end-to-end technology model, edge computing on satellites, as well as the rise of the networking model being used in space.
Constellations: What’s been new at Loft Orbital since you last spoke to Constellations?
Alex Greenberg: A lot of things have changed … we are launching our first missions this summer. In June, we're flying two satellites on a SpaceX mission. Across these missions are nine different payloads, and each mission is built on a different satellite bus. We're using two different satellite buses built by different manufacturers … we've also grown the Loft Orbital team to almost 60 people … we signed a litany of important customers including Honeywell, the Canadian Space Agency, the U.S. Space Force, DARPA, Eutelsat, a company called Totum Labs, which is doing some interesting work in the Internet of Things (IoT) space.
Constellations: You've clearly been busy. You’ve spoken about models – instead of offering Software-as-a-Service, you’re essentially offering “Satellite-as-a-Service.” Could you elaborate?
We own and operate satellites that are 100 kilograms in size – about the size of a dishwasher – and we fly and operate customer payloads onboard those satellites. Most of the time, our missions are rideshares, where we're flying multiple customers with completely different sensors. The customers are not coordinated with each other – they’re just sharing space and resources on our platform.
Sometimes, we fly dedicated missions for customers where one customer is taking up the entire mission. We do both models. The space industry typically operates is in a way where you, as a customer, go to a satellite manufacturer and say "I want to buy my own satellite" ... it's like going to Boeing or Airbus, and saying "I want to buy my own airplane," and they build a custom airplane for you. What we're doing is very different – we're going to the manufacturer, and instead of buying a custom aircraft, we're buying that aircraft and selling seats on board to our customers. We’re more of an operator than a manufacturer. We're not the Boeing and Airbus, we're more like an airline – applied to satellite, of course.
Constellations: What are the advantages of offering an end-to-end service, from a technology standpoint?
Alex Greenberg: The biggest one is speed to orbit. Our model is to use commodity satellite buses, meaning we procure the hardware in advance. On top of that hardware, we've developed our own hardware and software – think of it like middleware – to make flying and operating payloads seamless. We can turn satellites into systems that are bespoke and customized into platforms that are plug and play, and highly scalable. That's probably the biggest advantage.
Constellations: By the way, congratulations on your Space Force contract. Within that contract, it says that Loft Orbital an edge computer that can analyze data in space. What new capabilities does this technology bring?
Greenberg: Thank you! Think of the smartphone as an example: this is a typical edge device. Your smartphone handles navigation while you're driving, but what it's really doing is providing data about your speed and route to data centers in the cloud that fuse it with data coming from other user's phones, to determine traffic patterns. They send that data back to your phone, and that's how you know whether it's going to take five minutes or an hour to get from one exit to the highway, as well as information about speed traps and construction zones – all those things that you see on your Waze app or Google Maps app.
Now, think of our satellites in a similar paradigm. Our satellites are just a node in a network that is connected via a protected inter-satellite link to a much larger compute enterprise. The satellite is like the tip of the spear in this paradigm. And it informs the larger enterprise of all kinds of things that could be happening in space, whether it's a destructive space weather event, interference, cyber attacks, or space junk. And there's the litany of events that are tracked by satellites on the ground. The list is endless in terms of things that are relevant to share with a broader enterprise that originate with the satellite. The satellite processes raw data at the edge using the edge computer, and then that data is sent via protected links into this larger compute enterprise.
To use the phone analogy again, if there isn't connectivity to the bigger enterprise, satellites can be programmed to make decisions by themselves. Just like if you have a map downloaded on your phone, you can still use it to help you navigate, even if you don't have a 5G connection – our satellites can function in the same way if they're loaded with the right instructions of how to process certain data.
Constellations: That's a good analogy. When you're talking about satellites carrying an edge computer, what extra steps should be taken to mitigate security risks?
Greenberg: I'm going to keep using the analogy of the smartphone, because I really love thinking of the smartphone as just a node in a broader network, just like our satellites are a node in a space-based mesh network. Like your smartphone, we believe that satellites are going to be able to receive frequent updates for whatever application they're hosting, as well as the firmware on board, just like your phone does … the default state of satellites is that they're connected to the outside world, and that brings the same challenges that any edge device has, in that it needs to be protected from cyber attacks.
Traditionally, the way you protect the satellite is to rely on encrypted links to protect it from malicious attacks. But as satellites become increasingly software-defined, you need to address that cyber threat is not just at the moment of uplink. It's not just where the satellite is connected to the ground, but further into the software supply chain, where malicious code can hit hitch a ride unbeknownst to the operator. The malicious code can be embedded in a patch update, application, or new software that is going to be sent up to the satellite. You need to be vigilant about what you're sending to the satellite. Onboard the satellite, you need to be able to detect malicious code that may inadvertently been sent up. That's one thing that we're doing with the Space Force – on top of our edge computer, we're developing the capability to detect anomalies that could be ascribed to cyber threats, or some kind of compromised system by malicious code. Not only are we developing the actual compute infrastructure itself, we're starting to develop apps that go on top of that compute infrastructure.
Constellations: Going back to the model that you used, which is satellites are a node within a network, what are the advantages of adopting a networking model?
Greenberg: There are two advantages. The first is the speed at which you can deliver data across these nodes. The second is the efficiency of communicating across an enterprise with an approach like this. Firstly, because our satellites have a computer on board, we can pre-process the data to make the files smaller and reduce the latency of the data moving from source to user and reduce the bandwidth required to move data across thousands of endpoints. The data can flow more quickly across the decentralized processing architecture that's handling enterprise-wide tasks like data fusion and decision support.
The advent of edge computing makes using the mesh network much easier. Additionally, if a data fusion algorithm had to wait until all the data was present in a centralized location to begin processing, that would slow down the result. In a world where real time insights are required, that could get somebody killed, or a mission wouldn’t get completed. That's why the ability to downscale data and get it across the network quickly is important.
Constellations: As the space industry has been developing software-defined satellites and virtualized ground systems, do you see an increased adopting of a networking model, or will it be limited to specific use-cases?
Greenberg: In my opinion, the direction the military goes in drives a lot of commercial innovation. It's also true that commercial innovation, in the long term, drives where the military goes, but what we're seeing is the military embracing a networking model. The Department of Defense (DoD) is endeavoring to develop something called the transport layer, which has optical inter-satellite links that are being used to connect other layers within the whole space battle network. I see military space moving this way. Over an ISL [Inter-Satellite Link], you can get ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] data, or any kind of data transported quickly. Moving in that direction, I see a lot of commercial variants of this model. I honestly think that that's going to take over the space industry, and it really is going to help move a lot of activity that is purely ground-based, to occurring in space.
