Consumer electronics made satellite miniaturization 1,000x cheaper

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 8:51

   Yeah, yeah, sure. You put a phone up into space? Yeah, this was a slightly catastrophic event, as you can see. Basically, we put this phone onto a suborbital rocket. We were trying to show, well basically, let Let me step back one sec. Okay. Someone at NASA kept on saying when we were there, why are we spending a billion dollars on a satellite when a phone like this has most of what a satellite has, but it costs 500 bucks.

2. 9:22

   Right. It has GPS. So what was the answer to that? It didn't need to cost a billion dollars. Phones work just fine in space. Now this first test did not work, but amazingly all of the phone electronics has survived we managed to get all the data and and this just showed the case in point that even though this is a failed launch these things are incredibly robust they're designed exactly for you to drop it on the floor and it not break because people do like that and so um it actually was a surprising example of just how robust consumer electronics are see what happened back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, NASA was pioneering all this technology because it had to. To go to the moon, you had to put a capsule with humans in it, you had to have a computer, so they had to sort of develop microprocessors in order to get a computer that's small enough because computers

3. 10:14

   were the size of a building. They had to, you know, pioneer solar panels and various other technology in order to get it done. And so they're used to the idea of building everything themselves because they couldn't go down to, you know, Fry's or whatever and get the component they didn't exist you didn't buy batteries that they needed you can buy computers that they needed they can buy a solar panels so they invented it all so NASA had a mentality of inventing everything now it did incredible things as a result but now the consumer electronics the electronics that we have in our back pocket yeah far superior to what they had and the dominant R&D is being spent by Apple and Google and whoever on developing these electronics to be better and better so we took the attitude of instead of developing all of that

4. 11:04

   let's take the best stuff that's already being developed commercially and use that for space learning to follow the consumer electronics industry rather than trying to pioneer everything and that whole approach use cheap electronics that we can buy online and then by the way throw up a few more than we need and if one or two of the satellites breaks no big deal totally different risk attitude to what NASA did and that also enabled us to just reduce the cost by about three orders of magnitude which is you know a big deal for any sector you know it's a bit like the mainframe computers to desktop computer revolution and all the applications we have with desktops now completely different than what we did with a few mainframes one per country or whatever you know