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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Astranis Co-Founder Explains Small Satellites Driving a New Golden Age
- Gedmark describes three eras of spaceflight, from Apollo through the entrenched cost-plus shuttle era to today's private, startup-driven industry, enabled by shuttle retirement, dot-com wealth, and cheaper technology.
- Astranis builds small geostationary satellites, a harder radiation-heavy orbit than LEO, because GEO has historically been the most valuable orbit and nobody else was attacking it with small-satellite approaches.
- Gedmark argues that space is the only viable way to solve the backhaul problem for the roughly four billion people still offline, since fiber and alternatives like balloons and drones fall short.
- He says governments such as the US Space Force want swarms of small, resilient, frequently refreshed satellites, citing the Russian cyberattack on the KA-SAT satellite on day one of the invasion of Ukraine.
- Looking ahead, he sees opportunities in lunar infrastructure such as communications, a lunar GPS, and cargo transport, and calls this a new golden age of space.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasSeveral forces converged to launch the commercial space boom
Gedmark points to the space shuttle's retirement, dot-com fortunes funding private ventures, and technologies like lithium-ion batteries, cheaper chips, and better propulsion that made small satellites feasible.
Small satellites are dramatically smaller than legacy ones
Traditional geostationary satellites were the size of a school bus or double-decker bus and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, while small satellites range from breadbox to mini-fridge size.
GEO is hard but historically the most valuable orbit
Satellites in GEO sit in the Van Allen radiation belts, requiring radiation-qualified or custom components, but one satellite can cover an entire country, and GEO has seen the bulk of spending, including broadcast satellite TV.
The connectivity problem got worse, not better
Gedmark notes that the unconnected population went from three billion to four billion because fiber cannot economically or physically reach remote islands, mountains, jungles, and deserts.
The core problem is backhaul, and price drives demand
Cell towers are cheap to build, but connecting them to the internet is the hard part; Gedmark believes that at low enough prices demand becomes nearly unlimited and that Astranis is at that economic inflection point.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesWhen you get access to the internet, you are getting access to the sum total of the world's knowledge
— John Gedmark
It's quite astounding that somehow we've not only failed to solve the problem, the problem actually got worse over time, not better.
— John Gedmark
It's like when you see that magnitude of opportunity and no one is doing it, figure out why. Figure out why no one else is doing it and take a stab at it.
— John Gedmark
We're talking about one of the world's most epic problems here, so it's on the order of scale of solving the world's energy problems, solving the world's food problems.
— John Gedmark
In some ways, satellite technology is just one of these last places where we did not move to smaller hardware that you could build faster and iterate on more quickly
— John Gedmark
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
