[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Reality 2.0, I'm Katherine Druckman. Doc Searls is co-hosting with me today and we have a very interesting guest. As our, all of our guests, to be honest, but this one's particularly cool because we're gonna talk about space things, but we'll get to that in a minute. So Paul Bailey is joining us. He is the chief architect at cognitive space and they work in the realm of commercial satellites, but I'm not gonna say too much about that. Lest I mess it up. So thank you for joining us today, Paul. I'm really excited to have this conversation because our a. Is made up of a lot of like-minded people who are going to be really interested in your story. I'm pretty sure. So, Paul, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do now. And then we'll kind of go a little bit into how you got here. [00:01:07] Paul Bailey: Yeah. Uh, so right now, yeah, like you said, I'm, I'm chief architect at cognitive space. And that really kind of means is I was one of the first, uh, basically three employees at the company. So I'm a full stack engineer. Uh, so I design, you know, backend APIs. And front end, uh, do some front end development as well as, uh, DevOps. So basically, uh, most of the stuff that isn't space at our company, that's the stuff I do tech wise but I also have a, a background in aerospace engineering though, too. Um, but, and we have a separate engineering team for that also. that's [00:01:46] Katherine Druckman: cool. So you, you, you, you, you know enough about all of the aspects of the company to be probably, uh, the guy that is super valuable , you're, you're their favorite, right? I don't know being number three, I guess. [00:02:02] Paul Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I got, like I said, I got started in aerospace. Uh, you can see actually back there is my yep. Picture of the space shuttle. That was my first job outta college. I worked, uh, space shuttle flight design. That's awesome. Um, [00:02:18] Katherine Druckman: that never looks bad on a resume I [00:02:21] Paul Bailey: mean, Good now. Yeah. Yeah, it does. It always is a good story. Um, but while I was there, you know, at the space center in Houston, uh, they use open source considerably. And that's kind of why they hired me is because I knew development. So they always need aerospace guys that can do code. And so while I was there, I got even more into kind of coding every day to, to do my aerospace tests. Uh, I had, I guess my first love was Pearl. Uh, but when I was there, I started learning Python and, uh, as I got more and more into it, I shifted the way. To just straight software, but always kind of wanted to come back. So cos me, it's been kind of my, uh, 15 year plan to, to combine my two skill sets, uh, back into one again. [00:03:14] Doc Searls: Are you, are you in Houston, geographically? Is that, [00:03:18] Paul Bailey: uh, actually I'm not, I'm one of our remote employees, but that's where I met our founder at. Um, so I'm in canyon. About halfway between oh, get [00:03:27] Katherine Druckman: out. [00:03:28] Paul Bailey: Okay. [00:03:29] Doc Searls: Santa. Yeah. Cause, cause Catherine's in Houston. [00:03:32] Katherine Druckman: So just, I spend a lot of time in canyon lake too though, so yeah. Okay. It's pretty. Yeah. It's nice place. [00:03:39] Paul Bailey: Yeah. So this is my little shed I work out of. Uh, oh, that's [00:03:42] Katherine Druckman: cool. Yeah, I like, I like actually one of we've actually, we had an entire episode about this, but I, I like kind of sharing, um, and seeing other people's work setups, the remote work, you know, because obviously with the pandemic, um, even people who weren't working remotely before started, and you can work in a place that's beautiful, like canyon lake, right. And, and. That's, you know, a fantastic benefit, but everybody has their own sort of idiosyncrasies about how like they like to set up their desk and how they like to set up their mm-hmm gadgets and their gear and, and their environment, whatever makes them more productive. It's actually a really interesting conversation. I mean, everything from, you know, the tools that you use, your group preferred microphone and whatnot, but also like the way you decorate, like your, your nerdy rug designs and stuff like that can be kind of part of that, which is, I don't know. I think that's fun, but, um, but yeah. I suspect I'm not alone here and that I would love to hear more about the space shuttle story, because that's cool. Yeah. Not that what you're not you're doing now. Isn't also cool. And we'd like to hear [00:04:47] Paul Bailey: about that too. Yeah, actually the, I have quite a few war stories there. Uh, yeah, so I was in flight design, but specifically I was in the abort group. So we basically designed all of the abort trajectories. So, you know, if something goes wrong, We had to plan it out. You know, engine goes out where do you land? Uh, there was several different, different abor scenarios, you know, depending on when an engine goes out, you can do different things. You can return to launch site. Uh, you can go across to Europe. Uh, so I always thought the nominal guys had it easy because they just had to do one trajectory up to the target, you know, wherever they're go into. Yeah. We had to do like five or six at least . Um, but yeah, we've, you know, so there's no one writing those type of types of tools. So we had to learn, you know, my first year was actually just learning about the shuttle about abort trajectories and getting certified in that. And then once you kind of learn all that. You gotta write your software if you want to automate those type of things. Right? No one else is kind of, uh, building software for that. So, I mean, of course we'd bring in all kinds of tools to help us, but so a lot of our own software we wrote, uh, with that. Is [00:06:10] Doc Searls: is any of that leverageable, uh, post shuttle? I wonder to some of the work you did. [00:06:16] Paul Bailey: Yeah, actually, I mean, I haven't checked, uh, so back in, you know, this was back a while ago, so there wasn't GitHub back then, but you could request the simulators that we wrote. um, and you know, basically kind of like get hub today and we would send you a CD and have the, uh, the simulator and you could reconfigure it for different space vehicles. Uh, I believe that simulator is still around or at least one of 'em. So I worked in two, one was kind of like a, an old school back from the Apollo days that they just reused. And so it was like a Fortran based simulator. And then the newer one was written in Java. That one was stamps. I believe it's still around, but I don't know. Um, and actually, uh, at cognitive space we use a similar kind of simulator package from NASA. Uh, not that one in particular, but now it's on GitHub, of course. Uh, and we bring that in, write our own models to that and, and extend some of the functionality built some of our own features on top of that and use that as, as one of. Uh, the core of some of our product. [00:07:33] Katherine Druckman: I love the GitHub on a CD story. That's pretty great. [00:07:37] Paul Bailey: Yeah, you have to, well too, the other thing with certain NASA libraries, which is still happens today because we, we actually request some of these, uh, there's different compliance issues. So like a, some aerospace software is considered is classified in the same category as weaponry. Oh. Or like, wow. It's kinda [00:07:58] Katherine Druckman: like, I guess that makes sense. [00:07:59] Paul Bailey: Launching things kinda, uh, yeah, it's, it's kind of like strong encryption, right. Even though it's not really a weapon, that's in the same category and you can't export it. Uh, so you actually, you it's open source and you can request it from NASA and they'll send it to you. Uh, actually, I don't know how we get it if it's on the CD, if the EMSS now, but there's a package or two, we actually do this with, but you have to basically, uh, be licensed even though it's. It's like a free and open source product, uh, to make sure you comply with the, the business rules and don't export. [00:08:37] Katherine Druckman: That's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, I hadn't considered, so it, so it arrives basically missing a piece I'm missing some pieces or some pieces that plug in you don't get to see [00:08:45] Paul Bailey: all of it. Yeah. And so that's where the one package we use that does the simulation that's on GitHub. That's open for everyone mm-hmm And then for some reason, this other package that kind of plugs into it, uh, is export controlled. So we have to request that specifically and we can do what we want with it, but you don't get it unless, you know, you go through the paperwork basically. Fascinating. [00:09:07] Doc Searls: So, so now you're in the, in the, in the satellite business or in the, in the business of business satellites, I guess. What is that about? I mean, so like everybody knows, I think right now too much about Starlink, because it's up there and Musk is ho in the stage, but there's a, there are an awful lot of satellites up there doing all kinds of things. The, the stuff that's not necessarily commercial is probably what we hear more about when NASA does and what. You know, universities and science, uh, outfits do, but what's the commercial. What are the commercial uses primarily that, that, that you guys are involved [00:09:43] Paul Bailey: in? So what we do, I mean, uh, someone like Starlink could be potentially our customer. Uh, but I like to say, uh, you know, Elon. Too cool for us and is probably gonna write what we're doing. but it's, we're, we're definitely going after commercial, uh, satellite startups and the difference or, or why we do what we do today is, uh, we're sending, you know, if you take Starlink as a good example, right. We're sending so many more satellites up. Than we were before. And so even from like five years ago, you could have a couple satellite operators maybe manage your constellation of satellites, but now we're sending so many things up there that you have to manage. Uh, you can't basically even, uh, higher enough satellite operators to kind of manage the thing it's. It's too unwieldy. So we write the software around helping you, uh, basically automate and manage your constellation. And then we throw some AI in there, uh, to basically help you optimize things. So you can, you know, for an existing satellite constellation, we could help them. Uh, you know, sell to more customers, maybe sell, sell more images, get more images down. And then for these new newer satellite operators, uh, you know, a lot of the old guys have built systems like this. You know, ours, we think is better. Of course, uh, because we have the AI built in also, but, uh, the, for the newer satellite operators, they don't wanna spend five years building the system. Uh, you know, it's a build versus buy decision. And so we have a, a huge really there's a lot more than just Starlink, uh, you know, a huge customer base that's coming online that needs to build these ground systems out and they can either spend years building it themselves, or they can use someone like us. Uh, that's already building it and then building it a matter that's reusable for. Other customers. [00:11:57] Doc Searls: Well, we know it's Starling's businesses. They've got the ISP in space, basically. Um, what, what are, what are some other typical, um, kinds of businesses that are, that require having a satellite up there in order to do what they do? So collection satellites, obviously you mentioned [00:12:13] Paul Bailey: to customers. Yeah. So most of the, the types we're going after are what's called remote sensing. You know, so people taking images, [00:12:22] Katherine Druckman: ah, [00:12:23] Paul Bailey: Oil and gas exploration. Yeah. There. Yeah. There's so imagery can be used for that type of stuff. Uh, but there's all types of sensors, new types of sensors being invented too. Uh, so image is, you know, is kind of the one that everyone knows, right? We've all watched those spy movies and they're watching us, but honestly, there's other types of sensors that are, are, uh, I guess. Uh, people are sending more of those types of satellites up now. So there's, what's called, uh, SAR, synthetic Apture radar. Um, and so with radar, you know, with imagery, you can't see through the clouds. So in certain areas of the world, you almost never get a good image. , uh, but with radar you can see through the clouds and you can produce these images that, you know, have a, uh, pretty good quality depending on what you're looking for. Uh there's there's RF. So there's constellations going up that are just observing radio frequencies. Mm-hmm uh, there's consolation. Going up that track what's called, uh, AIS. And I think it's ad BS. I forget what they stand for, but it's the radio transmitters and planes and boats. So you can track all the planes and boats going around the world. And if you've seen flight aware in Houston, I, uh, oh yeah. I look at it a lot [00:13:45] Doc Searls: flight aware and, and I [00:13:46] Paul Bailey: love, uh, the, yeah, there's always a helicopter [00:13:49] Doc Searls: and Marine traffic is really deep. Um, so they, yeah, that one too Marine traffic's they, [00:13:54] Paul Bailey: they, you know, use the ground sensors. That's becoming obsolete because we can just do it as satellites. Now, you don't even need them, um, on the ground, there's enough satellites that have that type of sensor. Uh, you can planes and, and nav Naval vessels are being tracked all the time, uh, through the satellite systems. Now [00:14:13] Doc Searls: what, uh, so, so what is there on the, on a, on, for example, with Marine traffic, there's I assume there's some sort of beacon on a, on a ship. Um, that's looking up into space or they just they're just broadcasting something kind of like a GPS satellite. Does the GPS satellite itself doesn't do anything's actually your GPS itself is doing something. Um, I interpolating between the different, the different satellites. , you know, quad strangulating or ulating where you are. But, um, but, um, but I mean, is, is that a generic thing? Like you just get one for your boat and it's just look, it's beeping to the sky and then there's satellites up there that pick this up and sell the information. I assume that's partly, partly, there's gotta be a business model somewhere in there. [00:15:04] Paul Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. They it's. Yeah. They just basically transmit information. So they're transmitting things like their location. I believe they transmit like their direction, which way they're going. And, uh, yeah, every boat is supposed to have one of these things on it. Now, I guess one of the interesting things, we also do some government work. Um, and so, you know, military vessels are supposed to have this too. Mm-hmm but that's one of the things, uh, that they do, you know, during. Uh, war times is they spoof these devices or turned them off. All right. And so that's where we help, uh, the air force. We work, we've been working with the air force basically if, uh, you know, if we can't track it via an RF satellite, Can we switch over to Neo or radar. Um, and then when it comes back on, is it the same beacon ID that was, uh, occurring before? So we try to help them kind of, uh, same kind of thing, automate and, uh, decide where they can collect, uh, observations from. So, [00:16:21] Doc Searls: so I imagine you could run a kind of touring test on the beacons, right? Like, like, is this, is this the real thing, or is this not the real thing? And your AI will take care of some of that is that part of that part [00:16:32] Paul Bailey: where the AI works when they spoof things, uh, you can't really tell, uh, you know, you can tell that it's different, of course, but you won't know that it's fake or not. Mm-hmm . Um, but what you can do is you can use. You know, the RF sensor to say, Hey, they're broadcasting that they're a commercial vessel. And then maybe if you bring in imagery or radar, um, and this is the part we don't do. Uh, so there's other companies that will take those observations. And again, the newer thing is the used AI to try to determine what the ship is, let's say. Um, and then maybe through one of the other. Uh, sensor types, they can determine what the ship is. And then they say, oh, we see that they're, you know, spoofing that beacon. So now we know this commercial vessel is really not commercial and you know, it's a, mm-hmm military vessel. We need to track, um, I guess one of the other interesting things too, is, uh, there's other companies using social media and. Bring in all the satellite data bring in social media data. Um, and one of the interesting things during one of our, uh, exercises that we did is they actually caught the ship on social media, was able to identify it that way. So, well, [00:18:04] Doc Searls: that's interesting. That was this [00:18:07] Paul Bailey: is it that the satellite end? [00:18:08] Doc Searls: Yeah. So, so they're actually looking at the human traffic or the, the that's going in, out doing IP look up and that kind of thing, just. See, where is it coming [00:18:18] Paul Bailey: from? Well, like the ship was like in a bay or something. So I don't know if they had to do an IP lookup, but they, they found the image on social media and they, oh, I see that. Oh, I see. Right. So you could identify the image. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is from the imagery. Yeah. And so you had to fusion of satellite and social media data to, uh, basically figure out where that ship was. [00:18:44] Katherine Druckman: Fascinating. Maybe terrify. Interest and that I think that use case maybe, I don't know. I have to think about that one a little bit. I'll [00:18:52] Paul Bailey: I'll I'll say this it's honestly, it's, it's not too terrifying yet because the, the AI and identifying things, aren't very good. [00:19:02] Katherine Druckman: well, I guess that's a whole other [00:19:04] Paul Bailey: conversation. It still requires people in the process, at least for now. So, [00:19:09] Doc Searls: but so sometimes I wonder, you know, What percentage of communications in general, especially during war time is. Is is intentionally false because, um, it's in the interest of, you know, one of the combatants or competitor, if it's business right. To, to, to flood the zone as it were, you know, um, and with false information, just to. You know, throw opponents off. Do you have any sense of that or is it just, I mean, some of that's just sport, I suppose, but, um, a lot of it's gotta be sport. I don't, [00:19:45] Paul Bailey: we only, when we're in those types of things, we're actually in a, like a research mode testing things out mm-hmm so, yeah. I don't know. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Uh, in, yeah, so these type of even the using commercial satellites, so that that's actually, what kind of started our company is, is the air force want. Integrate commercial satellites into their, uh, intelligence mm-hmm . And so at least right now it's still considered research. Um, and so it's not operational. Yeah. So I haven't been in operational settings there. Um, so I wouldn't know how much that is. Yeah. [00:20:26] Doc Searls: So, Catherine, you, you were gonna ask something. I don't know. [00:20:28] Paul Bailey: No, no, [00:20:29] Katherine Druckman: I or not. I, no, I'm, I'm still process. Was correlating social media with the, with satellite data. I don't know. I'm trying to think of all the nefarious applications of that. [00:20:41] Paul Bailey: Yeah. I mean, and some of it, there's a, uh, they showed off and this wasn't for an exercise we were in, but one of the guys showed it off as you know, there's to bring it to Ukraine. There's like a blogger in, in Ukraine taking pictures of. Tanks that have exploded or been shot down or whatever you wanna call it. Um, but how many of those, you know, for the military, they wanna know how many of those are fake and, um, how many of those are actually real? And so that's, there's, there's a, you know, money going into that to, to build AI systems around and going through social media and then figuring out. What's real and what's not. [00:21:26] Katherine Druckman: So if you can correlate the image or the image information with an actual location, you can verify its authenticity ver versus, you know, so a tank taken somewhere where, you know, in the location where it's not relevant or [00:21:41] Paul Bailey: something like that. Yeah. Location and probably time too. Right. You wanna make sure? Yeah, sure. You wanna? Yeah, maybe it was the same spot, but taken 10 years ago. So that's interesting stuff like that. [00:21:53] Katherine Druckman: We talk about authenticity of, of data and information a lot actually here, which is why this is kind of particularly interesting. The ideas are, you know, ways to authenticate information. What's true and what's false. And, and what is, you know, undetermined, um, Yeah. So that's a complete something I hadn't, you know, considered actually interesting. [00:22:13] Paul Bailey: Yeah. So that's the side. We don't really get into the data processing yet. Mm-hmm um, we deal more upfront with, uh, kind of coordinating the planning of, you know, how you get observations from satellites and that's what the government, anything we do with the government. We also try. Uh, so the way our, our government contracts are, are structured, uh, the government's getting a little smart. They don't wanna pay for everything mm-hmm um, nowadays. And so some of their newer contract structures is they actually, once you, if you, you get a government contract, you have to bring in private investment. And so we basically have, uh, a requirement to sell our, our stuff commercially. So we have to get both, uh, pub, uh, public sector and private sector involvement in order to, to produce our product. [00:23:07] Doc Searls: So how do you recruit, recruit that? I'm just wondering, uh, so, uh, I'm, I'm trying to imagine you go around looking, I mean, you've got public, you say you've got public. You want to go find private or vice versa. Does any do either does either side do some of the upfront work for. With that, or you just have to do kind of kinda [00:23:24] Paul Bailey: calling, um, you mean like in terms of like investment or [00:23:29] Doc Searls: yeah. Or just finding the, I mean, so, so if it's a public private thing and you kind of have to have both as customers, mm-hmm , um, do. Do customers on other side, like saying, knowing that this needs, that it's the public side and it needs a private side. Do they, are they already in touch with the private side? They kind of bring 'em in or is it, um, [00:23:49] Paul Bailey: well, I guess, yeah, it's kind of up to us to find those, those commercial partners. or, and those investors on that side. Uh, but with that said, uh, our CEO is, uh, Scott Herman. And so he used to be the CTO at black sky, which is a commercial constellation mm-hmm , uh, company. And so, uh, yeah, basically he's brought us in a lot of the commercial contacts. Um, that's kind of helped grow the company and get us some commercial customer. [00:24:22] Doc Searls: So I, I, I wanna get more of a sense of what the, what the, what the business is. You know, I'm looking at your, uh, your website, um, you know, that to a mission planning, but I think a lot of things are probably not just a mission because maybe the mission is, is getting it up there. It's like, you've already got things up there. What are they doing? I'm also sort of interested in, in what I mean. So for example, I'm familiar with the, and this is. Public sector thing, but because I live in California right now, I'm in Indiana, but I live in California in a place where it's almost impossible to get fire insurance because they're betting your house is gonna burn. Um, mm-hmm and, and there's a one called Motus and. I forget avers, but these are, these are satellites that are, um, on polar orbits and they're busy scanning the earth. There are a bunch of them, of course they have to be. Um, but they're looking for hotspots. Right. And you see what the hotspot is and, um, and then you see how old that hotspot is, but it seems to me, well that that's, there's probably some commercial purpose for that, that, that private sector. Um, Service would might want to sell to, maybe they already are, and I don't even know it. So I'm just, you know, but I'm just talking the things that, where I'm familiar with something that's actually already up there. So, [00:25:46] Paul Bailey: yeah. So I would say like our, our three to five year goals kind of to build out all the like, uh, things, software services that you need to run a satellite constellation, um, on the ground. So what's called the ground system. Yeah. And so we're kind of building out all the pieces to that. And so to kind of go to your use case of, of let's take the finding hot spots. Uh, so like, you know, like a, a company like black sky, they might get California, the state of California as a customer, come on and say, Hey, we really need to find all these hot spots. Um, we need this type of sensor that can do that with this resolution. And now right. Black sky already has a bunch of customers, um, that they're selling to. And so they have to go figure out, can we even get them this imagery or whatever the sensor type is and how often can we get it to them? And currently, uh, that's a pretty arduous process. Mm-hmm and it takes a lot of humans. Um, so when we say mission planning, basically, We can bring in, you know, a new customer, let's say to their planning and re plan that with our AI and basically, uh, a couple of minutes and, and then give them a schedule of like, Hey, you can get, we can cover California, uh, twice a day or, you know, whatever it would be. Uh, we can cover these spots three times a day. Um, and so that's where our AI not. Can plan out the constellation, uh, more efficiently. Um, so maybe get your images faster, stuff like that. Uh, it can do things like maybe, uh, cover more area, uh, use, utilize your satellites, right? So if you think about like a satellite as a flying computer, right? Mm-hmm you want as close to a hundred percent utilization as possible. Uh, so that's where our AI can basical. Make sure you're using all the capacity that you want to. Um, actually it's a little less, you probably want it less than a hundred percent because one of the, uh, funny things is if you use your satellites too, uh, I guess too hard, uh, you know, if you think about, if you do too much Bitcoin mining with your, your computer, , it's gonna wear out faster, right? Yeah. So, and you can only send up satellites. So. So you actually want that utilization maybe lower than a hundred, but we can, we can fill that utilization up for you. [00:28:37] Doc Searls: So, so get a sense of where, where you are in the industry. It's an industry again, I don't know, but I'm. You know, but I'm I'm, but I'm looking at the black sky right now, which I've never looked at before, by the way. Um, mm-hmm but they say they provide on demand and high frequency monitoring of the most strategic and critical activities, locations and economic assets, but they also brag on their AI enabled software. Mm-hmm so you guys are complimentary to that, that in some way. Yeah. Mm-hmm so some way. Yeah. So, well, where do you end? And they begin and are you a customer or a partner of them? [00:29:09] Paul Bailey: how does that work? Yeah, I would say they would be a potential competitor, I guess for, well, so not a competitor, but they would be a potential customer of ours because, uh, but they built basically, you know, with that built probably the same thing we're building. Um, but , but, uh, you know, they're not gonna go sell it to another constellation. So they built that system, that ground system. They're not building the AWS for satellites. They're, they're using it for their constellation and that's it. Mm-hmm , uh, we want we're building. [00:29:45] Doc Searls: So they, they have a constellation. So when you speak of a constellation, it's, it's a collection of satellites that are owned and operator at least operated by a single entity that yep. And is known as that. And it probably is a name that when people, when you speak at that constellation, you know what that is. [00:30:02] Paul Bailey: Yep. Um, and they're actually also trying to build, what's called a virtual constellation. So that where they kind of like resell other people's data. Um, so like, we're definitely not doing that. You know, we're just selling or building the, the management pieces or the AWS, you know, uh, you, you have a satellite, you build the hardware, we'll take care of all of the ground management software. Mm. [00:30:29] Doc Searls: Just in case anybody listening doesn't know what AWS you're talking about. Amazon web services and their cloud service. So, so the cloud is their cloud is the metaphor here, [00:30:39] Paul Bailey: right? Yeah, exactly. See [00:30:41] Katherine Druckman: intermediary service provider role, basically. [00:30:45] Paul Bailey: Yeah. So we don't own any satellites, uh, you know, at least for now. I, I, I pitched the idea I pitched idea like, [00:30:55] Katherine Druckman: Hey, we need a satellite. You need a space laser [00:30:58] Paul Bailey: yeah. I mean, come on. Why not? I mean, yeah. Hey, I mean, you're in the business. We need to like, to love things into the sky. [00:31:04] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. Who would not want a satellite of their own? I have no idea actually, why you would, but, um, it sounds cool. Certainly [00:31:12] Doc Searls: a, a sport for us in, uh, Santa Barbara, which is. technically I live is watching, um, watching rockets take off carrying satellites. Of course, in almost every case, uh, from mm-hmm Vandenberg now space force base. It used to be the air force base. Now it's a space force base. Um, and, uh, which is huge fun. Uh, it's, it's huge fun to watch. And, uh, it was interesting to me that one of the ones that took off, it, it, it vectored south or Southeast, I think was one of, one of, uh SpaceX's. And then there was this Corona, mass eject that damaged a whole bunch of satellites before they were properly orbited. And then he de orbited, they, they, they wasted the things by deorbiting them, which I that the right word, Debi. I think so. Were they? Yeah. Uh, back down into the atmosphere and they make streaks and they're done. Um, yeah, it, it, it's interesting. Maybe what, maybe, I don't know if you know this or not, but, um, what percentage, I mean, in a given for, for at least for low, lower orbit, what percentage go down every year? I mean, just because they wear out or they they've just succumbed to frictions or [00:32:26] Paul Bailey: whatever. Yeah. I don't, honestly, I don't know. I can tell you, and it might have been that launch that, that you're talking about, uh, that actually affected us because, oh, really, we have customers for potential customers who are sending up new satellites. And if, if they don't get their stuff in the orbit, then they don't wanna buy our software to manage their satellites. Mm. So yeah, that actually, uh, we, we watched the launches closely because we know whether, uh, we have to, uh, You know, kind of hound them again to see if they wanna use our services or whether we should hold off. [00:33:04] Doc Searls: so, so you're talking about companies getting cold feet because they see, they see a bad thing happen to another company. They, they could happen. [00:33:10] Paul Bailey: No, no, it's their actual, so, you know, like I said, we, we sell the satellite startups, so if they don't get their first satellite off the ground. Oh, I see. Right. Yeah. and so, yeah, that affect affected us, uh, in, I guess in, you know, who we, who we're, uh, pitching to. How is the, the overall [00:33:31] Doc Searls: gotta have a satellite up their business expanding. I imagine it's expanding. I mean, and probably Musk by just kind of chumming the seas in the sky with satellites more on the way. It's kind of accelerated that I suppose, but it is a growth business, I imagine. [00:33:50] Paul Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it is really been great for us, uh, because he's definitely kind of, uh, pushing the industry. And so that's where the, the market for new satellite startups, uh, is really big. Um, there's lots of companies. Trying to send different types of satellites up. And so it's been great for us in terms of, uh, investment too. Uh, you know, some people are trying to find new stuff other than just tech. So kind of being like a, a tech and a space company looks. Looks, uh, you know, fancy to them. So , mm-hmm, , it's been good for us. [00:34:34] Katherine Druckman: I wondered. So I'm also, of course I have your, uh, website open for the company you're at now. So you mentioned, uh, blockchain security. Security of via, via blockchain, which is always sometimes we, we, we, we talk about blockchain with a little bit of a tongue and cheek kind of attitude, but it is interesting to see, you know, what kind of, you know, business applications blockchain has. You know, outside the, the sort of hype driven ones. I wonder if you could kind of tell us that the grown up side of blockchain from your perspective a [00:35:06] Paul Bailey: little bit. Yeah. I always like to say we didn't have enough buzzword, so we had to add another one, but we actually had a real use case for it. Um, and yeah, there's some videos. They, they're pretty hard to find because they were for a. A a space pitch. It was kind of like a shark shark tank style, uh, pitch competition, um, where we won a contract and, uh, basically, um, If in the different military organizations, uh, and the contract we won was actually with the UK ministry of defense, um, where we built a, a, basically a prototype and we're actually gonna expand on the blockchain. So it's something that like, kind of in development for us. Uh, but the way these organizations work, you know, there's like, A top secret, a secret and an unclassified level. And, uh, you almost never, uh, get data going between those levels. Uh, it can happen, you know, and the way it usually happens, uh, is, you know, Even today, they burn a CD and get it approved and send it down to someone But what happens also is that, uh, people are scared if you're at the top secret level. And you unclassify something, uh, and you are wrong about it. Mm-hmm, , you're gonna be in trouble. So no one wants to do it, even though it's possible. Um, so that was one of the problems they were, uh, looking for. And so, uh, a solution for, and so we, we pitched a blockchain solution, uh, and then most blockchains, uh, And this is for their space operations, but in most block change, you know, all data is just shared. Um, but they have a, a use case for space operations because the UK wants to collaborate with the us and they're at different security levels. So they they're getting more. Having to have the need of shipping data between these, these security levels and between different countries. Uh, they wanna, everyone wants to collaborate with the us for space stuff. Um, everyone's kind of stopped investing in space and now all of a sudden, uh, all these countries like the UK are starting to vest in again. Um, and so we pitched the blockchain. What we call the, a partition blockchain, and we actually patented it. That allows you to have a blockchain, but I, I like calling it the Swiss cheese, uh, Swiss cheese data, because on the different nodes in the chain, uh, you only get the data that you have permission for. Um, so you're able to share stuff in the blockchain with different node. But it kind of has a permission system built into it. Uh, so you still have consensus and, and different things like that, but you only get the data, um, that you're available or you want available. So if you take maybe someone like the us space operations. They'll be the head honcho, but they only wanna share certain things with sure. The UK space division, let's say, um, that's where it'll help kind of transfer data, um, through a, a blockchain. And so now we did that as a prototype, but now commercially we're taking that. Commercial companies kind of have the same problem with their space operations, because with a, with a constellation, you have different customers, right? You want more than one customer because you have this big, expensive satellite constellation you have to use. Um, and so, but you don't a lot of times want one customer to see what the other customer is. So now we're kind of, uh, taking that blockchain and applying it to, to that, to not only use it for security, but distribute what we call distributed planning. [00:39:22] Doc Searls: So the cause a blockchain is sitting in a number of, um, servers, a number of database. It's one database that's distributed, that's identical on many servers. So those are all like they're not out in the world, obviously they're, they're in the side of facility, but they're some they're secure in a way because they're distributed into some physically distributed, probably in some. And there's encrypted communications that puts, puts it in, put, puts the data in these multiple bases. [00:39:53] Paul Bailey: Um, yeah. Mm-hmm and then, yeah, so each, you know, if you, if in a distributed planning scenario, you know, you could have. uh, your customers of your, of your constellation would each have a node of the blockchain and they would be able to access that data. Yeah. But then via our blockchain, um, it gets distributed back, you know, to the, the home base let's say. And then we together, you know, at the central. We want to plan all of our customers together and make sure we can meet all of our customers, uh, demands. Right. Um, but also not share the data with, you know, typically this is kind of a complicated way to do this. And typically like in a standard like software business, you just have kind of people have logins and give them permissions. Right. But with, with the aerospace industry, they're, uh, everyone kind of wants their little. You know, data, data lake in, in their own private, uh, you know, data center. Um, so it's, it's definitely like a complex way to do it, but we we're trying to meet the needs, I guess, of, of the industry [00:41:07] Katherine Druckman: you're saying it, it kind of reminds me of some of the conversations we've had with Dave Hupy, our regular recurring guest. Yeah. [00:41:14] Paul Bailey: Yeah. [00:41:15] Doc Searls: Interesting. On our other podcast next week. Um, yeah, I'll have to link to some of. So looking at your, um, at your website, you have, so is it called sentient? C N T I E N T. Is that how it's [00:41:28] Paul Bailey: pronounced? Yes, that's correct. Yeah. [00:41:30] Doc Searls: Yeah. So, so yeah. So what is that exactly? I mean, it's clearly the main thing you're pushing there. So, [00:41:36] Paul Bailey: so that's basically our product name, you know, so that's the name of our product, but I like to think of it as like a product suite. Um, and so it's kind of like Microsoft office, we're building. A bunch of different apps, but they all kind of go together and we sentient is the suite. Uh, you know, and so one of those products, right, is the mission planning. Uh, we have another product inside the sentient suite that we're building now. Um, that's for, uh, like forecasting. So you have a consolation. You want to grow it well, how, where should you add your satellite? Should you add it here? Should you add it there? How many more customers can you sell to, if you add two satellites versus three? Um, so we're building that one out now. Um, and then we have additional products down the line that, uh, you know, so we're kind of billing off out the Microsoft office suite, uh, for space basically. That's cool. Yeah. Do you think Cynthia is the umbrella [00:42:38] Doc Searls: so is, this is a little unrelated to that, but do you think we can ever have too many satellite. [00:42:45] Paul Bailey: Uh, probably is the sky, is [00:42:49] Katherine Druckman: this the space just fill up or well, I don't know. They all start [00:42:54] Paul Bailey: colliding. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's definitely issues. I mean, we're talking in, like, in terms of the colliding, right? The, the unfor, uh, I guess fortunately, right. It's pretty spread out. So it's gonna take a long time to like, uh, get there. but I mean, we've already started to see some problems, uh, in terms of like debris mm-hmm . Um, and I forget if it was Russia, the Chinese kind of exploded something and it almost hit the, the international space station and other satellites. Um, so it's probably take us a while to get there, but yeah, it's, it, it could be a problem. And if, if countries don't kind. uh, deorbit their stuff, uh, their satellite, uh, things and clean things up. And there's kind of protocols around that. Uh, you know, it, it could start becoming a problem there kind [00:43:54] Katherine Druckman: of an environmental concern, just like everything else. Really. Yeah. [00:43:57] Doc Searls: It's quite a few years ago, uh, that, um, I don't that, uh, I, it was a mill sat or one of the military satellites. I dunno if it was one that was called mill sat or not. Cuz there were a bunch of those I think, but um, It blew up on the way up and did not get into an orbit. It went into a very long elliptical orbit of, of small pieces of debris, like hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris that come back to earth and fly back out on this, this orbit again, and as if they are pretty much practically speaking permanently and, um, and I, and I know there's a there's work toward cataloging. Absolutely. Everything is up there. Right. So, and I, and I think that, and am I right? That a satellite goes up and it does go into a database where, um, yep. You know, most, you know, it it's known, known to other peoples, so they, they, they don't collide with those things. But, um, there was a, a photo I saw yesterday, uh, taken in Western Australia of. Of, uh, the, the Milky way and, and their little streaks all over day. , you know, because if, if you do it in the middle of the night, it's not bad cuz you don't have the sun reflecting off those things. Right. They're just passing through it during the day or like for a few hours before the sun rises or after the sunsets, you, you see these things up there, which is a great sport for me and my son, who's now 25 and disinterested. But when he was a kid, we'd sit outside with, um, and I'll recommend, this is called heavens above heavens dash. And I think it's dot com. It's done by the name, Chris Pete in Germany, and he is been doing this. It is in the earliest HTML. You can imagine it's just the simplest stuff. Um, and it loads in, in a fraction of a second because it's not encumbered by anything. And, and it tells you where all the satellites are. I mean, I mean, that's, that are the visible ones that are passing overhead. Yep. And in those days it was, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Oh, no, that, yeah, the big ones then where of course the ones you now, you don't wanna see them. Right. This part of, part of the idea, right? You wanna make them as small and, and modest as possible, but the big ones were the Russian ones that, where they launch something gigantic and, and, and the second stage, or whatever, just stayed in orbit has this big tumbling cylinder that you know, is up there. In a high of for, but that it's not gonna decay very fast and it's just there forever. Um, but those are the ones that are easy to see, you know, but there are many, many more that are not. [00:46:27] Paul Bailey: Yeah. So if you want, uh, your audience to, to waste, uh, a weekend or two. Okay. We love that. Yeah. All the, all the source data for that type of information, um, is at space, track.org. Oh, right. Okay. You can, you can sign up for a free. Uh, they do kind of limit how much you can query the data. Um, but you can also ask them and they'll give you a big dump of everything. Um, [00:46:55] Doc Searls: is it, is the space track? I just put it in. It says this page isn't working. Is it there a hyphen in [00:46:59] Paul Bailey: there? I think, yeah, it might be space track dash org. Uh, I think might [00:47:04] Doc Searls: be it. I got, yeah, they're in is space-track.org. Yeah. [00:47:08] Paul Bailey: Um, but yeah, you can, uh, sign up for that for free mm-hmm and, uh, you'll when you log in there, you'll get what's called. Uh, so that's the organization and there's actually, uh, so that's the us organization. Mm-hmm I think it's cell track. That's the European organization that does the same thing. Um, and they basically track everything that's up there. Uh, you won't find any, uh, pretty visualizations, but you can download all the source data for what's what's flying up there. Uh, you'll get what's called a TLE. So that's a two line element. Um, that's basically the orbital parameters. Um, and so yeah, you can. Uh, you can basically find all of the satellites that are flying up there. And then if you notice, when you go through the data, you'll see that some that are labeled as D E B that's debris oh, really? That's [00:48:06] Doc Searls: interesting. [00:48:07] Paul Bailey: And so that's all the pieces of debris that they can track, uh, right now. That's one of the funny things is you'll sometimes you'll find the satellite and then you'll find one with the same name, but it has the debris marking that's because part of the satellite fell off. Um, and it kind of, oh, that's interesting too in orbit also uh, but yeah, you can, you can basically, uh, source all of that orbital information there and make a VI visualization from it. [00:48:38] Doc Searls: That's cool. We'll put that in the show notes. Yeah, definitely. We'll have a link stick, a couple things in the chat here for [00:48:44] Paul Bailey: yeah. And anything for people later that goes up, they track it. So, uh, it sometimes for newer stuff, it takes a couple weeks, but eventually, uh, if something's flying it's it's in there, you know, it's. Uh, it's public information because you can observe what's flying in the sky. yeah. So that's why it's kind of just open for everyone go in there. [00:49:10] Doc Searls: So it's developed by S a I C under a contract from a very long alpha Americ string. [00:49:17] Paul Bailey: see, [00:49:18] Doc Searls: CFS CCC space, CJ three. Slash six it's it's droid. I mean, the name [00:49:27] Paul Bailey: like that? I believe it's part of the air force. Uh, that'ss that contract it's for, but I think that's who runs it. So [00:49:36] Doc Searls: yeahinteresting, my sister was, is a Navy veteran, but I think is either she or a friend of mine, who's at air force veteran who insisted that the air force had longer. Multi-let acronyms for things or initialisms for whatever. Um, but the military in general does that, uh, that's S E I C. I see. Huh? [00:49:58] Paul Bailey: And there's good. Um, open source tools, if you, you know, if you search and Python and JavaScript, uh, to convert Ts and show 'em on a map and, uh, oh, that's cool. Yeah. It's, it's not too hard, even if you don't really know, uh, what the information is in the T to, to start making visualizations out of it. [00:50:21] Katherine Druckman: Interesting. We'll have to look some of those up and include those too. How fun? Cool. That sounds like quite a weekend project. Uh, I assist back. We might, we might have a few takers on [00:50:31] Paul Bailey: that. The, I guess another I'll I'll throw one more in for you. Uh, there's the Aqua satellite. Which is a satellite, an old satellite that I think NASA purchased it for open use. So you can actually, oh [00:50:51] Doc Searls: really? Oh yeah. Earth observer. Satellite. [00:50:53] Paul Bailey: Yeah. Uh, yeah, so it just takes pictures constantly. And, but if you, if, if you build a good enough radio, you can actually communicate with it and download the images off of it. Fascinating. Wow. So we, we actually use that in our testing, um, via some Amazon web services. Uh, we didn't actually build the radios, uh, To test out, you know, some of our communication stuff, uh, management software, uh, we actually use Aqua to, to give that a rundown since we don't have, uh, our own satellite that's really [00:51:32] Doc Searls: is, is it a single satellite? Just, just basically scans around the world. Yeah, I see. [00:51:36] Paul Bailey: Yeah, it just flies around the world and takes pictures. And so when you download the images off of it, you never know what you're gonna get. You, you get what you get and that's it. Yeah. Yeah. How funny? [00:51:50] Katherine Druckman: That's interesting. I, you could, you could, I mean, you could retrieve them in some sort of orderly way where you could actually piece together a, I mean, right. Or no. Does, does that not work out? No, [00:52:00] Paul Bailey: I I'm not for certain how it stores the images, so yeah, I mean, but if you caught it on a. On a repeat basis, you could probably piece something together. [00:52:11] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. I was thinking like some sort of open mapping project or something. I [00:52:14] Paul Bailey: don't know. It's, it's pretty old, so it's, it's not very high resolution, but it's, [00:52:19] Katherine Druckman: it's cool. Okay. Yeah. that's cool. That is very cool. Um, so, uh, yeah, I just noticed that we, I think we've, we're coming on an hour. I think that's, uh, I felt like we were just getting started with a conversation, which is always a good sign. It's like, whoa, we just started figuring out what, you know, what all of this is. But, um, [00:52:39] Doc Searls: I think that, I mean, it seems to me there's just a gigantic, um, uh, topic and, um, you know, but it's one of those businesses that, or collection of businesses that is not known to most. Yeah, I mention, of course, you know, freight forwarding probably isn't either, you know, I mean, there are lots of things that are, that show up in the, that like freight forwarding didn't show up until, you know, the, um, uh, you know, the supply chain went to hell and, you know, mm-hmm, the evergreen Jack knife in the Suez canal and stuff like that. Yep. Um, but there's, you know, but I think I can imagine people getting more conversant about this stuff. Right? Mm-hmm cause you start space as an inherent we're relying on that. I also think that there's something to the fact that we're zero, this is a part we're doing this, you know, you. You're both. You guys are both in Texas, I'm in Indiana. It could be anywhere, you know, it, we, all of us could be anywhere. And, and we are Al also weightless. , you know, we, we have, no, we have no gravity here. You know, we, we all appear to be, have our gravity all appears to be going straight down, but we're actually on an angle from each other, you know, it's um, and, but we take that for granted, but we still live in a physical world and the physical world is one where, um, How do we cope with the distance in that? And it seems to be that's where your business is, right? Because all kinds of stuff is happening still on earth that needs tracking and needs. Yep. Needs to be familiar in way. And, you know, you need perspective on it, I guess it's maybe kind of that perspective. [00:54:15] Paul Bailey: Yeah. And it, it's funny, you mentioned that, uh, supply chain because that's, uh, one of the problems. Not the supply chain in particular that we're trying to solve. Uh, because, so like when that happened, uh, many of the major, uh, commercial, satellite constellations, right? They have customers, they have images they have to take, but now all of a sudden. There's this crisis and everyone wants an image of that ship stuck in the right, [00:54:46] Doc Searls: right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:54:48] Paul Bailey: Yeah. So how do you retest your consolation without, uh, you know, really making your, your regular customers, man? Um, and so that's the kind of. Software we're trying to build. [00:55:02] Doc Searls: Oh, that's interesting too. Right? Where, where you may need to interrupt the purposes, the, the immediate purposes of, of a given business in order to handle something that, that matters to other parties, right? [00:55:15] Paul Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. So that's a, that's, you know, it's not something you can regularly plan for, right. Um, where you kind of make your schedule and just follow it it's you gotta allow for interruptions too. [00:55:27] Doc Searls: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Stuff comes. and, and earth is like that too. yep. And people are like that [00:55:34] Paul Bailey: us people like to like to interrupt and mess things up. that we do. I don't know who, [00:55:42] Doc Searls: who was, it said that hell is other people, but a case could be made. Well, [00:55:50] Paul Bailey: this [00:55:50] Katherine Druckman: has been great. Oh, cool. Yeah, this has been great. I think, um, you know, honestly, any, any time the, the, the subject of space comes up, you know, people, people start paying a little bit more attention or at least that's nerd to do, but then when you, when you, when you bring together all of the, you know, the, the, the, the aspects of the, the work that you do, including the development, the. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, and you're good stories is, is where I'm getting [00:56:15] Doc Searls: outta that. Yeah. Thanks so much. Good stuff. It it's, uh, bringing back the, uh, the space geek that I was, uh, yeah, I thought you get a kick outta this when I had kids, you know, when you have kids, you kind of bring 'em into that, you know? Yeah. [00:56:27] Paul Bailey: It's, it's, it's fun. Uh, yeah. One more thing. One more story. Sure. I wanted to tell. Yeah. Okay. Because it, it kind of, uh, crosses over into sci-fi when we were building out our SIM. We were trying to improve the performance. And so I don't know if you've all have, uh, read the Bobba verse, but I basically, uh, stole some features from that sci-fi book. And, oh my gosh. I was like, Hey, why don't we just do it this way? I don't, I don't actually write the SIM, but I kind of pitched the ideas and they're like, oh yeah, that would work. So [00:57:03] Doc Searls: this is, uh, that's great, Dennis E. Taylor, uh, is that yeah. Okay. [00:57:09] Paul Bailey: So a lot of the, the book that book is about the oh, VR Legion. Yeah. Okay. Uh, you know, uh, simulated, uh, I guess AI running a space probe. [00:57:20] Katherine Druckman: Well, you know, so much, you know, life does imitate art many times, so that makes sense. Sci-fi provides a lot of prior art for a lot of really interesting technology. So [00:57:31] Doc Searls: it will all [00:57:31] Paul Bailey: be true. Yeah, hopefully only the good parts. Well, they, I was really happy when they liked my idea too. I was like, wait. Oh, that's great. [00:57:41] Katherine Druckman: yeah, that is, that is great. That's validating. It's pretty cool. Well, cool. Um, I, yeah, this is fantastic. I, I suspect our listeners are gonna be really excited by this conversation. Um, and, uh, yeah, I, you know, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so glad we ran into each other at a, a women in tech conference, which is kind of funny because I somehow, you know, got a guest who is not a woman in tech, but, uh, conference was great. Uh, um, Anyway. Yeah. So thanks for joining us. Thank you everyone for, to, for listening, you know, to the end. And, and we hope that you'll, you'll make a weekend project out of checking out some of the.