41–50 of 151 posts
Had a dinner conversation with a person who had worked for military intelligence back in the day. At one time a receiving station was located in Antartica. For Polar orbit satellites this insured reception once per orbit. Since it was so cold the only reliable media for storage they could use was paper tape.
There were some comments yesterday on tracking subs, talking about the throughput requirements. It made me think about another bit of orbital infrastructure: in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. But yeah, seems like interoperable space protocols are starting up. BACN-Mesh works. Maybe not quite so important & I forget the name…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-86650-z
https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr534649
Also some work on unsupervised change detection:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19437-5
But there are undoubtedly lots of other people/companies/militaries exploring. We didn't build the hardware for example, and we weren't the only experiment onboard our flight. The main differentiator is how many have actually deployed in space. It's very easy to show that you can run a model on an accelerator, but getting it in-orbit somehow, testing it on real imagery from new sensors, etc. The challenge is that most people will have to train a model on simulated data, fly a cubesat or another small platform and then re-train their model to adapt to images from orbital images. Aerial imagery models don't always transfer well to satellite images.
My take having been to conferences, and speaking to others in the field, is that there are a lot more researchers interested (as of 2022) and we'll start to see more publicly deployed experiments in the next year or two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineers play one of the most pivotal roles in war and loss of human life, and many don't even realize it. Something that needs to be reflected on more.
On reflection, if my side doesn't militarize space then another side will dominate and make the rules. Might as well work with my side on it and also get scientific advancements out of it. Even in the advanced age of Star Trek we needed defensive capabilities.
We in the US have driven most provocation in space. The military budget is more than the next nine countries combined (including China). Whether it be the Strategic Defense Initiative, unilaterally leaving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Prompt Global Strike, hypersonic missiles, the US is developing escalatory weapons tech then justifying it with delusions that the same exists in other countries, like those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Weaponization of space has always been touted as the ultimate high ground, but we seem to have forgotten the lessons and mistakes of raising the stakes, https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
In an age of nuclear weapons, new "disruptive" strategic technology development can be extremely dangerous and destablizing.. this is not a game humanity can afford to play.
There were some comments yesterday on tracking subs, talking about the throughput requirements. It made me think about another bit of orbital infrastructure: in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. But yeah, seems like interoperable space protocols are starting up. BACN-Mesh works. Maybe not quite so important & I forget the name…
The article’s point is this will soon be obsolete. Processing at the edge is enormously costly.
This guy is really drinking the space militarization Kool aid that the SDA is churning out. It's sad to see another young generation getting sucked into the military industrial complex
I figure the market for "low" resolution imagery will be destroyed when Starlink decides to add something like a fixed wide angle 100 megapixel cameras to every satellite. There are a lot of options for what to do from there, but getting continuous global imagery would suddenly be possible.
Planet Labs captures ~30 megapixel images (usually though, these are quoted in terms of pixel size, eg. 5 meters per pixel) and has hundreds of satellites on orbit. I don't know about Digital Globe's capabilities, but they are also in this business as are others. Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability?
No. Everyone talks a big game about SAR and resolution because it’s easier than latency. People don’t pay for resolution, they pay for immediacy. (The folks who do pay for resolution typically have their own birds. There simply aren’t many use cases for occasionally needing hyper-resolution photos of what something looked like a few days or even hours ago.)
There were some comments yesterday on tracking subs, talking about the throughput requirements. It made me think about another bit of orbital infrastructure: in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. But yeah, seems like interoperable space protocols are starting up. BACN-Mesh works. Maybe not quite so important & I forget the name…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remote sensing is severely limited by latency and throughput of the downlink, as it needs to push mountains of data in a tiny window when the satellite is passing over the ground station once in a while. "Internet in Space" will help to remove (or reduce) this limitation.
In a conflict with a near-peer adversary, the attrition rate on reconnaissance satellites in LEO is going to be high. So, it will also be important for satellites to downlink their data quickly before they get knocked out.
Had a dinner conversation with a person who had worked for military intelligence back in the day. At one time a receiving station was located in Antartica. For Polar orbit satellites this insured reception once per orbit. Since it was so cold the only reliable media for storage they could use was paper tape.
There were some comments yesterday on tracking subs, talking about the throughput requirements. It made me think about another bit of orbital infrastructure: in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. But yeah, seems like interoperable space protocols are starting up. BACN-Mesh works. Maybe not quite so important & I forget the name…
> in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down The article’s point is this will soon be obsolete. Processing at the edge is enormously costly.