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Can Eutelsat’s Software-Based Satellite Reduce Growing Space Clutter? 

When Sputnik launched in 1957, it was a tremendous moment for the world. Over 60 years later, we have a very human problem floating in Earth’s atmosphere: space junk. But, Eutelsat’s new software-based Quantum satellite hopes to eliminate some of this junk by having a satellite that can change function via shifts in software, allowing…

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When Sputnik launched in 1957, it was a tremendous moment for the world. Over 60 years later, we have a very human problem floating in Earth’s atmosphere: space junk. But, Eutelsat’s new software-based Quantum satellite hopes to eliminate some of this junk by having a satellite that can change function via shifts in software, allowing the satellite to serve multiple purposes.

Giving insights is Bren Briggs, VP DevSecOps, Hypergiant, an enterprise AI company focused on developing world-changing technology to solve the world’s biggest problems in the areas of space, defense, and critical infrastructure.

“I think this new Eutelsat software-based satellite offers an amazing opportunity to reduce the growing space clutter because it’s doing for space what AWS and other cloud providers sort of innovated and did for us when it came to the data center,” Briggs said.

Just like AWS put an API on the data center and made everything flexible, elastic, and on-demand, Eutelsat is doing the same thing for space, where we now have satellite space and time to be delivered on-demand as these satellites can be reconfigured for various customers or missions.

“I also see an opportunity to launch fewer satellites to support more missions simultaneously because not only can these satellites be reconfigured, they can potentially be multitenant and simultaneously operate multiple missions,” Briggs said.

Listen to Briggs’ thoughts on how launching satellites that can serve more than one purpose could reduce the number of satellites floating aimlessly around the planet, and how this intersects with expansions to 5G and telecom technologies.

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Video TranscriptExpand ↓

I think this new eutelsat software based satellite offers an amazing opportunity to reduce the growing space clutter because it's doing for space what AWS and other cloud providers sort of innervated and did for us when it came to the data center. And that is that just like AWS put an API on the data center and made everything flexible and elastic and on demand. Eutelsat is doing the same thing for space where we now have satellite space and time that can be delivered on demand as these satellites are reconfigured for various customers or missions. And I also see a fantastic opportunity to launch fewer satellites that support more missions simultaneously, because not only can these satellites be reconfigured, but they can potentially be multitenant and simultaneously operate multiple missions. So, yes, I think this is a fantastic opportunity to reduce the rapidly growing space clutter that we have by not launching single purpose satellites or ones that we can quickly obsoleted or something like that. And that this is also lowering the barrier to entry and democratizing space by, you know, meaning like normal people can now go out and get time on a satellite, whereas before, you know, you might have to have access to the entire logistics or the supply chain where you're building a satellite, you're launching it and it prohibitively expensive. You know, I would love to be able to do something like pay by the hour or by the month to get some sort of, you know, small amount of time on a satellite. That'll be fantastic. Now, how do these new software, satellite software based satellites work? How do interact with kind of like how we're doing things before or how are they going to change our technology? I think that what we're seeing here is to use another analogy from a major, you know, sea change that we had is it's sort of like moving from the very manual human and patch code based approach of phone switching that we had, you know, decades ago where you would pick up the phone, the operator would ask you who you wanted to talk to, and then you would tell them and you'd hop your way along the lines. And then, you know, now we, you know, not long after we figured out these ways of doing automated phone switching. But if you ask the average person on the street at the time, they probably would have said, no, that's crazy. That's impossible. There's no way we can do that. I think we're kind of potentially even there where we're thinking, you know, we want to reconfigure satellites on orbit and we want to rapidly update software on orbit and we want to do sharing. And we want to or resource sharing and multitenant see where we have multiple customers that share this hard to share the same underlying hardware, the same way that virtual machines are doing on us today. And so I think that that's kind of where we are. And the risk that we have here, probably the primary risk is really the same class of attacks and problems that we have with containers and jails and virtual machines and public cloud, which is when you have this multi tendency and potentially hostile customers or clients that are setting up shop on your hardware, how do you isolate them away from each other and think that we're going to have several probably really high profile examples of tenant escapes, some sort of a container escape or a breakout where a tenant, you know, somebody escapes their tenant and takes over the satellite. There's probably potentially several other very new and interesting attack vectors that are going to come up. And I'm very excited to see what those are going to be and participate and hopefully in the research and development of both identifying and mitigating these new attack classes that are likely to pop up.

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