The video explores the explosion of satellite activity in low Earth orbit, particularly the involvement of companies like SpaceX and Amazon in increasing the number of satellites. With this surge, space debris has become a pressing issue due to leftover rocket bodies and collisions, exacerbated by missile testing from countries like Russia. The increasing crowd in low orbit spells potential disaster for space endeavors in the future unless appropriately managed and tracked.

The video showcases Leo Labs, a Silicon Valley startup, as a pioneering company in space debris management. Founded in 2015, their advanced space tracking system is likened to a futuristic air traffic control system for space. They have developed a global network of radars to monitor satellites and debris, helping space companies, such as SpaceX, manage satellite collisions and avoid space traffic mishaps. The company's services have become vital as satellite numbers sharply increase, requiring innovative tracking and collision avoidance solutions.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. anomaly [əˈnɑːməli] - (noun) - Something that deviates from the standard, normal, or expected. - Synonyms: (abnormality, irregularity, oddity)

And this is not an anomaly.

2. proliferation [prəˌlɪfəˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - Rapid increase in numbers. - Synonyms: (multiplication, expansion, surge)

The success of Elon Musk's SpaceX triggered a revolution in the space industry.

3. trajectory [trəˈdʒɛktəri] - (noun) - The path followed by a projectile or an object moving under the action of given forces. - Synonyms: (course, path, route)

Whenever any one of these things goes through one of these beams we recalculate its orbit.

4. conjunction [kənˈdʒʌŋkʃən] - (noun) - The action or an instance of two or more events occurring at the same point in time or space. - Synonyms: (coincidence, coexistence, simultaneity)

And the alerts are the cdms. So the conjunction data messages.

5. propulsion [prəˈpʌlʃən] - (noun) - The action of driving or pushing forward. - Synonyms: (driving force, thrust, impetus)

A lot of the satellites have propulsion systems.

6. manifold [ˈmænɪˌfoʊld] - (adjective) - Many and varied; of many different kinds. - Synonyms: (numerous, multiple, diverse)

The number of satellites has gone up so dramatically we focus on low Earth orbit.

7. trajectory [trəˈdʒektəri] - (noun) - The path followed by a projectile flying or an object moving under the action of given forces. - Synonyms: (path, course, route)

And when they come to our radar, we get an approximation for position and velocity.

8. impetus [ˈɪmpɪtəs] - (noun) - The force that makes something happen or happen more quickly. - Synonyms: (incentive, stimulus, momentum)

They're bringing new commercial services to market and they're leveraging new technology.

9. proliferation [prəˌlɪfəˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - Rapid increase in numbers. - Synonyms: (multiplication, augmentation, spread)

SpaceX with its Starlink communication system. They want to put up something like on the order of like 10,000 or more satellites.

10. compendium [kəmˈpɛndiəm] - (noun) - A collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject. - Synonyms: (summary, digest, overview)

And so the actual collision probability is actually low.

How LeoLabs Is Using New Tech to Target Space Junk

Let's begin with the simplest of space math. From 1960 to 2020, the number of satellites in orbit increased at a slow and steady pace. We went from zero satellites to about 2500 satellites, zipping by over our heads. By the end of 2021, however, that number had doubled to 5000. And this is not an anomaly. 5000 will soon turn to 10,000. And then. Deep breaths. 100,000 satellites. If companies like SpaceX, Amazon and many others get their way, most of these satellites will settle in low Earth orbit, which is right here. It might seem like a roomy enough place, but its already filled with those existing satellites. Leftover rocket bodies and debris from collisions in some countries. Russia, or looking at you have only made matters worse by firing missiles into space and blowing things up. What we have here is a real problem, the kind of problem that could ruin space now and for many years into the future.

If only someone, somewhere was doing something about it. Today I am going to go visit a company called Leo Labs. It's a startup based right here in Silicon Valley. You can think of them as a Sci-Fi super modern air traffic control system. They've built some technology that tracks everything in space. Rocket bodies that have gone up there, satellites, all the debris from things that have collided and exploded. It's kind of an essential technology that we're going to need in the coming years as space fills with more and more stuff. So I'm going to head into their office and try and figure out how this technology works.

The core of what we do is tracking all the satellites, all the pieces of debris in low earth orbit. And the reason we're in business is space has gone into space race 2.0. And so the numbers of satellites are scaling up, the risk from debris is scaling up. None of the tracking systems were built to scale. And the reason we started the company is because we knew how to build scalable tracking systems. So we're in the process of doing that.

Dan and his co founders started Leolabs in 2015, and they appeared just in the nick of time. The success of Elon Musk's SpaceX triggered a revolution in the space industry. Almost out of nowhere, the world became awash in rocket and satellite startups. More people than ever before want to put more stuff than ever before into orbit. The Leo lab's founders saw this frenzy of activity coming, and they bet that we would soon need better systems for tracking things in space.

You guys were ahead of the game in kind of predicting where this economy was going. Yeah, that's the whole reason we're in business, the number of satellites has gone up so dramatically we focus on low Earth orbit. So kind of the closest 2000 surface of the earth. That's where the revolution in space is happened. It's where the business revolution is. Three years ago, there were 800 functional satellites in that part of space. Now there's close to 4000. On top of that, there are about 15,000 pieces of debris tracked today. Dead satellites, dead rocket bodies and fragments of it. And there's been weapons tests, there's been collisions.

On top of those 15,000 pieces of debris there's about 250,000 critical but untracked pieces of debris up there today. So a big part of what we've set out to do is track that small stuff and bring it into the safety picture. To date, Leo Labs has raised more than $100 million. A lot of that money is going toward the construction of a network of radars placed around the world. It's these radar systems that look up at the sky and spot and catalog objects as they orbit.

You need this global network of radars. If you've got one radar site, you can check in on a satellite about twice a day. So every 12 hours. That's a long time to wait, really. You need sites around the world. We've got four sites today. We're going to more than 20 sites over the next few years. So today you guys are in like Midland, Texas, Costa Rica, Alaska and New Zealand. Is that right? Okay. Yeah. And then we've got three more sites under construction.

A big part of Leolab's mission is not just tracking objects in space but actually making sure that satellites don't collide into each other. Satellite companies like SpaceX and Planet Labs to find out where their satellites are and if they're about to hit something. A lot of the satellites have propulsion systems. They can kind of move to get out of the way of each other or change their orbit a little bit.

It's a service that you guys offer to help these companies know how to maneuver their machines? Yeah, we offer a collision avoidance service. It's a subscription service. We'll send you an alert up to seven days in advance if your satellite's going to come dangerously close to a piece of debris or another satellite. And most satellites have a thruster on board, a chemical rocket or an electric thruster. Companies have been doing that for decades, moving satellites around.

But it's sort of like a harder problem now. The risk of a collision is a lot higher now just because we've installed so much more hardware into space. You have a big collision, it creates a cloud of debris. And now all the other satellites are flying through this whizzing mess of debris. The other element of it is the need for track and all the small debris as well. As we add all of the new satellites into space, the risks of the collision, the likelihood of the collision is going up.

Right now, we're putting out about 400 million collision alerts per month in low Earth orbit. So these are either the first alert of collisions happened or follow ups letting you know, 400, 400 million. Okay, what does that mean? You're sending out 400 million, like, emails, or you can get them over email. That's kind of the legacy way of doing it. It's machine to machine. So we push out these alerts through our API, and then the satellite operators. These days, their fleets are automated. So when we send them an alert, they can decide to nudge their satellite again or at a different time to avoid the collision.

To really understand how the Leo lab service works, it would be super helpful to have an astronaut, someone who spent time aboard the International Space Station dodging debris on a daily basis. And as luck would have it, I found just such a human. I'm Ed Liu. I'm one of the co founders at Leolabs. And you are an astronaut? I am a former NASA astronaut. I flew three times in space, two times on the space shuttle, then I launched on a Soyuz mission to ISS immediately following the Columbia disaster.

When you're on the ISS, you guys actually do get pelted by debris, right? Yeah, things do hit the ISS. I remember looking out on the solar arrays, and you can see holes in them. In fact, I remember doing a spacewalk coming down a railing, and there's a thing that looked like a bullet hole in one of the railings. So it literally hit a railing, a steel railing. Was it experiences like that that drew you to this startup, or how did you end up getting involved with leolabs?

Absolutely. So at the time, the number one danger to crews on ISS was orbital debris. And to this day, it is the number one danger, according to NASA's own figures. And the reason is because the vast majority of objects that are large enough to go through the hull, should they hit the ISS, were not tracked or are not tracked by the us government. And so this company was created to track those. The vast majority of objects smaller than are tracked by the Department of Defense because they're dangerous, not only to the astronauts, but to all of development of low Earth orbit.

As both Dan and Ed mentioned, Russia made the space issue all too clear. Last year, it fired a missile at one of its own satellites because, well, because it could. And now everyone has been left to deal with the consequences. So what we're looking at here is the Earth and these are Leo lab's radars attracting the orbit of this satellite. Cosmos 1408 was roughly along this line. And when you break it up, everything else kind of ends up following that path. That's why all this stuff is kind of looking like this. So these are all the objects we're tracking.

Whenever any one of these things goes through one of these beams we recalculate its orbit. Each of these beams can track about 2000 objects per hour. You've got the green are actual satellites payloads. The yellow are rocket bodies and the red is debris. And then blue is unknown. Okay. Yeah. It's important that you put your radars all around the Earth because that's how you get the coverage you want to get to the southern hemisphere and that's because, well, objects, they spend half their time in the southern hemisphere. And historically, people have left their trash up there.

So those are the dead things. The largest of the current constellations is Starlink. They are covering the earth in these things. There's more than 2000 of these things already and they're launching them in groups of 60 every couple of weeks. This is a big problem for satellite operators when they launch. And one of these rockets spits out 30, 40, 5100 satellites. Which one is there? Right? Because they're not all laid. Right. So one of the services that we've been providing commercially to companies is, hey, figuring out which one is which.

Like, if you look at this particular picture, you'd be like, oh, we're already f. This place is jam packed. But these objects are very misleading. Yeah. Much larger for the purposes of display. Again, something that's the size of China, right? Yeah. The size of a satellite is gonna be really small. It'd be less than a pixel. You couldn't see it. So keep in mind that there's a lot of satellites up there. There are many, many thousands of satellites, but they're not this big. While my space math is simple, this space math is hard.

It takes brainiac people like Bonnie here to find out when satellites might collide. As an astro person, I get to work on algorithms. And those algorithms are what's gonna go into the server and it's gonna produce some sort of alerts. And the alerts are the cdms. So the conjunction data messages. The heart of the algorithm is math and physics. We have two satellites in orbit, and we know the path. And when they come to our radar, we get an approximation for position and velocity. So we know how fast these guys are going and you know where they're gonna go.

If we have two of them going on a collision course, then we run something that is called, like, the probability of collision method, which is gonna tell us, hey, at what exact time these guys are gonna come close and how far off they're going to be. One of the things that you can see, like, the work that I do right now, is going into the safety of flight and looking for conjunctions. So if you are a satellite operator, you know the name of your satellite, so you can just type it here in object one.

And then if you suspect that you might be colliding with, like, another satellite that you already know. So, for example, I don't know, one of the starlings from SpaceX or one of the doves from planet or anything. You could just type the other object here in search. Okay, let's just say that you have no idea, and let's just say that you are me, a colombian citizen that is trying to find out what's going on with the one and only colombian satellite that we have in orbit. Let's look it up. So we go factset, and there he is. We're just going to see what's coming around factsite.

So we do search. We have a potential collision with a starlink. And you can see when that is going to happen in the future. We can click on view, and it's going to take us to a page that is called an analysis report. It's going to show you the ground station, so you can see what the path is that the two satellites are actually following. So it tells you the exact time when we think it's going to collide. It gives you the miss distance. And so, you know, 20 km in space is nothing like nothing at all. And so the actual collision probability is actually low. Yeah. And so we know it's not like super high risk.

Without this type of work, space runs the risk of becoming unusable. Humans will have messed up low Earth orbit in much the same way that we messed up planet Earth. This debris is a big issue. There's this thing called the Kessler syndrome, I think is what they call it. Right? Is that the syndrome? The right, yeah, it is the Kessler syndrome. Tell me how that works.

This idea of kind of cascading debris clouds, right? Yeah, the idea almost like a nuclear chain reaction of one piece of debris hitting another piece of debris and a cascade. I don't think we're close to an overall risk of Leo going into that. There are bad neighborhoods in space though, and so in effect we're becoming a space realtor. We can tell you where the bad neighborhoods are and where the good neighborhoods are between about 800 and 900 km altitude. There's been some bad events, there's been weapons tests where a satellite was blown up, there's been breakup events and the like.

So there's just, there's more debris there. So if you're going to put out new satellites, you're going to launch new satellites. Don't put them there, put them in other regions of space. The situation's manageable right now, but we do need to manage it better. There's satellites going into all different orbits. You see them going north south and south northe kind of east west and everything in between.

And it's just not organized. With a bit of organization. It can. I think we can put a lot more satellites into space. We've seen SpaceX with its Starlink communication system. They want to put up something like on the order of like 10,000 or more satellites. And they're not alone. There's multiple companies and countries that want to put up tens of thousands of satellites for comms, networks and all sorts of things.

And so if everybody gets their wishes and there's 100,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, is that actually feasible to manage? If we have the right technology, I think we can totally manage it. Okay. That's the exciting part about this second space race, is it's commercial. The leaders in it are bringing new commercial services to market and they're leveraging new technology. It's Moore's law brought to space. Like you said 510 years ago, you'd spend ten years designing and building a satellite. You'd run it for 20 years. And so at the end your technology would be 30 years old. And now companies are refreshing their satellite design every year, launching new satellites every year. It's like keeping up with the latest iPhone.

I mean you're getting new, new chips, new sensors, new cameras all the time. Exactly. New cameras, new computers, new radios. It's awesome to me, we're building like a computing shell around the earth to sort of analyze it in ways we never have before. Whether it's photographing what's happening with the rainforest and water and the movement of people and roadways or the communication systems. It's kind of like this new Internet layer around us. That's how I think about it.

Yeah, I think about it the same way. And another way to look at it. Business on earth is just stepping into space in a big way for the first time. So now just normal day to day stuff's getting routed through space, and that means it's communications networks, cameras. Yeah, everything. You said this is the computer revolution in 1990 happening in space. Yeah. The monitoring and understanding of where everything is and where it's going is going to be crucial to the development of this economic sphere.

Space Technology, Innovation, Science, Artificial Intelligence, Debris Management, Spacex, Bloomberg Originals