Commercializing Space (Part 2): From Frontier to Marketplace

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here, and welcome to Disruptors x CDL: the Innovation Era. We’re doing a special two part series on the space economy, and I’m joined by my co-host, Sonia Sennik, the CEO of Creative Destruction Lab, which has its own special space stream. That just tells you how big the space economy is these days.

Sonia, great to be with you again.

Sonia Sennik: Thanks so much, John. It’s awesome to be here. Today, we’re hosting part two of our discussion on the space economy. And this time we’re diving into examples of Canadian companies who are building the future of space. To put it into perspective, Morgan Stanley’s space team estimates that the roughly $350 billion global space industry could surge to over a trillion dollars by 2040.

John Stackhouse: That’s right. This is not just the stuff of Nassau and maybe Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. There are thousands of companies, including many Canadians and two that we’ll hear from today, that are active way up there as well as down [00:01:00] here. If you listen to part one of our special series, you would have heard Commander Chris Hadfield, who of course has been to outer space and back, talk about just how big the opportunity and ambition is.

Sonia Sennik: And he contrasted that against just how little we know. And how much more there is for us to explore and learn about outer space. With the cost of accessing lower earth orbit dramatically lower than it’s ever been, the opportunities are truly endless.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, after a conversation with Chris, I was thinking about what the container ship did to globalization and how space transportation may do the same.

For history nerds, you’ll know that the container ship was born out of the Vietnam War. Where the U. S. military had to ship all sorts of stuff to Asia and then were sending back empty containers. So some bright entrepreneurs developed a business out of container ships, and thus was born in many ways what we now call globalization.

We may be seeing the same thing with what Musk and Bezos are doing [00:02:00] with space transportation today.

Sonia Sennik: And now our global supply chain is going to include reusable rockets.

John Stackhouse: So what do you call globalization when it includes another planet? Universalization, John. I’ll go with that. Joining us today will be Christine Tovey, the former CTO of Airbus Group North America and an aerospace veteran, who will tell us what her new company, Wyvern, is doing up there in space, as well as Mina Mitri, who’s the CEO and founder of Kepler Communications, a Toronto based satellite company.

Let’s dig in. We caught up with Christine at the CDL Space Session. Have a listen. Christine, thanks for being on the podcast.

Christine Tovee: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks, John.

John Stackhouse: So a bit of background. Why VERN came through CDL was founded with the broad goal of providing actionable intelligence of Earth from space to enable a sustainable future for humanity.

So no small ambition there. Why think small when you’re in space? Give us a sense of what inspired the vision.

Christine Tovee: Well, I think [00:03:00] Wyvern was unique in terms of its enthusiasm and cohesion of its founding team. So four young people, mostly out of the University of Alberta. Unique in the sense that two of the founders were women.

So we had a 50 percent female founder team and truly their joy to work with the enthusiasm, the collaboration, the insight that we have, but also one of the other reasons why I think Wyvern was amazing is we were combining a disruption of how the business of space was happening with real technical innovation.

And I would say going through CDL, that combination of both business and technology disruption is relatively unique and one of the reasons why I thought Wyvern had a great future in front of it.

John Stackhouse: And six years on, tell us a bit about your progress.

Christine Tovee: Six years on, we’re now at approximately 35 employees. We grew up in COVID, so we’re [00:04:00] practically a virtual company.

So there are engineers and employees from all the way from Halifax, all the way to Campbell River, Vancouver, as well as we have a few American employees down in Colorado. We have just finished another financing round, so we just raised six million dollars U. S., you know, in a very difficult financing environment.

We’ve got three satellites on orbit. We’ve got two more launching in 2025. Space is hard, so there’s a lot more lessons to learn about getting the imagery down. If you don’t know what hyperspectral imagery does, is we take images of the Earth in many different colors. So beyond what the eye can see. And you can combine these different colors to learn different information about what’s happening on the earth in terms of chemical composition, soil moisture, temperatures as well.

So you can learn a lot about what’s going on and therefore get into decision making and to optimize a number of things. So. We have a number of [00:05:00] clients in agriculture, in mining, defense, obviously is still very much interested in imaging, that’s naturally the number one client for this type of imaging.

But we also get very unique requests, we’ve been asked about the health of coral reefs, the Great Barrier Reef, we also are looking at invasive species, we’ve just done a use case on forestry where we can actually identify different kinds of trees in a forest. What’s also exciting is this data used to be quite bespoke, and not a lot of people had access to it, nor did they have the expertise to work with it.

So it’s a real discovery journey, both for us in terms of that space journey, but also for clients wondering what more can we do that’s going to impact so many other areas.

Sonia Sennik: Christine, I think you beautifully illustrated in your response there, just how many different industries space companies can touch with the hyperspectral data that you get and the opportunity with AI to really [00:06:00] leverage that and harness those prediction tools to better support their businesses.

It’s all very new and exciting. So what is the biggest piece of education you’re giving to business leaders as you’re discussing with them the opportunities with your tools and technology?

Christine Tovee: Yeah, so first off Wyvern focuses on the data. We certainly do have an AI and ML deployment plan, but we’re also looking to partner with people who can do the application.

So on the layer of data is the applications. Now, what has been an education? Of such is what can people rely on the data for? So it’s quite a process to take down zeros and ones from a sensor that’s detecting light over 500 kilometers away from the earth and then turn that into something called an image.

And that’s what we do really well. Then it’s a matter of, well, what does this image tell you, and how do we deal with some of the discontinuities, the discrepancies in it, and what does it mean, and certainly [00:07:00] something that’s really relevant right now is what’s truth in an image, and what is processed. AI is making this even more of a challenge to explain it, because AI can do a whole bunch of stuff, and you don’t really understand what it’s doing to the image.

But how do we maintain what we’ve kind of called pixel truth? So making sure that the customer, whatever their application, whatever their analytics is, can trust that the data is of ground truth.

Sonia Sennik: Just to pivot to how you get those images and how you get that data, is you actually send CubeSats into lower Earth orbit. Now, not all satellites are created equally. Can you give us just a very brief primer on the difference between a CubeSat and satellites that we’d be more familiar with?

Christine Tovee: So it’s true.

Our first three satellites are CubeSats. If you’re in the know, we talk about CubeSats in terms of units. So this is a [00:08:00] 6u or 6 unit size. CubeSat. It’s small. It’s small. It’s the size of a microwave, essentially. It was literally packed in a suitcase and hand carried onto a British Airways flight to Vandenberg to be launched.

Yes, it had its own seat on the BA flight. I come from military satellite communications where we’re talking about a satellite that is in the tons that would fill this room and would be launched into an orbit that’s 36,000 kilometers away from the earth, which means it’s moving very slow compared to the earth.

In fact, it’s stationary over a point. With smaller sats, you put them into what we call low Earth orbit, which, like I said, is around 500 kilometers above the Earth, and they’re moving very fast. In one day, in a sun synchronous orbit, we’re going over the Earth 24 times. As it slowly moves along the equator, So it covers the full circumference of the earth in one day and it does that every day.

So it’s a very fast moving [00:09:00] satellite and we want more of them, but also we’re actually moving to what we’re calling a small satellite. So about a hundred kilograms next. And there’s some very big advantages to that as well. The orbits won’t change too much. But with a larger satellite, you actually get better pointing accuracy just because you have more mass, your conservation of momentum stabilizes the platform.

And certainly if you’re taking photos, if anybody’s sort of had a shaky hand when they’ve been trying to take a photo, you want stability for that platform. And so a small sat, which is about a hundred kilometers, provides extra stability. It also provides extra what we call space, weight and power. And so with power, you can also do a lot more on board processing.

So I talk about the technology challenges that we have is there’s, there’s two really that Wyvern’s trying to solve. It’s how do we take a good image? And we’re working on deployable optics for that. And then there’s, how do I manage the data? Because [00:10:00] one of the big challenges of hyperspectral, when I talk about multiple colored images, it means every time we’re taking 32 images of the same spot.

And that’s a lot of data, like we’re into the gigabytes of data. In 32 different spectroscopies. Yes, in 32 different colors. And the next generation is going to be even more colours. So it’s a data management problem as well. So being able to move into a constellation or an architecture where I do some of the processing and the A.

I., the M. L., the analysis of the images on board before I have to move all that data to the ground is also a big change.

Sonia Sennik: So what’s wonderful about this is it’s such a chain of innovation. It is. An innovation in the hardware, an innovation in how you take the photos, an innovation in how you power and process on board can lead to an innovation to the data that you get.

And then how I do or don’t manage my farmland or how I do or don’t manage my mine site. And so that broad spectrum of [00:11:00] industries that you’re about to touch is really exciting. What do you see as being in the next 10 years, the biggest barrier for you bringing that to life and getting engaged with businesses all around the world?

Christine Tovee: Well, I don’t think it’s going to take 10 years. I think it’s a real five year planet as such. The barriers are, I’d love to see more launch companies and more launch opportunities because these are not massive constellations in terms of the Starlink thousands of satellites, but to cover the earth and to get the latency and the timing, you need 40, 50, 60 satellites to cover the earth in a meaningful way.

So access to launches is one thing. Reliability and being able to launch to exactly where I want it to be. I’m really interested in getting to a point in space that is really meaningful, especially when you’re trying to coordinate 40 satellites, I do not need them all bunched up into the same orbit.

Thank you very much. The challenge is also going to be managing technology from different generations and obsolescence and make sure it all works together. So there’s [00:12:00] a massive coordination, change management, change management, again, the operations are complex, the mathematical calculations are complex.

This is another area where I think AI and ML is going to help us just to manage that complexity and understand how performance varies across the satellites and the imaging capability. The space is also going to be an area where we’re going to be more security driven. We’re seeing the world change from everything from more space debris.

So we’ve got to monitor our satellites and make sure we keep them safe. Radiation, being able to de-orbit, but also there are cyber attacks. There’s a hypothetical where hack a satellite, hack a satellite, you know, take control of the TTC links. So those are the challenges.

John Stackhouse: As you laid out, you’ve got a great five year plan, but what’s your dream for Wyvern and what do you need to get there?

Christine Tovee: Well, the dream for Earth is to be able to see what’s happening on Earth at any moment. I remember [00:13:00] reading once about a story where a river up in Yukon essentially disappeared overnight and by the time people realized what had happened, they had no clue why this river was suddenly gone. I’m hoping Wyvern we never miss something like that again.

We’re living in such a connected and complex world that things happening in one area of the world actually have huge impacts somewhere else. And being able to see those two things at the same time, especially on a climate change level or something like that, understanding our connectivity across the globe, I think is one of the missions of Wyvern, and I think this data can really help.

The other way is There’s the moon next, there’s the solar system. Can we expand to a cislunar and a solar sort of environment where we’re doing hyperspectral imagery all over the place?

John Stackhouse: You don’t think small?

Christine Tovee: No.

Sonia Sennik: Never.

John Stackhouse: Christine, great to have you on the podcast. Thank you.

Sonia Sennik: It’s been a real pleasure.

Our [00:14:00] second guest is Mina Mitri, CEO and founder of Kepler Communications. Mina, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. You have a background in aerospace engineering from the University of Toronto. How did you decide to build a startup?

Mina Mintry: Oh, well, that’s a long story. I’ll try to give you the bridge version.

During my undergrad and my master’s, I had the privilege of leading a not for profit called the University of Toronto Aerospace Team. We started out with about five people that were volunteering to build these heavy lift aircraft that were remote controlled and tried to carry as much weight up as they could.

three year period where I was responsible for the team. We took it to a group of about a hundred volunteers doing a range of things from building our own rocket engines from scratch, designing drones, and ultimately launching satellites. So we had the opportunity to put down a levy in the university of Toronto, where each student would pay a portion of their tuition to support our launch campaign going up into orbit that was unanimously [00:15:00] voted in, which was really cool.

But it was through that experience that I really learned what was happening inside of the space sector. Gone are the days where it’s nationally held by trillionaires, and I mean the government of the U. S. or the Soviets of the time, and now space has become democratized, it’s really accessible for all, where we could mix laughing gas, aluminum powder, and candle wax to make our own rocket engines from scratch.

Yep. Somebody permitted us to do that, but all the way through to developing and launching microbiology payloads on a student based levy is really a great opportunity to realize what was happening inside of the space sector. I got together with some of the smartest folks that I knew at the time, which were really top of their field in the world.

And we got together and decided to build Kepler.

John Stackhouse: Mina, I think you just gave away your IP. I didn’t realize laughing gas was the critical ingredient, but we’ll see who takes advantage of that. Tell us a bit about the Kepler story.

Mina Mintry: The Kepler story builds off of this idea that we were seeing space access become so democratized.[00:16:00]

You had sit and run competitions that were going out and building, launching, operating spacecraft, made us realize here is the opportunity where people have democratized access through launch or through regulations or through a myriad of different ways in which spaces become more accessible. And while there’s been a heavy amount of investment into launch, There’s been very little investment into communications, and so we set out with this vision to bring internet access outside of this world, the same internet that we’re so enjoying today, but bringing it into space so that any object in space becomes completely free.

indifferentiable from your networked printer and that might be a good or bad experience depending on how you’ve used network printers in the past and hopefully it’s been positive but generally it means that you’d be on your phone able to access any asset that’s in orbit in the same way that we so do here on earth and that was the grand vision.

And so we set out to do that in 2016. We raised a little bit of capital, [00:17:00] launched our first satellites that were proof of concept validation, allowed us to acquire spectrum rights. And then we moved into developing our product into 2018 and raised two successive financings. Thereafter, and today we’re a team of about 170 people split between the US, Canada, and Europe launching a constellation that’s entirely built in house here in Toronto, and that provides connectivity to the range of applications from human space flight to earth observation missions, to national scientific and defense oriented applications.

John Stackhouse: You and I were together recently, Mina, and I made an offhand reference that I thought Canada may need an Elon Musk to propel us with a bit more ambition into the space economy, and you glared at me. I needed no words to know what was on your mind, and that was that we have plenty of Elon Musk equivalents, you being, I think, one of them.

Tell us a bit about your ambition. How big can this get?

Mina Mintry: John, those are your words, not mine. So I think I’d say we have an [00:18:00] incredible opportunity here in Canada because we have the talent capacity to near do anything. We have highly motivated, highly skilled people that come out of university, just ripe for opportunity.

And if they’re provided that opportunity in Canada, we’ll see incredible growth inside of the space sector. If we don’t provide them that opportunity in Canada, they’ll actually just move. They’ll go to the US, they’ll go to Europe, they’ll go where they can match their ambition with their talents and be rewarded for it.

And so I think in Canada, we have an incredible moment where we can provide a massive space economy. We have a really unique talent base that could be put to work inside of this ecosystem. And we just need the right mission and ambition to support them.

Sonia Sennik: The European Space Agency awarded a group led by Kepler Communications a $36 million euro contract to develop a low Earth orbit optical relay network.

This is the first time ESA has awarded a contract to an [00:19:00] effort led by a Canadian company. Can you tell us a bit more about this project? And congratulations.

Mina Mintry: Thank you so much. I think this project follows a broader theme that we’re seeing, which is that governments are increasingly moving away from government owned, developed physical hardware, and moving towards procurement of services, where traditionally these government customers would go out and they procure the physical hardware, they’d specify a requirements list that was like an inch thick of paper, and you’d have to read every bit of that paperwork to deliver on a hardware good.

Now we’re seeing a shift in governments where they say, okay, you as a contractor, we’ll take on the liability. You’ll deliver the end service to me. And so we were successful in that opportunity because we are commercially led, commercially driven, developing our own technology, our own network. And the European Space Agency saw an opportunity to take advantage of our commercially developed infrastructure and fulfill their need just by buying [00:20:00] services instead of buying physical goods.

And so this is happening not just in Europe, but in the US and everywhere around the world. And giving governments access to capability on a timeline and a cost that otherwise would just not be possible. And so that is what ultimately led them to the decision to kind of say, okay, we’ll take advantage of the Kepler network.

We’ll use some of the services on there, but we have a few things we’d like you to fine tune. And that Delta design effort is very small for us. It allows us to move fast. And at the same time, provide something to the European Space Agency that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to gain access to.

John Stackhouse: Mina, you’ve been talking about low orbit satellites and in our previous episode with Chris Hadfield, we talked a bit about that, but also about going back to the moon and all the opportunities out there on the moon and beyond. That’s very exciting. It opens our aperture. to literally a universe of opportunities.

A lot of what’s going on in space is actually [00:21:00] almost within arm’s reach in low orbit. Give us a sense of what’s going on out there up in the sky that we can literally see.

Mina Mintry: So we’re actually seeing activity in space and three main regimes and beyond. So the three are low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, geostationary orbit, and beyond would include lunar activity or other exploration type missions that are predominantly government led.

Low earth orbit is where the majority of the activity is. That’s anywhere between, you know, 200 kilometers above the earth to about 2,000 kilometers above the earth. And there were Experiencing the range of Earth observation missions. So these are missions that want to observe the Earth or some property.

That could be the weather. That could be measuring the location of aircraft or shipping vessels. It could be taking just regular pictures. It could be radar data. We’re also seeing human spaceflight, and that’s predominantly being done in low earth orbit, so the International Space [00:22:00] Station is set to retire by 2031, if I’m not mistaken, and we’ll see the advent of private space stations that are meant to be replacing the International Space Station effort, and there’s a lot of interesting parties that are vying to do this, and partnering well outside the space sector to establish them.

I think Axiom Space is one of them that recently announced a partnership with Prada to develop their, their astronauts or the spacesuit. And in medium earth orbit, you’re seeing a lot of activity as well, where you’re looking at replacements for GPS, alternative pointing, navigation, and tracking mechanisms.

Geostationary is the historical most used orbit. And the reason why geostationary orbit is really interesting is because whenever you fly something in geostationary orbit, you stay fixed with respect to any point on the earth that you’re observing. So if I fly a geostationary satellite above Toronto, I will always see Toronto.

Cause it’s rotating at the same rate as the earth is rotation [00:23:00] and geostationary orbit is already experiencing some new and interesting technology applications where we’re seeing satellite servicing take place. There was actually commercial missions that went up to extend the life of geostationary satellites.

And then the exploration side of things where we have lunar mandates, we’re going to see, uh, Hopefully our first Canadian astronaut fly around the moon, Jeremy Hansen. We’re expecting the lunar gateway to take place, which is the next generation of the international space station, but hosted, you know, closer to the moon.

And there’s a whole range of both commercial and government led activities there, but in general, this is the result of democratized access to space.

Sonia Sennik: And Mina, as the number of satellites and missions increase, we hear a lot about space debris and managing all of the stuff that is now in lower Earth orbit or in orbit around planet Earth.

What do you think are the most pressing concerns for orbital management and sustainability?

Mina Mintry: Yeah, for us, the most pressing concern is really [00:24:00] uncontrolled space debris. Controlled space objects, or even large space objects. are really manageable. We’ll get notification of what’s called a conjunction.

That’s where there’s a probability that we will be within a defined orbital sphere of another object. And for large objects or controlled objects, there’s awesome operator to operator dialogue. That we can always see, and it cuts across geopolitical borders, where we have those conversations with near any operator who all have the same incentive, and it’s the safety of their space assets.

Where we struggle is for uncontrolled objects, so think like defunct bodies, and ones that are really small. There are some interesting recent news articles that talk to, you know, the micrometeorites, space debris, and the damage that can cause to solar arrays on board spacecraft, and that’s the type of stuff that we worry a little bit about.

Which is how do we build redundancy in our systems to make sure we can manage for those micrometeorites, which might be a loose bolt or a nut [00:25:00] or something that’s come off of a pre-existing satellite that is flying at 7. 4 kilometers a second and going through the body of your satellite.

Sonia Sennik: And it’s whipping around planet Earth effectively infinitum. So how much can we expect that we’ll have more conversations about management of this issue over the next few years?

Mina Mintry: Yeah, we’ll always have more conversations about it, but there’s two sort of real mitigating factors. One, space is really large. If you think of the surface area of the earth, we do okay to get billions of people.

In and around and can traffic manage individuals and in space. That’s just a much larger surface area covers the whole of Earth. And so space being so large really helps to mitigate for that problem. And then the second thing to keep in mind is building redundancy in your system so that they can tolerate one of your solar cells and of itself getting destroyed by micrometeorites and having redundancy to be able to manage it.

Regardless, we always want to have conversations about this because it’s an issue where you see increasing amounts of space debris, and we want to make sure we have [00:26:00] sustainable use of space for decades or hundreds of years to come.

Sonia Sennik: Mina, what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs aiming to grow their space ventures in this increasingly competitive landscape, but exciting landscape?

Mina Mintry: I think the main thing I would, I’d focus on is the persistence you need. In this role, because the sector, the domain, the talent wars, everything in between, it’s just that there’ll be day after day challenges. I’m sure this applies to any entrepreneurship, not just in the space field. If I were to give one piece of advice to any entrepreneur aspiring to be in the space sector or any other sectors, just persistence is the most important attribute.

Sonia Sennik: And yet he persisted. Mina, thank you so much for your time.

Mina Mintry: Thanks for having me.

John Stackhouse: A big thanks to Christine and Mina for sharing their perspectives. And if you didn’t get a chance to listen to episode one in this special series, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts and hear our extraordinary conversation with [00:27:00] Commander Chris Hadfield.

Sonia, it’s clear from both of these episodes that we’re at the dawn of a new space era and one that’s filled with potential as well as responsibility.

Sonia Sennik: Absolutely, John. Space is no longer just a destination. It is becoming a new platform for human innovation, imagination, and opportunity. We hope our episodes this week gave you insights into the opportunities ahead in the space economy.

Until next time, keep looking up and stay inspired.

John Stackhouse: And if you’re as passionate as we are about understanding the intersection of advanced technologies and real world applications, be sure to subscribe and leave a review. This has been Disruptors, an RBC podcast, in collaboration with Creative Destruction Lab.

I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Thanks for listening, and talk to you soon!

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