T-5 Months to Launch

Testing — if you do it right and do a lot of it — produces a wonderful host of issues that to resolve, require you to reach into the depths of your soul (willpower) and into the depths of the company’s cloud storage (documentation). It’s an arduous, sometimes mind-numbing task, but it produces validated hardware, robust software, and also some great memes.

Clarity-1 Progress

Seeing The ‘Bedo Way

Remember that photo of the dollar bill from last newsletter? Well, despite the no-frills diagram of the test setup, the actual test configuration was very specialized, expensive to use, and located far enough away to prevent regular use from our team.

To solve this dilemma and in classic Bedo fashion, we identified our barebones requirements and sprinkled a little Startup Dust ✨ onto some older hardware to bring it back to life.

Even as I write this sentence, I still find it hard to believe it’s true — we purchased a 1950’s-era tape recorder off eBay, completely disassembled it, and configured it to achieve the exact angular rotation we’d need to mimic the specific line capture rate to test our visible sensor.

And while our test setup does not meet previous ultra-precise rate requirements and cannot accommodate larger sensors like the original, it’s perfectly acceptable for our needs and allows for the in-situ ability to perform validations that require real imaging to perform — both in-person and virtually through remote access.

Looking ☝️ to look 👇

Of the many, ongoing tests underway at our facility, one stood out to me in particular — the skylight test. The goal of this test is to utilize the actual night sky to test if the alignment of our optics incurred any damage or shifts after our environmental test campaign, as opposed to waiting to evaluate the effects through our imagery on-orbit.

This might seem pretty routine to you, but I found it somewhat poetic that we first need to point our camera at space from Earth, so that later, we’re able to take better pictures of Earth from space..

The filling

As a food-motivated person, food analogies are my bread-and-butter for putting things into simpler terms.

If you’re from Texas, you’ve probably had a kolache before, courtesy of the Czech population that dates back to the early 1900s. For the uninitiated, a kolache is basically a fully-enveloped hot dog that is surrounded by a delicious pastry bread. Kolaches started out with your standard set of sweet and savory flavors. Nowadays, you can find all types of kolaches: from the typical sausage, cheese & jalapẽno to esoteric varieties like the Chicken Enchilada flavor offered by Texas chain Kolache Factory.

The Earth Observation industry isn’t too different from Texas kolache industry. It started out pretty standard, but we’ve recently hit an inflection point where the limits of the medium are being pushed. If the Earth Observation industry were a bunch of kolaches, Clarity-1 would definitely be a one of the freakier, Chicken Enchilada VLEO-optimized kolaches.

In the interior of the bus that you intentionally can’t see, we’re beginning our polarity and phasing tests with the actuation units inside the bus. This requires mounting and hooking everything up in the flight configuration to play “Simon Says” with our hardware — ensuring when we say “go right” we actually go right, and not left, up, down, center or otherwise. I realize I haven’t given you photographic evidence to see all of that happening, but you’ll just have to trust me on this one and enjoy the artistically mysterious (and legally-approved) photo above 😁

Software sims

I recently saw a post on Twitter/X commenting on how space startups need to show less simulations and more real hardware; while I don’t necessarily disagree — porque no los dos? I wouldn’t call myself wise by any means, but I often find that the answer to binary questions exist in the complexities of the middle and folks that argue for the 0 or 1 aren’t too fun at parties.

Our software teams have been absolutely ripping and continually adding more fidelity to our approaching mission operations. At this point, we’ve built up and run various day-in-the-life (DITL) scenarios to model nominal and off-nominal orbital operations. The console below not only helps us to monitor the rigorous testing of our scheduling and overall ground system through these scenarios, but will also serve as an important dashboard and tool during launch and early operations.

To my initial point: hardware and simulations are both equally cool. The image below shows how our satellite will, via our line scanning system, collect imagery over Redwood City. The next step is to run these exact algorithms through our precision hardware, after we complete the polarity testing mentioned above. Stay tuned for more updates!

ICYMI

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See y’all next month! Leaving you with this: