T-6 Months to Launch

There is nothing new under the sun.

In the wake of SpaceX’s success through the early 2010s and the genesis of Space 2.0, it’s hard to remember a time where a NewSpace startup wasn’t popping up every other day. This recency bias and counter-cultural shift away from the methodologies of Old Space has sparked necessary change and innovation at a critical time. But at the same time, it makes it easy to forget that we’re a part of a greater, much longer legacy.

Stewart Brand published the first issue of Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, and with it, the first true color image of Earth on the cover. Brand campaigned to have NASA release the then-alleged satellite image of the Earth, saying “I was a big fan of NASA and of then ten years of space exploration … it was a bit odd that for ten years, with all the photographic apparatus in the world, we hadn’t turned the cameras that 180 degrees to look back.” As we know Brand eventually got his way and with this, and the first* satellite image was released to the general public. A global sense of introspection immediately took hold and everyone realized that our collective home was worth looking at.

In the years since, we’ve seen the heirs of this image from Corona, Gambit, Hexagon, IKONOS, Landsats, QuickBirds, GeoEye — and more recently, the Doves and the WorldViews. But what really has changed? Satellite imagery, through its many iterations and improvements, has proven its value time and time again as a tool for uniting the global consciousness and a key instrument of highly-relevant data.**

We have a lot to thank Brand for: Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech where he likens the Catalog to Google before Google, the juxtaposition of counterculture with cyberculture in the Bay Area — forming part of the bedrock of what would eventually become Silicon Valley, and of course, introducing the general consumer to satellite imagery.

As we near the 60-year anniversary of that first iconic image on the Catalog cover and with just 6 months until our inaugural launch, I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity Albedo has to continue Brand’s mission of turning the camera back on ourselves and advancing the legacy of space-based imaging.

Clarity Progress

Ahem, sorry for the soliloquy. Let’s hit those juicy engineering highlights!

Let there be (first) light 💡

What you’re seeing is the first light image from our visible sensor (not just a normal picture of a dollar bill). America’s first founding father was used as a muse for a key test on our sensor’s scanning capabilities. The test consisted of Mr. Washington being taped to a rolling drum, which rotated at an angular rate that our commanded image capture rate had to match. If it’s a little confusing, Nate (one of our engineers) drew a very scientific, very official diagram to help you out.

We successfully completed our test objective: command our flight hardware to capture a decent image. Our primary concern was the along-scan smear in the vertical direction of the image; the absence of that was a key validation of our sensor solution. Great, now to do it all from space.

Sidebar: Different ways you can capture imagery

To expand the aperture to the various methods of image capture — most of us are used to pulling out our iPhones, pointing and holding it steady at something, and clicking that little capture button. Your iPhone uses a “staring array” sensor — you statically hold the sensor long enough at something to collect enough photons to generate a good image. That’s not how Albedo captures imagery.

This is an imperfect analogy but you can think of Albedo’s image collection method as not dissimilar to how you would take a panoramic photo on your iPhone. When you take a panoramic photo, you sweep your phone over the scene, carefully holding (yet always failing) to keep the camera level enough to capture your bigger image. A much harder process, more opportunity to introduce jitter, but the reward is greater amount of scene content in your photo.

In an overly reductive way, that’s how Albedo’s line-scanning system works — we take one or more of these panoramas by scanning our sensor very precisely over the Earth.*** It’s an exceptionally hard problem that requires the ultra-precise pointing and controls system and precision bus platform we’ve previously mentioned, but the payoff is that we’re able to collect significantly more images and bigger images for our customers.

To put it into perspective, let’s use Manhattan as an example: if we were to use an iPhone/staring array sensor from our VLEO orbit, we’d only be able to capture a small fraction of Central Park in a single image. With our line-scanning system, we’d be able to image most of Manhattan by scanning up from Chelsea through the Bronx, and then turn and scan again from the Upper East Side down through Chinatown. More pixels 👾, more happy customers.

Build it bottoms-up! ⬆️

In the previous newsletter, we previewed our custom VLEO-optimized solar arrays being tested on the production line. Less than a month later, our solar array production line is in full swing, with the necessary arrays built, tested, and mounted onto the zenith panel of our spacecraft. That is the negative z-axis of the satellite, aka the “butt” of our satellite. We burn a lot of energy collecting imagery and thrusting around in VLEO, so we need to charge any chance we get. The engineers call it “nadir sun-pointed negative-z facing”; I call it “tanning our buns in the sun” 😎

Ship it 🚢

To be quite honest, I never really thought too deeply about transporting Clarity-1 to the launch site — I figured it was low-hanging fruit compared to building a fully-tested and functioning, autonomous space robot camera. Wrong. Like everything else with space, take a simple, Earth-based process and crank the Difficulty Dial to all the way to 11. Turns out there isn’t a standard mailer envelope for phonebooth-sized satellites.

Our team custom designed this aluminum clamshell container, equipped with a purge system to positively pressurize the interior with gaseous nitrogen in order to keep our very, very nice optics clean and stable. It’s 500 cubic feet and weighs a ton (literally) even without our 550kg satellite.

After all of that, you might think that the hardest thing would be how it actually gets transported to the launch site. Funny enough, FedEx does offer a temperature-controlled FedEx Custom Critical truck — ah, the irony of life.

What’s in the box (continued)

On this table in the middle of our clean room, are the last pieces of critical hardware we need to build our VLEO spacecraft.

“But Winston, I can’t see what the hardware is.”

Yeah, that’s intentional. First of all, it’s export controlled and if I showed you, I could go to jail. Secondly, I want to teach you about this little thing called symbolism.

At the end of the movie Seven, Brad Pitt is left holding the closed box above; he doesn’t need to open it to know that he can either make the impossibly hard but painful choice to do the right thing, or give in to his emotions and wrath. The binary decision of pull the trigger or don’t — and live with the consequences of that decision forever.

So does it really matter what’s in the box? All you need to know is that our destiny nearly fully in our hands. We are holding the boxes and nearing that unavoidable fork in the road — do we do the hard thing or take the easy way out?

First Day Out: Spacedropping, Thrusting, Scanning

I have personally never launched a satellite before, so the closest pattern match I can think of is dropping your kid off at the first day of school (I also don’t have kids yet, but was once a kid). On that momentous day, you hope you’ve taught them everything they need to navigate the world in a semi-autonomous fashion. Kind of like a satellite, eh?

We are being responsible satellite parents at Albedo and teaching Clare all she needs to know to have a successful first day at school:

• Spacedrop software: We now have the ability to upload new versions of flight software to the spacecraft — meaning even after we launch Clare into her new environment, we’ll still be able to teach her new things and fix any potential issues.

• Thrust planning: Thrusting (and when to thrust) is going to be huge component of successfully staying in our VLEO orbit. The team has burned down a ton of risk here and will continue doing so as we thrust towards launch.

• Scan capability: As mentioned in the sidebar above, our line scanning system requires a very precise ability to maintain our panoramic sweeps very accurately. The earth is round and rotating at up to 1,030 mph, our satellite is orbiting at 17,000 mph, and we need to scan each line of 10 cm imagery along your requested area at the perfect rate from hundreds of miles away, regardless of the relative geometry of our satellite and your image location. But now our algorithms to do that precisely and robustly is running on our flight software.

ICYMI

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See y’all next month! I’ll leave you with this:

Footnotes

*First full-disk, true-color picture of the earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_images_of_Earth_from_space

**I like how Brand decides if an item deserves a spot in the Catalog:

An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed:

1. Useful as a tool,

2. Relevant to independent education,

3. High quality or low cost,

4. Not already common knowledge,

5. Easily available by mail.

If we didn’t already have a mission statement, I think the first four criteria would make fine directive for Albedo’s imagery. The fifth criteria may need a little update.

***This is a very loose analogy for the sake explaining a complex process to the uninitiated. To be factually correct, the iPhone panorama method is how a pseudo-scanner would operate to capture imagery. Albedo operates a line-scanning system that would be more akin to how a photocopier (remember those?) scans a document line-by-line.

Agile scanning imaging systems have effectively an extremely wide array of pixels, 2 to 8 times wider than a staring array, and is able to scan that line of pixels at rates of tens of thousands of lines per second. This produces a far higher area collection rate, as a staring sensor would need to reposition and stabilize between each exposure. But this means that your satellite needs to be able to scan the sensor at both a relatively fast rate as well as with exceptional stability. Every tiny fraction of a second that we are scanning a new line of 10 cm imagery, the satellite needs to have progressed in its pointing at the imaging location by the same 10 cm distance: the sensor and the spacecraft pointing in perfectly smooth and stable alignment.