Satellogic: space is the new Wild West

Sigue a continuación una nota publicada el día de hoy en la página de internet de la revista británica WIRED, publicación especializada en tecnología, reflejando la participación de Emiliano Kargieman, CEO de Satellogic, en el evento WIRED 2014 que la revista organiza en la ciudad de Londres.

SATELLOGIC: SPACE IS THE NEW WILD WEST

By KATHRYN NAVE

"Anybody in this room can build a satellite," WIRED innovation fellow Emiliano Kargieman told the audience at WIRED2014. "We're at a tipping point in technology where we have the tools and the knowledge for anyone to build things and send them into space. It's the new Wild West."

Emiliano Kargieman talking at WIRED2014.

With Argentina-based Satellogic, Kargieman is staking out his own claim in the space race, designing, building and launching satellites for a thousandth of the cost of traditional models. The company has already launched three, planning to follow them up with a further 15 next year. "The vision is to have hundreds talking to each other," he said. "Even if a few individual components fail, and they will, the overall system will still be reliable."

Given these aspirations, Kargieman said, "I should be telling you I always wanted to be an astronaut -- but that wasn't the case. Yet my history in space started from a young age when I was asked to repel an alien invasion -- unfortunately poor motor coordination meant I'd play Space Invaders for about ten seconds before losing and having to restart the game."

The life-changing moment came when Kargieman realised he could hack the computer to cheat the game. "I had three lives, but I figured that number was somewhere in the computer. So if I could find out where it was, I could go in there and change it. My life has been a continuation of basically hacking into things and poking around inside different computers as they got more and more complex."

It is this hacker spirit, he argued, that drove the technological revolution. "The early computers you ordered by post, assembled, and then couldn't do anything with them," he said. "But some people saw in these toys an amazing opportunity. These visionaries, entrepreneurs and hackers took this and transformed it to something that everybody has in their pockets and that changed lives of billions."

This did not happen to the space industry, however. When Kargieman visited Nasa Ames in 2010 he was shocked to find that under the dashboard of one of their newest space shuttles lurked five modified IBM system 360s from the late 60s. "We are still flying technology from the Apollo era," he exclaimed.

Because Satellogic's systems are so much quicker to build and significantly more affordable, they plan to deploy enough satellites to cover every point on Earth, providing live hi-res imaging of the entire world. The aim is to help address the pressing issue of how we manage and distribute our limited natural resources. "If you want to be nice you say we've been using heuristics to deal with this -- actually we just have no idea what we're doing," Kargieman said. "If we want a sustainable society we need to base the decisions on actual data not hand waving. And how do we get this data?" he asked. "Through satellites."

Fuente: wired.co.uk