{"id":18908,"date":"2015-11-26T15:55:53","date_gmt":"2015-11-26T15:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.businesscloudnews.com\/?p=240082"},"modified":"2015-11-26T15:55:53","modified_gmt":"2015-11-26T15:55:53","slug":"how-silicon-valley-is-disrupting-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/how-silicon-valley-is-disrupting-space\/","title":{"rendered":"How Silicon Valley is disrupting space"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"spaceship<\/a>We tend to think of the Space Industry as quintessentially cutting edge<\/em>. As such it feels awfully strange to hear somebody compare it to the pre-Uber taxi industry \u2013 nowadays the definition of an ecosystem ripe for seismic technological disruption.<\/p>\n

Yet comparing the two is exactly what Sean Casey (Founder and Managing Director of the Silicon Valley Space Centre) is doing, during a phone conversation ahead of his appearance at February’s IoT Data Analytics & Visualization<\/a> event in Palo Alto.<\/p>\n

“With all Silicon Valley things there\u2019s kind of a standard formula that involves disruptive technologies and large markets. Uber\u2019s that way. Airbnb is the same,\u201d says Casey. \u201cSpace is dominated by a bunch of large companies, making big profits from the government and not really interested in disrupting their business. The way they\u2019re launching their rockets today is the same way they\u2019ve been doing it over the last forty years. The reliability has increased, but the price hasn\u2019t come down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nowadays, however, a satellite needn\u2019t cost hundreds of millions of dollars. On the contrary, costs have even come down to as little as $150,000. Talk about economising! \u201cRather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on individual satellites, we can fly hundreds of satellites at a greatly reduced cost and mitigate the risk of a single failure,\u201d Casey says. In addition, he explains that these satellites have tremendous imaging and communications capabilities \u2013 technology leveraged from a very everyday source. \u201cThe amount of processing power that you can fly in a very small satellite comes from a tremendous processing power that we all have in our cell phones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Entrepreneur Elon Musk<\/a> was one of the first to look at this scenario, founding SpaceX<\/a>. \u201cMaybe he was bringing some<\/em> new technology to the table,\u201d says Casey, \u201cbut he\u2019s basically just restructured his business to make launch costs cheaper.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, due perhaps in part to the historical proximity of the US government and the Space Industry, regulatory opposition to newcomers has been particularly strident. It is a fact that clearly irritates Casey.<\/p>\n

\u201cElon Musk has had to fight regulatory obstructions put up by people in Washington that said we want to keep you out of the business<\/em> \u2013 I mean, how un-American is that? We\u2019re supposed to be a capitalist country that embraces new opportunity and change. Get a grip! That stuff is temporary, it\u2019s not long term. The satellite industry is often reluctant to fly new technologies because they don\u2019t think they can sell that approach to their government customers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whereas lower prices open the door to new customers, and new use cases \u2013 often moving hand-in-hand with developments in analytics. This brings us to perhaps the most interesting aspect of a very interesting discussion. There are, on the one hand, a number of immediate feasible use cases that come to Casey\u2019s mind \u2013 analysing the flow of hospital visits to anticipate and epidemics, for example, not to mention a host of economic usages, such as recording and analysing shipping, resources, harvests and more\u2026<\/p>\n

On the other hand, while these satellites will certainly offer clients a privileged vantage point from which to view and analyse the world (we don\u2019t refer to the \u2018bird\u2019s eye view\u2019 for nothing), precisely what discoveries and uses will be discovered up there in the coming years remains vague \u2013 albeit in a tantalising sort of way.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of those things that, if you\u2019ve never looked at it. If you\u2019ve never had that data before, you kind of don\u2019t know what you\u2019re going to find. After this is all played out, you\u2019ll see that this was either a really big step forward or it was kind of a bust and really didn\u2019t amount to anything.\u00a0 It\u2019s sort of like asking the guys at Twitter \u00a0to show that their company\u2019s going to be as big as it became after they\u2019d done their Series A Financing \u2013 because that\u2019s where these satellite companies are. Most of them are Series A, some of them are Series B \u2013 SpaceX is a lot further on.\u201d<\/p>\n

One thing that looks certain is that Silicon Valley is eyeing up space as its Final Frontier. From OneWeb and O3b founder Greg Wyler\u2019s aspiration to connect the planet, to Google\u2019s\u00a0 acquisition of Skybox<\/a> and Monsanto\u2019s acquisition of Climate Corp<\/a> \u2013 plus a growing number of smaller investments in space-focussed start-ups, not to mention the aforementioned SpaceX and Amazon\u2019s more overt investment in rocket science, capitalism is coming to the cosmos.<\/p>\n

Sean Casey will be appearing at IoT Data Analytics & Visualization<\/a> (February 9 \u2013 11, 2016 Crowne Plaza Palo Alto). Click here to register.<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We tend to think of the Space Industry as quintessentially cutting edge. As such it feels awfully strange to hear somebody compare it to the pre-Uber taxi industry – nowadays the definition of an ecosystem ripe for seismic technological disruption.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[893,1909,1297,3717],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-of-things","category-iot","category-opinion","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18908"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18909,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18908\/revisions\/18909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}