Satellites can send data with laser precision

Hi everyone and welcome to a new Space Cowboys and here with Herbert. Hi Thijs. Hi and I can hear myself through this microphone that I'm back in Amsterdam. You're back in Amsterdam. Yes. You've been in Asia for how long? I was in Asia for two months and last time people heard me was through a Skype connection, like a phone I think. Which wasn't too good. Yes, but I love the warmth of this microphone. This is really good. Well, today we're here. It's funny because we just practiced your last name and now I'm hoping that I still know it. So, Crocombe. Yeah, Will Crowcombe. Very good. Yes. Will Crowcombe. It's the first time I heard it pronounced right in the Netherlands. Really? Okay, wow. I'm so good. Will Crowcombe from TNO. Yeah. And your function? So, at TNO. I'm an engineer or a system engineer as we say there. And so, my job is to technically engineer projects and find solutions to problems that exist. Exactly. And customers come to us and ask us to solve problems for them. Yeah. And we're going to talk about satellite communication in general and laser satellite communication specifically. Yeah. Laser communication. In space. Yeah. So, this is where we communicate using light as opposed to radio frequencies. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Maybe we do in a fiber like. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. Except for in this case, instead of being in the fiber domain, it's in free space. So, the light travels through free space. Awesome. So, the fiber is straight. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, we're going to talk about all about it. Yeah. First, we have some news, some sad news. I think that we have to get out of the way. That means I'm going to have to kick off. Yes. Herbert. You. Well. Have some sad news for the world. I'm not sure. It'll be news for everybody who listens to this podcast. But we have to report that the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan Indian spacecraft has probably perished. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It lost contact with the flight control about 1.3 miles from the lunar surface. 1.3 miles from the lunar surface. It was almost there. The Indian lander. We talked about it for months. Yeah. Chandrayaan. And the sad thing is, some time ago, a couple of weeks, a couple of months ago, the Israeli lander Beresheet crashed also. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, right now, it's not, as we speak, as we record this, it's not entirely certain that the Vikram lander crashed. Oh. They did find it. The Chandrayaan orbiter located the thing. Mm-hmm. And it's not certain that it crashed. Maybe it's still functioning. Well, it suffered a hard landing, but they don't know if the… No, they don't know if it was a hard landing at all. Oh, really? As far as I know. Do you know anything about it? I have no idea. No, no, no. Only at very high level. I know they lost communications. They lost communications. Yeah. And they assume that… Should have used laser communication. Absolutely. That's the first mistake. First mistake. It's always better. No, but… And then they assume… They assume, they think that it was a hard landing. Yeah, there has been no communication. So, they haven't been able to steer it. Right. Insofar as they do, I'm not entirely sure. I mean, 1.6 miles? 1.3. 1.3, that's a hard landing. For free fall, that's too much of a good thing. Yeah. Too much of a bad thing, actually. Yeah. And it sucks because, like you said, it's right after what happened to Beersheet, the Israeli lander. Which certainly crashed. That certainly crashed. That's one great crash. Yeah. And now it's… We're kind of… Like, the last successful one was then, let's see, Chang'e 4. China. Chinese water. China on the dark side of the moon. And now it's… No, the other side. The far side. The far side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's light over there. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, the far side of the moon. This side is dark. The other side is light. Of course. Yeah. Of course. And it's still roving around. Actually, there was some news this week and I kind of didn't want to… Is it moving at all? I thought it was stationary. We'll Google it. They call it a rover. Is it a rover? They call it a rover. But… It collected… It found something gel-like. But then I dove into the… Yeah, that's weird. Yeah, I dove into the news reports and then, I don't know, in the limited time I had, it said it could be a translation issue. I think it was glass-like. Yeah, glass. That it was actually glass. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. I read gel-like. Yeah. When I read closely, it turned out to be probably glassy stuff. Something glassy. Some remnant of a meteorite impact or something. Maybe. Maybe. That's what they're thinking. So, at least that thing is doing something. Which is cool. Because, I don't know, there was so much talk about the moon this year, of course, because it's the 50-year anniversary and you had these two missions. It's a good thing. Something works. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you had these two missions by two countries who hadn't been there before. Yeah. India and Israel. And now it's… Oh, we've been happy for them. Yeah, especially. And now… They succeeded. Yeah. And now they both… I guess it says it's not an easy thing to do, right? Yeah, we do it because it's hard, right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Turns out it's actually hard to go to the moon. Yeah. Who would have thought? We just have to kind of wait for the next mission. So, I quickly dove into it. I looked up, like, hey, so what's on the calendar now? And it seems, I don't know, Chang'e 5 for some reason still has a launch date of December 2019, but I don't… That's the next Chinese one. That's the next Chinese one. But the rocket that is supposed to launch this mission isn't even back into flight yet. It had some malfunctions two years ago. And it still has to do another voyage before it can actually shoot anything up. So, I don't think that's going to happen this year. And then there's the Moon Express in July next year. American. American. Won the Google X Prize. And now it's basically just became a private company that does moon landers. Just wants moons, landers, rovers, and equipment. It's basically a company for those types of things. So, I see July 2020. Also looked into it. That date also comes from a more, like, optimistic estimate earlier this year. So, I don't… It's going to be a while. It's going to be a while before we get excited about a moon mission. You were supposed to get busy on the moon surface. Exactly. Yeah, right now. Plenty of test launches though, right? There seems to be a lot of news on, you know, experimental testing progress on the various US-related activities. Exactly. Exactly. But it's nothing new happening now. There's a couple of things that are definitely working, that are going, flying around it. So, we have to start looking at those. Mainly orbiters, you mean? Yeah, mainly orbiters and a couple of the things that have landed. Maybe you should focus on that a little bit more and then less on what's going there because the things that are going there are just falling out of the sky. Maybe you should pay attention to those because I'm leaving… Oh, and that's the next news. Yeah. Yes, and that's the next sad news. Would you like to elaborate more? Well, not very much. I mean, I have three podcasts to run right now and that turned out to be a bit much. Yeah. So, I decided to drop one and well, we had a kind of a small lottery backstage. Exactly. You're taking a step back because I don't want to let you… I'm really sorry to say… Yeah. I don't want to let you go completely. So, it's not the end of you on this podcast. No. It's just that you… It's just that you… It's a brief reappearance now and then. Yes, exactly. You're just stepping back as my co-host. Yeah. Yes. And I'll do… I'll also do less preparatory work. Yes, definitely. Yeah. So, I'm leaving most of the hard work to you. Yeah, exactly. And it also means that the podcast is going to remain once every two weeks now, like we did over summer. Like it's been. Yeah. So, for now, that's how we're doing it here. So… Yeah. And I wish you the best of luck, of course. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We'll just take a look at that. We'll take a look at the ratings. Yeah. And how many people are listening. We'll see if there's a big drop-off. All your fans are going to… Rising all the time. Exactly. The other two… The other ones that you do are in Dutch. So, it's for our Dutch listeners. You do, of course, the Technoloog. It's a very popular podcast here in the Netherlands. Oh, technology. Yeah. And then the CryptoCost, which is about… Cryptocurrencies. Exactly. Yeah. Cryptocurrencies. So, you keep on doing those. Sure. Herbert, this is not farewell, but it's at least a… That's right. Yes. It was an opportunity to… To bring it up. Exactly. Exactly. We've got those out of the way now. Yes. Exactly. And then, Will, you had a very interesting piece of news that slipped past our attention. So, what's… Yeah. Well, it's actually very relevant to, I think, the subject that we're going to talk about together a bit later. The ULIS satellite, ANISA satellite, a mission that went up a couple of months ago. I believe it's a LIDAR mission to measure global wind speeds. And I read in the news recently that they actually had to move that satellite out the way of one of the Starlink SpaceX satellites to avoid a collision. And, yeah, I think that's… To avoid a collision. Yeah. Avoid a collision with one of these, you know, prototype constellation satellites. One of the 60-something that SpaceX launched. Yeah, exactly. A couple of weeks ago. Yeah. And it's kind of crazy because we… We Googled. We went to the news article. Turns out that they were trying to get SpaceX's attention on this for a very long time, emailing them. Always asking… ESA always asking, like, hey, can we get a contact for somebody who's with the Starlink program? Because this might be a problem. And then there was a problem. And then SpaceX emails back, nah, we're not going to do anything. And then ESA just fires its boosters to steer itself clear from the Starlink. It's a crazy story. And I have… I mean, it's been reported, but… Well, I believe it's all about… Maybe you can tell us more, Will, but I believe this is all about interest. I mean, it was not very much in SpaceX's interest to do something about this because the satellite of theirs that was going to be in a possible collision with ESA's satellite, the satellite of theirs was being decommissioned anyway. Is that true? Well, I don't even know what I read on the news. And I believe they were deorbiting. A couple of them. And, yeah, I believe, though, that this ESA mission is a very important mission to ESA. So it could have been really quite catastrophic. And I think, you know, there's a lot of talk about… And they didn't have 60 of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's only 60. So there's a lot of talk about… Well, I mean, ESA didn't have 60 of those satellites. So they had to move. But there's a lot of talk and a lot of action recently related to constellations, building these mega constellations. Yeah. For communication purposes. Yeah. And there is this kind of general fear, I think, of what are we going to do with all these thousands of satellites in the sky? And I think this is kind of a symptom or an indicator of a problem that's going to come. So it's going to be interesting. Yeah, it's going to come more and more. Yeah, yeah. I just want to read a quote by Holger Craig, the head of the space debris office at ESA. He said, nobody did anything wrong because there are no rules in space. Space is there for everybody to use. There's no rule that if somebody was first here, like ESA was in this case, that they could go first. Basically, on every orbit, you can encounter other objects. Space is not organized. And so we believe we need technology to manage this traffic. So for ESA, it was more like, hey, we're going to play traffic police. And space just said like, yeah, have fun with that. Yeah. We're not going to do anything. That's a very, maybe over polite thing. Yeah. That's a very, maybe over polite thing of them to say. Yeah. Super over polite. Because the only SpaceX could have done was talk to them. Yes, at least. Instead of emailing them like, hey, your problem. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Super weird. But so it's going to be busy. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. In space. And busier in space. I mean, there are a lot of people planning constellations, you see, in all sizes of satellites. Yeah. So you're working on laser communications in space? Yeah. Yeah. Also from ground to space and also from air to space. From air to space. From air to space and from space to space. So from the moon to a satellite in orbit, back to the Earth, back to Mars. So actually, it's mainly, so we're actually very focused, our activities at TNO, very focused on laser communication related activities local to the Earth. I think people are working on systems for deep space communication, as we call it, and that's to the moon and beyond. But our focus at the moment is really around, you know, providing connectivity to the Earth, let's say. And why is that? Because that's the same as Starlink and the other projects. Well, absolutely. Yeah. So why? Why? Well, there are still large parts of the Earth that have very little or no connectivity, broadband connectivity. And the cost of laying optical fibers, I don't know official figures, but I think it can be up to 40,000 euros a kilometer and you have to wait for years to get licenses to actually lay the fiber. So the costs of implementing a terrestrial network to give those people connectivity is just economically unfeasible, particularly in areas like Africa, for example. That's the Starlink perspective. That's what they plan to do. Yeah. But is that also the background of your work specifically? Well, our work is, we work on technology. So we develop technology to enable our customers to provide services. And so what we are working on, we're enabling, developing enabling technologies so we can build and develop laser communication systems. And those systems are bought by satellite integrators. They're integrated on satellites. Those satellites are sold to, in the end, service providers. And those service providers then provide services to people in terms of connectivity. Okay. You're actually saying what people will use your technology for isn't very much your business. No. So what we tend to do is focus on the generic building blocks. Yeah. And we then respond to direct customer requests. Okay. I need this system with this kind of functionality. And then we develop systems to meet those needs. But I suppose you can mention one or two examples of what people might use it for. Well, for example, so we've already mentioned SpaceX, but there are companies such as Telesat. This is all public information. Telesat applies. So, you know, we're planning a, to build a constellation. This constellation consists of thousands, hundreds of satellites. All, let's say, interconnected with laser communication terminals. So they can basically provide a network, a web in the sky to relay data around the earth. And one of the, I believe the real drives for Telesat to do that is in Canada, actually providing connectivity to everyone. It's actually quite big. It's not a big challenge. It's a big, you know, vast country. So they're deploying this network, this constellation. And I believe because that constellation is in place, actually, they can then provide the connectivity to the rest of the rest of the world. So and there are lots of people, Amazon, all planning different versions of constellations, all with different models, business models. All with different customers in mind. And different technologies also? Yeah. Yeah. But. Because you're doing laser and I'm trying to think like, what are the other ones doing? Well, so, so, so one of the links that we're focusing on are enabling technologies for the intersatellite links optically. In the moment, you can provide that functionality, that intersatellite link with RF technology, so radio frequency technology. But the, the, the, and it's far more mature. But the real issue there is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The bandwidth is getting eaten up. Yeah. Communication bandwidth. There are, you know, you have to apply for licenses to use certain frequency bands. And the, the bands are not big. And the, the bands are completely swamped. And people are moving, moving towards RF technologies like K and KU bands to, to kind of get as much out of it as possible. Squeeze every little last drop out of that bandwidth there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To be, to be clear I believe nobody uses laser technology right now, do they? Well, actually that's not true. It's a technology in the works. It's not true. Well, people do use it. No, no. So, actually Europe and ESA are really leading in laser communication there. Rolling out laser communication technology. It's being rolled out as we speak. Well, there is an operational network in space that relays data from LEO stationary satellites to geo stationary satellites. LEO is low earth orbit. Low Earth Orbit. Low Earth Orbit. And they use laser links to do that. And what's the name? And this network is actually called the ERDS network, or Space Data Highway. It's a public-private partnership, I think, set up between ESA and Airbus. Airbus now commercially operate that network. And what they're in the process of doing is increasing the connectivity to that. But it's a... And it just launched, no? Well, the third... Okay, so the way the system works is they are planning a number of geostationary nodes. Those geostationary nodes are in stationary orbit with respect to the Earth. Always over the same part of the Earth. Yeah. Those geostationary satellites downlink data to Earth with a KA band, RF band link. But what they do is they take data from satellites in the LEO orbit and they take the data from those satellites via laser link because basically these LEO satellites, they orbit every 90 minutes or so. And it's actually quite a challenge to get the data down. But they use those geo nodes as kind of the relay points. And I believe they've already achieved 80,000 or so links, hundreds of terabits of data already downlinked. Very, very high reliability on that network. So B2B... Beyond 99 point something reliability. And what they have done, so Airbus and TSAT, who developed the laser communication terminal, what they have done is basically show that this laser communication technology is at a high TRL, so technical readiness level. Okay. So this is kind of a launching customer for this technology. Yeah. So the pioneers, they were the pioneers of this technology. Now, the challenge that we now face is making it economically viable. So it's... It's about taking the same technology and being able to produce it in large numbers, making it cost effective enough. Yeah. Can we take a step back and make something of a comparison between RF radio links and laser links? Yeah. I mean, why should you use one or the other? What are the advantages of this new technology? And is there a third technology that we... Any other competitors around? Anything outside the radio or laser? Well, ultimately, it's still... There's still waves. So one is a lot shorter in wavelength than the other. Yeah. So laser communication terminal technology relies on light in the infrared range, so somewhere between a micron to one and a half microns. Okay. So you can't see it, but it can blind you. It can blind you. Yeah, but ultimately, the wavelengths are a lot smaller, so it's a lot higher frequency, and the bandwidth available is huge. So... Because of the short wavelength, the high frequency. Yeah. So you can get orders and orders of magnitude more data within that infrared band. So it should really unlock this communication bandwidth problem there is in specific applications. Because you said that for radio links, everything is swamped. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the... No room left. So there are... RF systems, which have very high gain antennas. What that means is you can put your RF energy into a very kind of... into a certain direction, very directional, and then... Using Schotel's... Dishes? Yeah. Yeah. But that means that you can control where you put your energy. But ultimately, RF systems are a lot more likely to interfere with each other. So you can... And you can... If you can interfere, you can jam, et cetera. And that's why there's these strict rules on bandwidth allocation to avoid interfering. That's why you need the licensing and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah. And actually, it's becoming huge... There's often a lot of conflict between these big service providers over these bandwidths. And you get a license to have a certain band for a certain period. And you must make use of it. If you don't make use of it, you lose it. So what you even find is people putting... They're putting up dummy satellites if their systems aren't ready just to make sure that they keep hold of that frequency. Keep them. So now, the real benefit of optical communication is that there are no rules on it. There's no bandwidth allocation at the moment. And one of the reasons why is the fact that it's incredibly directional. Narrow. It's a narrow signal. Well, yeah. Just a point of light. Yeah, just to put things in perspective, our systems that we're developing, they have divergences. So the way the spread of the beam, these divergences are in the order of a thousandth of a degree. So... Whoops. A thousandth of a degree. A thousandth of a degree, yeah. So if you're in a LEO orbit, let's say, I know 900 kilometers or so, then the spot you get from your system on Earth is in the order of a few hundred meters. So that means that the likelihood that you interfere with another is very, very low. Still, it is for a couple of hundred meters. So you can still spray that signal over a wide area. Yeah, it's a Gaussian shape. So what I mean is that the energy is really focused in the center. Yeah. But yeah, if you think about a few hundred meters comparison to 900 kilometers, it's still very, very directional. Yeah. And what that does is also makes it inherently secure. So people listening into your light, listening to your light, you can pretty much see them because in order to get enough light, you can look over your shoulder and you see someone else with a big telescope. So it's also inherently secure. Because they have to physically be there. Yeah. And so if we talk about these other ones, the old ones, the RF communications, that's what they use for deep space communications to anything from television in the Earth orbit to... Just talking to any sort of satellite that's out there. Exactly. So it's all RF-based communication technology with the exception of the RDS or Space Data Highway at the moment. So take Viasat, for example. You see on people's houses the RF dishes for getting the TV. Yeah. That is pointing at a geostationary satellite. Yeah. And that geostationary satellite is essentially relaying data which is being fed to the satellite and just one-for-one, transmitting it to Earth. So there's maybe an application where you would want to use RF because you want to spray it over an area of 1,000 kilometres across. So you're absolutely right. So actually going back to this example, let's say the high-throughput satellite, high-throughput communication satellite such as the ones that Viasat provide. Yeah. On what we call the user link, so the link from the satellite to ground, you actually want to cover large parts of Europe. And they designed... They designed these systems such that you can... They can actually design the antenna, RF antenna, such that you can really quite closely cover the shape of Europe to provide. And you can actually make sure that each spot has enough gain to provide the right amount of people with the right amount of data. So yeah, you're absolutely right. In that kind of case, the user link, RF technology is definitely needed and laser communication can't serve that. Otherwise, you'd have hundreds and thousands of these expensive laser communication terminals. So it doesn't work. But on the link where you feed those satellites, so it's kind of a point-to-point situation, that is perfect for laser communication. So anything like broadcasting, well, as you say, feeding a broadcasting satellite or maybe astronomical data on their way from some space observatory to... Yeah. All those kinds of stuff, that's where laser communication comes in. Yeah. And what kind of speed? Because you're saying this is really good for us. So what kind of speeds are we talking about? Okay. So it's very application dependent. But I'll give you a few examples of also some of the systems that we're working on. So we're working on a project that we call Tomcat. And Tomcat is one of our kind of cornerstone projects. It was actually named by one of our lead engineers. But it's a... It's a ground station that we're developing to feed geostationary satellites doing this high throughput kind of functionality. And the ground station we're developing should achieve in the order of a terabit per second throughput. Terabit per second? Terabit per second and beyond. So we're also currently working on very early research to hopefully enable in the future things like 10 terabits per second. So crazy stuff. Yeah, it's crazy. Because if you can... Yeah. If I would just... If I would just picture myself a laser, right? A point of light. Can you just also do 10 points of light and then just have 10 times as much speed? Well, actually, the way that we do this is we pick a wavelength of light, a very narrow band around that wavelength of light, and we modulate that light. So we have a constant wave laser. And what we do is basically modulate it, switch it on and off very, very quickly. On and off? Yeah, yeah. So we're talking kind of gigahertz or 50kHz. It's still just ones and zeros. Ones and zeros. Wow. And actually, the more advanced systems can kind of pick out points in between the one and zero. But basically, to keep it... It's just modulating the laser on and off. And you can switch it on and off to a certain speed. And that gives you, let's say, the defined data rate per optical channel. And then if you want to then go towards the terabit, then you start multiplexing optical channels. So you start laying different wavelength lasers, on top of each other. Ah, so it's a laser in different wavelengths. Yeah. But all the same sort of dot. How big is the dot? Well, again... I play with my cat and my laser pen a lot. Like, how big is this dot? You definitely wouldn't want to play with this laser with your cat. Because actually, in order to... Burn it. Yeah, well, in order to get to the kind of throughputs that we're looking for, you need lots of channels. And when you add all that optical power up, it's actually a very, very powerful laser. Yeah. It's a huge machine. Yeah. So how many watts are we talking? So potentially up to a kilowatt. And it's very difficult to maybe kind of visualize what a kilowatt laser actually can do. But it can be very damaging. Destroy the Death Star. Yeah, well, not that bad. But so what we do for these types of ground stations, what you do is you put them in a place where there's no danger to society, let's say. Yeah. And... I guess if this kilowatt is going from geostationary orbit all the way down to the ground and gets spread out over 900... Or the other way around. A couple hundred meters, it's still relatively harmless, isn't it? Well, actually, what you tend to see... Well, you're absolutely right. The system has divergence. The beams diverge. And as a result, the power density reduces and the danger reduces. But what you tend to see in these types of satellites, they're... The forward link tends to be a lot more demanding. So we need more data coming in one direction than we need data in the other. Ah. So which one? What is the forward link? So, for example, if your broadband connects your computer, you can download data a lot quicker than you can send data. Okay. It's the same thing. Yeah. And this broadcasting satellite receives a lot of data via this laser beam, possibly. Yeah. But doesn't send much back to the source. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the real tricks and one of the real challenges for getting data from the ground to satellites via laser is the atmosphere. Sure. And it's the kind of the problem that astronomers have had for... As always. Looking up, yeah. Yeah. And what that does, that this atmosphere, it causes basically, in the end, losses. It causes your laser beam to scatter and for you to throw photons away, ultimately. Yeah. So, one of our kind of enabling technologies are what we call adaptive optic systems. In these adaptive optic systems, we can actually measure the atmosphere and we can adapt our very, very quickly our optical system to kind of precompensate for it. So, we can kind of precompensate for that disturbance and we can then send out a laser already deformed, the wave front of that laser already deformed to kind of really get the maximum efficiency of getting a laser. Yeah. So, you measure some gust of wind. Yeah. And up at a couple of kilometers altitude. Disturbance. And this threatens to bend our beam to the right. So, we're aiming it a bit to the left. Well, exactly. So, what we actually do is... And up in the right place. We look. Typically, we look at the satellite and the satellite sends a beam to Earth. And actually, we take that received beam in and we measure the quality of that beam and how it's disturbed. So, actually, we use the satellite itself as a reference. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Because you know what it's trying to send. And you see how... Well, you know how the atmosphere is distorting that beam. And then it's a matter of doing it, pre-correcting very, very quickly so you can... Magic. Oh, it is magic. You have to correct in the same fraction of a second because the next fraction of a second, it'll be all different. A few fractions of a second. A few fractions of a second. I don't know how much a fraction of a second is, but I understand. But what's... And this is technology that's taken over from the astronomy market. So, all these big telescopes that people are working on for looking deep into the galaxy and the universe, they have the same challenges to deal with, but in the other way around. It's just visible light instead of an infrared light. Yeah, yeah. But they still... When you look at the sky, the stars twinkle and that twinkling effect is ultimately the atmosphere causing a disturbance. Yeah, what you want to get rid of. And what they do is they use references in the sky and they can adapt their optical system to kind of essentially focus those images and give very good quality images. Beautiful. And what we see on... Going back to your question you asked earlier, well, what you see is the atmosphere is very close to the ground, right? So, by the time the lasers pass through that and it's travelled the other 40,000 kilometres to the satellite, it's propagated. Those losses have propagated. So, actually, you have to have a very powerful system on the ground. Because the disturbance effect is very close to the ground. On the satellite, that's not necessarily the case. It's a vacuum. So, the propagation doesn't cause that effect. So, that's why the powers on the satellites are a lot less than potentially the powers on the ground. Okay, so the signal on its way down has less of a problem with the atmosphere than going up. Yeah, and that's a good thing because putting anything in space is a real challenge. So, yeah. And now I also understand, I think, why... why satellite-to-satellite communication this way is maybe not so necessary right now because all the data that we really need is down here on the ground. We need our videos here and not so much in ISS or on the moon. Well, that's not actually true. Okay. So, please help me. Well, so, basically, people want to get data from one side of the Earth to the other. And at the moment, you mentioned at the start of the show that fiber optics is a way of doing things. You're doing so. But you have no idea where your fiber optic is. You have no idea who's tapping into your fiber optic. You have no... You know, the latency is huge. It's going through all sorts of amplifiers and switching. And what you can do and what the constellation market is also really aiming at is that you can send a message to a overhead satellite and it can then relay it via the satellite network to the other side of the Earth with very, very low latency, with very, very high security. My ping will be... Will you really good? I can finally play video games against somebody in South Korea? Yeah. Okay. Great. Do you know the milliseconds? Is it a ping of less than one millisecond? Again, it depends how far you're sending it, right? Yeah, yeah, of course. But I don't know the numbers off at hand. But, I mean, another important message is that... Almost speed of light. Well, yeah. Yeah. A couple of switches. Yeah. I mean, one of the important things is that a message that is never going to replace RF technology, it's never going to replace terrestrial communication, it's going to enhance the communication network in very specific applications. So, feeder links, as we call them, inter-satellite links, and other systems where point-to-point communication is... But you're actually saying that constellations like Starlink, that we talked about earlier, could use laser communication very well. Absolutely. But they don't right now. Well, it's... I don't know all the details of the plans, but some of the constellations are definitely planning having inter-satellite links. In fact, it's the kind of the core of the constellation, that functionality. And the baseline is to use optical communication for that. Right. And, you know, we at TNO and our industrial partners are really working hard to develop, you know, enabling technologies to enable that to be economically viable. True. These constellations are going to cost a lot of money. And it's all about economics. If they're not affordable, then they won't happen. So, it's about making sure that technology with the right performance is available for the right price. And is that right now a big challenge? Absolutely. Yeah. So, you do have to work very hard to get these prices down. Yeah. Yeah. So, our focus is really, and particularly on the space side of things, is really on what we call the optomechatronics. So, the optical side of the systems, and the mechanisms, and the control side of things. I think that's a position that the Netherlands really has in space, but not just in space, but in the semiconductor industry. So, there's... Optical things. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, so, the likelihood of, you know, the phone that you carry in your pocket, there has been a Dutch machine that's been used to make some of those devices. Those chips. Yeah, those chips. At a family party this weekend, I finally got an answer. I got a question like how computer chips are made. And I never knew, but ASML, you know, big Dutch, they make the machines that make the chips. Yeah. I finally realized it's just really good optical instruments. It's just... Absolutely. It's like cameras, the cameras are just brilliant, and they can make the smallest pictures of things, and then code them. How many nanometers right now? Yeah. Well, I think they're around 20 nanometer lines. 20. So, it's... And so, it's optical instruments. I never realized that it was so close. So, we're a really great photography country. That's basically what it comes down to. Yeah. Absolutely. It's amazing. And so, the technology coming out of ASML is amazing. And actually, TNO also supports ASML in their technology developments in the semiconductor world. But there's this whole supply chain and industry set up for producing those very high-end machines out there. And what we're doing is using that supply chain that's not used to a space, but used to producing very high-end optical instruments, and using their technology and know-how to really make these laser communication technologies affordable. And the idea is that hopefully that will really enable the things that we've been talking about. But help me out again. So, you're saying that these internet networks that are coming, these space internet networks, they will supply internet to the far reaches of the world, Yeah. the weirdest spots. But will there eventually be three different types of technologies, you think? Or will it all... Where do you fit in? Will this technology supply something to end users? Or will it be something that is used by the network in order to... I think it's all going to be hybrid. Hybrid. Particularly, also, I mean, I'm not an expert on 5G, but I can imagine some of the technologies we're going to talk about are really going to enable also the 5G concept. Yeah. And then, of course, the internet networks that are going to be able to work in the future using the connectivity of satellites to... Yeah. So, it's going to be a hybrid, combinations of different technologies. Yeah. So, a good example, connectivity of ships and aircraft. So, at the moment, it is possible to have Wi-Fi connections on aircraft, but I believe you spend a lot of money to do that. Yeah, it does. It costs a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very slow. Yeah. But potentially, this technology could also allow incredibly high connectivity for aircraft. So, aircraft could in the future have connectivity of gigabit per second links. And that... Finally, Netflix on an airplane. Yeah, yeah. Finally, Netflix on an airplane. Would laser communication be very useful for aircraft because you always need line of sight, don't you? Yeah. And what you would do is you would use a satellite network to... You would connect your aircraft to... Oh, right. Via satellite. Yeah. And in fact, this is... And now you're looking down on the plane. In the moment, this is typically the kind of things that... Again, I'll mention them again. ViaSat offer... And Imasat and various satellite providers offer connectivity to aircraft via RF connectivity. Yeah. I got to share this because... I got to share the story from my trip to Asia because internet everywhere in the world, it's like... It was one of the first big trips that I took where smartphone technology is now so developed that all the promises of just frictionless traveling, they are now coming true. So I booked, of course, all my hotels and flights online, but Google Translate and then the conversation mode. So you're in the middle of nowhere and you can converse with all these people. But it was very strange to me that I now already got to some parts of the world where I was able to connect with people. And I was able to connect with people in some parts of, in this case, Cambodia. Jungle. It took me six hours to get to the edge of the jungle, then three hours on a motorbike to the center of the jungle where Chinese companies were busy. That was the reason why I was there for some stories about that. Logging, I guess, or something? Logging, dam building. It started with dam building and they needed communications. So they put a bunch of cell phone towers there and this region has developed and the Chinese are pumping billions into Cambodia. And they also put up a bunch of 4G towers. And so I got to this strange situation where I come to this village where modernity seems to have not arrived. They didn't have running water, no real plumbing, nothing really anything. Plastic had just arrived and 4G had just arrived. So I see this little kid just in his diapers, no running water and just half a chicken grilling. And he's like, I'm going to go to the toilet. I'm going to go to the toilet. I'm going to go to the toilet. I'm going to go to the toilet. And he's swiping through YouTube and he's just watching YouTube videos. It just on the smartphone. It's crazy. It's such a crazy thing. Like they suddenly leapt from just almost like a farming, farming economy straight into the digital age. And I don't know, like if this will happen, what it will do, what will be the consequence of having internet like in these far out villages. What kind of kid is this going to be? I mean, I was almost shouting at that kid. Like to my colleague, no, no, it's more like you have the entire, you have the entire history of human knowledge in your hands right now. Like watching YouTube and you're watching YouTube. What about your privacy? What about your privacy? It's funny, I have the same conversation with my kids at home. But it's, it's true. Like on one hand, of course it's, it's this great opportunity. On the other hand, you see like, oh yeah, entertainment is of course what people use it for. I mean, of course. But it, it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, do you have any numbers on how many people right now don't have internet who could get internet this way? Actually, when we first started this, this activity a number of years ago, we, we even looked at, looked at the map of the Netherlands and how many areas of the Netherlands still don't really have the connectivity. And it's actually amazing. Amazing that a huge, still parts of, the Netherlands that have very limited. Forest near my home. Really for example, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's all about the economics and about the cost of implementing the connectivity. I know it from the United States and in the rural parts where it's the same and then you only have satellite connectivity. And so right now, if you get satellite connectivity, it's just one of those radio signals. Yeah. And they're slow and they're expensive. Will you ever do... I mean, that's a good point. So there's also a real push for getting the cost per bit lower. So at the same time, there's all trillions and trillions of devices getting connected to the internet. Even your coffee machine is now connected to the internet. And on the other hand, there's a drive then also to get the cost lower per bit. And that's another kind of factor of why new technologies are needed. But will, eventually, will it also be useful over long distances? Like Voyager spacecraft, New Horizons, which are... Going to the edge of the solar system right now. How far can you go? That's actually the question. Yeah. Well, it's... Yeah. So I guess it's possible. So, you know, we are also doing some research, early research into kind of deep space communication. And definitely it's feasible for providing connectivity to places like Mars and the moon. Yeah, HD live stream, 4K live stream for Mars right now. Yeah. Like, that'd be amazing. But it'll be plenty of latency. There will still be latency, of course. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's limited by physics, right? Like 40 minutes. Yeah. But the news switching to a live stream from Mars, like, hey, let's watch the sunset on Mars right now. Like, that would be nice. And what happens if Mars is on the other side of the sun? Well, there you go. Won't have the line of sight you need. But then you need a relay system. Relay system and Venus. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. Some Lagrange liberation point. What is it? Yeah. I was recently at a conference and we were given a presentation on the Voyager missions. And of course, like both Voyager... Voyager is now outside of the solar system. Very much so. And... The heliosphere, I guess, technically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, the data rates for that... So that they're... Yeah. Data rates for them are... Super low. Yeah. Yeah. Super low. But it's showing that, you know, there is a need to kind of work on these very deep space type systems. Yeah. But this line of sight thing keeps fascinating me. You can hear that, I think. Yeah. And when you have some satellite that's supposed to... To supply an airplane with an internet connection. Yeah. You're going to have to follow this airplane. Yeah. From the satellite. So you need to have a movable laser source and it's going to have to follow... It has to know where the plane is, get some feedback somehow. Can you tell us a bit about how this is going to... How this will work? I think you've just hit on the major challenge. So the fact that the laser... Much more directional than an RF system. It means that you have to make it control its direction a lot better. You need to, yeah. Otherwise, you know, you don't see each other. And also establishing this kind of... Establishing the lock between the two terminals is very difficult. If you can imagine the aperture, the opening in the space... The laser communication terminal that a light goes in, you know, is in the order of tens of centimeters. So very small. And you're trying to find that. Aperture from 40,000 kilometers away. Yeah. It's a really, really significant challenge. Yeah. And this makes me think, just a quick digression, of these Chinese students trying to throw their laser pen, the light from their laser pen into the eyes of police... Helicopters? No, no, no, no. Just the police guys. Okay, yeah. Supposed to beat them up. And that's easy because you see the spot of your laser pen and you go, a little bit more to the left, a little bit more to the right. Yeah. That looks easy. Somehow it looks easy to me. But how do you do it from a satellite when you are supposed to follow a plane? Yeah. You can't see your laser spot, can you? Well, both terminals need to be essentially actively transmitting a beam to each other. Okay. And... Yeah. And there's a very... And there's a complex sequence of acquiring. But essentially... Some protocol involved. Yeah, there's some protocol. Yeah. Basically, you have uncertainty of your position and orientation, so where you're pointing and where you are. And the corresponding terminal has uncertainty in its position and orientation. And that basically, when you add that uncertainty up, it defines... It defines the field that you need to look through. So that field tends to be quite... Well, very application-specific, but much larger than the divergence of the laser beam that you're transmitting. So you have to essentially spiral through the whole uncertainty cone, as we call it. So that's some trial and error process going on all the time. Yeah. Well, until you establish a lock. All right. Yeah. Okay. And then it becomes easier, I suppose. Well, and then it becomes easier because you can just... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, just to show something so I can show a closer look以上, and share my recent experience in motion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you basically spiral through and you see tiny little blips for a fraction of a second, a fraction, a fraction of a second. And you're supposed to then move your pointing system towards there. And yeah, so it's a complex algorithm, but it's one of the most challenging. Yeah. Finding each other. Another challenge is dealing with the atmosphere. Yeah. And, in fact, when it comes to aircraft, they're actually even in a closed loop system trying to suppress all the disturbances you have. So you can imagine if you're on the ground and the temperature is stable, the disturbances, as we call them, are pretty low. But on an aircraft, which is traveling very fast, you've got a lot more vibration. You've got varying temperature cycles. And this all causes your system to kind of point the beam in the wrong way. Or it looks one way and it sends the beam in another way. And that ultimately creates losses in your system. So, again, this is really where we and our industrial partners think we can add the difference. It's in actually the optomechanical design. So the very stable designs and dealing with these disturbances. So I referred to that adaptive optic system earlier. You're doing it point to point in a completely sterile situation. That's probably not the trick. It's doing it in every sort of weird moment. Astronomers have it easy. Yeah. And then you combine that with the fact that we have to make these systems affordable. And then you combine that with the fact that then we have to make these systems repeatable. So when you're mass producing them, they have to be first time right. So that's the challenge. And that's what we're busy with. Yeah. And our partners. And so where are you right now? Because EDRS is already up. That's a relay satellite by ESA. That's one of the three, I heard you say, that's already up? Yeah. So there's, I think, they recently launched their second geo node. But a number of nodes are also on the Sentinel. So actually, in all of the Earth observation data that's being generated, the motor is getting relayed via this network. Okay. So that's operational. So just to make sure I understand, the Sentinel is using laser communication? Yes. A number of the Sentinel's, ESA Sentinel's, are using and relaying data with this network. Beautiful. With this network that you co-developed. No, no. So we, this first network was, was put in place by ESA and with, by Airbus. And a lot of the pioneering energy was done by a company called TSAT in Germany. But now there's, there's real, like a real emphasis on making this technology, you know, economically viable for things like the constellation market. There's now a move to push it in towards other, other slightly different markets. Like I said, the feeder link market. And this is where we're now adding value. To, to, to kind of enable those things. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So what's the, the business model of TNO? Don't suppose TNO is going to manufacture their own laser communications equipment. Will you make money off patents or something? Well, so this is the first question that a customer asks us, you know, actually, because this is a commercial recurring business. The first thing they ask us is, you know, you're a research institute. You know, we're not going to buy, you know, we're not going to buy a recurring system off of you. So actually, and we, you know, we've recognized that. And that's why, you know, we've been setting up and working with industry to build this supply chain, which basically then produce our technology on, on license. So, you know, it's one of the kind of, the two main goals of TNO is to have kind of impact on society. And we think we're doing that via providing this kind of connectivity to people. And the second goal is to provide this kind of means, for economic growth for the Netherlands, but also Europe. And by developing these technologies, you know, which when we start are quite risky. And by the time, by the time we've developed them, we've reduced that risk. Then industry can pick, pick that up and, and then make money off it and generate revenue. Hard research. Yeah, but it's, it will be for the whole team. So there's about 80 people working on it in Delft at the moment. Wow. And that's, that's what I think is all driving us getting, it'll be super cool to see the technology that we've been working on, you know, becoming commercially viable. And actually we're already seeing a couple of examples of that. So, and I can give you a few examples, specific examples, if you, if you'd like. Well, there's, This doesn't completely answer my question. Who pays you? Who pays us? So, well, actually we, we, we, we, to be quite direct, we get our money from a number of different, different sources to develop these. We do work business to business sometimes. So sometimes customers pay us directly for solving a specific problem. All right. Yeah. Sometimes we, we, we are, you know, a government or research institute. So we have a subsidy from the government and, and, and with the aim of achieving those goals that I just referred to, economic impact and societal impact. And we also have, we have very good support from the Dutch space office. So NSO is called. It's, we, we are able to develop a number of technologies by them making funding available and to us, but also to our partners to, to make these, these technology steps and take these technology steps. Yeah. Yeah. Clear. Can I now get the examples of really good applications? Well, okay. Okay. So I'll, I'll give an example. I just wanted them. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll give an example of a project that, that is, is, is small, but really important because, so about three, three or four years ago, we started looking at what, what would the market need in the future in terms of mechanisms. And we identified a gap for the development of a little fine steering mirror. So it's a little optical device, active optical device. How small? It's about the size of a two Euro coin. Okay. Yeah. In all directions, let's say. And this, this little mirror is an active mirror and it tip tilts and it basically corrects for those disturbances I was referring to. And we looked at, you know, what the current state of the art was and what the future might need. And we formed a project with industrial partner, Demcom in Enschede and also now in Delft and, and I'd hope, and of course we, we formed a project to start a development of that thing and produce in the end a, a, a, we've produced a product that product is selling in its own right. So companies from all around the world are now buying that FSM because it's very, very high performance. And it's also enabling all the systems that we're developing. So it's the heart of our, can be heart of our aircraft terminal. It's the heart of some of our space activities. So it's all in one, just a tiny little mirror. Yeah. Tiny little mirror. But for a basically producing such a device that space compatible, it's really very, very complex. Yeah. And it's very high precision. So how many people works on this? Uh, I would say actually the chat, the team is constantly evolving as the product goes through its life cycle. You know, so from concept to, to, to kind of producing and starting the, the assembly lines, but you know, somewhere between 10 and 20 people. Yeah. Uh, and, uh, uh, and yeah, we've just, uh, in the process of, you know, producing and going through the first production run. And there is a serious interest from, from the market now asking for thousands of, of these devices. So, uh, you know, the model is working, uh, we're, and we're achieving, achieving our goals. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so, yeah, very nice. So, um, in the end, do you think you're going to deliver full systems then, or is it going to be things like these that enable this technology to this laser, laser communication technology to develop further? Well, I think TNO is, uh, again, we're a research Institute. Uh, we want to support our, uh, our, uh, our partners to, you know, provide technology. Some of our partners will provide systems and some of our partners will provide subsystems and some of our partners will provide components. Yeah. Yeah. And so, uh, uh, but yeah, that's where we're going. So for example, um, uh, we work very closely with, um, Airbus and Airbus Netherlands, uh, who we are developing all our ground station technology to, in the end that they bring that technology to the market. So at system level, uh, uh, I think a really important point is that, uh, you know, that we're focused on, areas of that market where we really add value and where our, our, our, our partners add value because it, it is an economically driven market. Sure. We have to do the right things for the right reasons. Yeah. I wonder when, when, I mean, I don't know when Starlink is like going up again, especially after almost crashing with ESA. Another 60 something. Yeah. I don't know. It'll be what? Five years, 10 years, 15 years before we, before, before, before I have internet in the Sahara. I can watch. It'd be a lot quicker. Yeah. There, uh, what we see is real, real, uh, uh, really aggressive, uh, hunger. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of organizations in competition. Absolutely. Also speed it up. And I think even that Elon Musk said, you know, uh, competition is rocket fuel for the space industry. So it is, it's really, it's really healthy. Competition is really healthy because it's forcing people to become competitive and it becoming therefore also viable, economically viable. So who knows? And there's the next decade, it'll be kind of normal maybe. Yeah. So. Have some connectivity. Yeah. So I really, and I really hope that, uh, you know, we all really hope that the things that we're working on now will really enable those things to happen. So that's, that's the, and we're making good progress. Godspeed. Yeah. I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Thank you so much, Will, for being here today. It's a real pleasure. Yeah. Really awesome. Herbert. Yeah. It was a pleasure. Thank you, sir, for being my co-host. The past half year or something. And you'll be, slightly more. Three quarters. How, how, you're just going to be a sidekick then next time. Like, I don't know what, what am I going to call you? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just a, just a guest. I'll drop by now and then. Yeah. Thank you. When you invite me. If you got us. Yes. Well, you're always invited. Door is, door is always open. Okay. Well, who knows? Yeah. And, uh, if you've got any stories to tell, by all means, I'll come and tell them, or I'll just, uh, whisper in your ear. Yeah. Thank you. Will, Crocombe. Did I do it again? Beautiful. Crocombe. Yeah. Awesome. From TNO. Thank you so much today. It's a pleasure. Okay. Thank you so much. See you next time. Yeah, definitely. Well, no, but the listeners definitely till next time. All right.