Andrew Gunther
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So that antenna that actually performs that one terabyte a day downlink, we get a pass on that antenna every 90 minutes. So if you have a really critical high priority workload and your objective is to deliver some insight to a customer as quickly as possible, you might not want to wait that 90 minutes.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
even after that 90 minutes is up it has to get to the ground it has to be processed then on the ground before it finally gets delivered so the idea being if we a can prioritize because we're also not able to get down all the data we may have on board every pass so it's kind of twofold right if you can say on board hey i have very high confidence that there is a methane leak at this position
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
That is a much smaller piece of data. And there are other antennas that we can use to transmit that data more instantaneously. And then secondly, maybe you have a little bit less confidence, but something is suspect. You can say, all right, on our next pass, this data skips the line. We're going to downlink that first.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And we're going to make sure that gets analyzed as part of this pass so we can get that information out as quickly as possible to customers. But it is definitely the hardest of all the options. You're right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, you can SSH into space for a hot five minutes and take a look around. There has to be some planning ahead of time. If you want to run some set of debug scripts, you're going to want to know ahead of time and just run that in an automated way rather than just maybe having a terminal open, which we've done.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
We've done, especially after the Sats first went up and we were trying to better understand the characteristics of the first one and just get a sense of what was happening live. There was a lot of like, all right, time to SSH.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
We don't have space for TMUX, man. It's a fresh shell every time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, it's the dream.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, I think, you know, and maybe I was uniquely naive in that, you know, I think everybody has that vision built up of like how NASA does things, right? And you imagine clean rooms and every like this perfection and just everything is immaculately tested. And I'd say that there's not problems, but it's you have that vision of that much slower pace. And I think what was surprising to me is that
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
the speed at which we can move and the amount of chaos that introduces and that it's okay. There was a lot of thought put in upfront around those failure modes and understanding and basically protecting ourselves, our future selves. So that when things do get chaotic and things do break, we have the levers that we can pull. So it's not clean rooms.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I mean, there are clean rooms, but you take a drill, do a test and it's like, oh man, we need to like route this connection somewhere else. And somebody just like takes a drill to a frame and they're like, all right, let's send it to space. That just kind of like shatters your view, right, of how kind of the way NASA does things.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And I think that kind of goes to what I was saying earlier about this meeting in the middle of this startup culture wanting to move fast and that entrenched aerospace culture of moving very, very slow. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
If we can launch a satellite for, say, like five million dollars, why are we going to run a five million dollar on ground test for that satellite or a ten million dollar on ground test for that satellite? We can launch three for that price. And if one of them works, we're great. So I think that's kind of where where that push and pull really comes into play.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And I was really surprising to me was just how much leniency there was towards moving fast. Like I didn't expect it to be able to move as fast as we've been able to move.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, it's nuts. I mean, this is something that even 10 years ago wasn't possible, right? Like launches have become way cheaper. You know, $5 million is a lot, but in the grand scheme of like Silicon Valley VC money, that's not a lot. And it's become super accessible for startups to Launch payloads into space. It's high cap X still for sure, but it's possible when it really just wasn't before.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And I think to your point, we're seeing that transformation in a lot of industries. For oil and gas, the state of the art was like once a quarter, they would pay some kid trying to get their pilot's license to just like fly and look out the window of a Cessna. And like, do you see any leaks? Nope. Nope. right? That's what we're going up against. That's what we're replacing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It just feels like such a huge quantum leap forward for that industry. And we're seeing like, we see that with customers, right? They're super excited. I mean, A, because it's space and it's cool, but also just, it is such a faster feedback loop than anything that they worked with before.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It's still high CapEx, but lower than it used to be CapEx. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So my dad also worked in aerospace. And when I told him that I was coming to his company, he was like, you mean you're just a bunch of guys and you put some satellites in space? Like, yeah. Yeah, they just let us. For real. You just apply for your FCC license and like let Noah know. And they're like, yeah, go for it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It's interesting because there kind of is. It's governed by the FCC because they control the radio waves. I got into a whole conversation with somebody on Hacker News a while ago about this because I just find this fascinating how the US finds really unique ways to have regulatory vectors over stuff like space. And the FCC is like the main body for that because they govern the airwaves.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So it's basically if you want to transmit within the U.S., you need an FCC license. And if you're launching a satellite, you probably are going to want to transmit in the U.S. So you need a license from the FCC to launch a satellite.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, and even better, the FCC issued their first fine for space junk a couple months ago.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The Federal Communications Commission, the champions of litter in space. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It was just, like, let it all burn up. A lot of these satellites, like, our satellites don't have propulsion. So, after X number of years, the orbit decays and they burn up and that's game. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So there's a difference between orbit decay and mission life because the components on board, in theory, will go out long before the actual orbit will decay. So I believe the satellites are slated to be a five-year mission from the onboard component perspective. But this is like that's still kind of like NASA grade ratings, right? Ideally, you get way longer than five years.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And then I think the orbital decay is like 15 years, closer to 10, 15 years. It'll take before.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
You build up feelings around these things. It's funny because each of our satellites we name after a sidekick. So the official designations are like Ghost 1, Ghost 2, Ghost 3, but we call them Robin, Goose, and Chewy.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Like, if you had to name it Goose, like... That's definitely not the objective. This is just a plug for that we have a Slack bot that announces, like, telemetry and new imagery, and it uses a picture of the appropriate sidekick and, like, speaks as if, like, Goose checking in, got new imagery.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, so we have a radio for satellite-to-satellite communication. They're not enabled yet, but feasibly, yes. The more satellites you have, the better network you have, and you can communicate in between. There's also proposals going through for a larger network. So we could, over encrypted communication, talk to satellites that aren't ours and everybody working together to get data down faster.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Inter-satellite communication networks are definitely something that's up and coming and trying to get off the ground. It's a bad joke.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I mean, Low Earth Orbit is smaller than you think. And I would say, without naming names, the jerks are the people who are just launching tons and tons, which is pretty much anybody who's looking to offer satellite-based internet, right? Satellite-based internet takes an absurd number of satellites. It's easy to pick on Starlink because they were the first, but they're not the only.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And that's going to continue to crowd Low Earth Orbit, which, again, is the most... accessible orbit for people like us. You can't understand an orbit out with accuracy multiple years. These things, they're going to collide at some point. There will be collisions and there have been close calls.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
What's crazy is we actually got a call for one of our sats and they were like, hey, you're going to pass really close to a Starlink satellite. Just heads up.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Us, no. Starlink has some rudimentary propulsion so they can do some stuff. I mean, even the space station had to move to dodge. I think there was like a Chinese satellite where they were like, hey, there's a satellite that we have and you need to move the space station so that our satellite doesn't hit it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, if you could just like shift altitude control a little bit and like, yeah, just real fast.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Ooh. Sorry. Oh, that's a boo. That's a boo for me, dog.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I don't know the answer on the space station, but for ours, it was just this like tense hour and a half. Right. Because we get that telemetry down and then it's like, all right, this is the orbit. And so we're sitting there waiting and hope Starlink moves. Yeah. And then like 90 minutes later, we get that ping and we're like, oh, thank God.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, just game over, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Especially for us when it's like one of three, right? That's a 33% reduction in our total capacity, which is like super meaningful to the business. Each of these satellites matters for us. I do have, in terms of the bullies in space, I do have one other very funny anecdote because I have beef with the Vatican.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The Vatican has a space program. Fun fact.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The Vatican has a space program. You can read all about it. It's called Spy Satellites, funny enough, but it's S-P-E-I. It's Italian. It's Italian. Cut him some slack, but the humor of it is not lost on me. So they actually launched with, they launched on the same rocket as one of ours.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And so one of the processes you have to go through when you launch a satellite is you basically call up NORAD and you're like, hey, this unidentified object you're tracking in space, that's ours. They know like who's who, what's what. Well, they don't know who's who. You've got to tell them.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The call options have changed. Press one for Santa, two for satellites. And so when we launched, the Vatican called NORAD and claimed our satellite incorrectly.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
We got scalped by the Pope, man. We got scalped by the Pope.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Man, coming from the outside, like the conversation I had with our main space systems guy of like, how do we like, how do we get our satellite back from the Vatican? He's like, it's just a naming thing. Like, it's not a big deal. I was like, no, tell me it's a big deal. I want to believe this is a huge deal.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
100%, yeah. We got beef.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
No, so we managed to correct this clerical error, and we've properly identified.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I'm far enough into daddom that they just roll out, and I don't even think about it anymore.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I do appreciate that I have like a job that my kid kind of gets. I can be like satellites. And she's like, yes, space.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I get that though. We all go through that phase.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
But then she brings home pink eye and I'm like, come on, man.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Oh, this is a great one. So the craziest thing, so I mentioned that we have multiple radios on board, right? We have this like super high bandwidth one and it's one way. And that's where that one and a half terabytes down comes from. We have this kind of like satellite to satellite. We have a much slower one that's more for like command and control. Sort of deal. SSH.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, that's where all the SSH magic happens. And effectively, the way this is all supposed to work is imagine like TCP where your packets come down over this fast one and then we send the ax back up the slower connection. And we could not connect over that slower connection when we first launched.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And so you basically like ran into flow control where we would try and like downlink imagery and it would give up after like a few megabytes because it's like, oh, I'm not getting any ax. And so I got pulled into that and we basically had to, we pushed this like really small patch up to the spacecraft to basically like ignore acts, like pretend acts do not exist and just blast this data down.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Cause we're, I mean, yeah, we're a startup and we're trying to like, we've launched our satellites and investors and customers are waiting for like those first pictures. And we're trying to like as quickly as possible. Yeah, as quickly as possible to get these things down.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So we ended up pushing up this patch to basically ignore the acts and we ditched the file transfer client entirely on the ground. And we just started running packet captures. Like we just ran TCP dump on this thing and just started like built this catalog of like terabytes of,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
of tcp dumps and then we we wrote a script that would basically analyze these and try to piece together files from the tcp dumps across multiple passes so like the same file would get transmitted like 10 times because you can imagine your packet loss from space is quite high so oh my god It was the most infuriating thing to watch because it's also this long tail.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, for sure. So I'm Andrew Gunther. I work for a company called Orbital Sidekick. So Orbital Sidekick operates a constellation of hyperspectral imaging satellites. And basically what that means is they have these cameras that can see way outside of the visible spectrum of light so they can effectively perform spectroscopy from space.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Like we couldn't tell, like we didn't have the control of telesatellite. Like, oh, we only need these five remaining packets. It would just blast down the whole thing. So you would get like 50% on one pass. Then on the next pass, 75, then 90, then 95, then 99, then 99.9. And because these bundles are encrypted, you need the whole thing. Like you can't be like, ah, screw that last packet.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Like for encryption to work, like you need the whole thing. Yeah. And so we're, we, we like basically wrote this, um, we call them DJP cap.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah. Spinning those PCAPs. So DJP cap was just trying as hard as it could to assemble from these TCP dumps. And that's how we got our first imagery. This issue has since been resolved, but the first imagery from our satellites was basically. rebuilt through this crazy kind of bespoke process.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And again, I think that kind of like goes towards the whole theme of the space segment moves much slower than we can move on the ground. So we're always trying to think of ways like, how can we deal with this on the ground? How can we fix this on the ground? And I think that's probably the most harrowing story out of all of them.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah. Yeah. That was a stressful couple of weeks.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Well, and then the even better wrench that got thrown into this is that some of the packets would be corrupted. So we would try and reassemble and then we would de-dupe multiple of the same piece of imagery to make sure it was the same on multiple passes. So it was almost like you kind of needed two copies of an image to make sure... that it was all good.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The other thing I will say is a lot of this work we did at one of our vendor partners down in Sunnyvale. And I took back to our office. They had Baja Blast there. And it was the first time I had ever seen Mountain Dew Baja Blast in the wild. And when I tell you, we completed that first piece of imagery. And my coworker and I were just like, Baja Blast time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And that is a core memory for me now is Baja Blast is success. Love it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah. So I'm code brood on Twitter. I also hang out in the ship at Slack. I'll give you guys that. Yeah. Great place to go. So check that out. I'd say those are probably the two best places to get ahold of me.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Oh, I'm also on Mastodon now. I'm on Mastodon also as Code Brood. Awesome.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It was great to meet you as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So gases that would normally be invisible to the naked eye are things that their cameras can see. And so their primary market right now is customers like oil and gas. We're like, hey, let us know if our pipelines are leaking. So OSK basically processes their own imagery, determines where leak sites are and forwards those on to customers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
They have customers in government who buy raw imagery looking to expand out into other industries. As you can imagine, like with these kinds of cameras, there's all kinds of cool stuff you can do. You can monitor plant health. You can help with mining prospecting. So very, very cool technology still in the early stages. Three satellites in orbit right now. to more launching in March-ish.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I don't have exact dates yet, but a little bit more about me. So I am principal software engineer at Orbital Sidekick. Prior to that, I worked at AWS for seven years. So basically I left AWS, joined OSK as lucky employee number 13, and got to build a lot of their ground segment systems from the ground up. As time went on, I got to be a little bit more involved and help out on payload side as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So kind of the V1 of all of OSK systems, I got to sort of touch and then moved into this role of wherever the fires are, I moved around to put those out.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
No, thankfully no, no physical fires.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So it's interesting. OSK is a company of about 30 people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Because like... Applications are open.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It's interesting. So being that small, we have to work with a lot of vendors to sort of pull things together. But the payload design and a lot of the core software for image processing, we write ourselves.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So the image processing on ground is all in Python. And the firmware for the SAT is C++ as well with some Python mixed in. So one of the big value props for OSK is that we try and perform some of the imagery analysis on board the satellite before it even comes to the ground.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, because you have this incredibly wide spectrum imagery, the data is huge. I mean, we're talking these satellites can bring down one and a half terabytes of imagery per day, per satellite. And so part of the idea is the more processing we can do on board to understand what imagery might be a priority versus not a priority really helps us get that information to our customers faster.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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So there's also this aspect of the analysis we write on ground should be analysis that we can hopefully perform on board as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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We ship NVIDIA hardware up to space. We are running NVIDIA dev board in low Earth orbit.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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A Linux embedded system that you never get to touch again, right? It goes up and you're, you're locked in.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah. I mean, this really gets into redundant systems, right? So a lot of the components on board, there's at least two, our own components. So our own dev board.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I forget if there's one or two of those, but there's kind of like a main control computer that exists separate from ours that kind of handles a lot of the boring stuff, like pointing the satellite and doing the actual hard work of transmitting data back down to the ground. And then our dev board basically handles all of that image processing, sending commands to the camera.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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So effectively, we have capabilities to like fail over from one component to the other. Or if we're rolling out an upgrade, you know, we roll it out to XCOM 2 and then we primary swap to XCOM 1. And so it's almost like an A-B test in space, right? You are kind of like a canary. So you upload it to one of the XCOMs, you swap over to that, make sure everything still works. Great.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Roll it up to the second XCOM. Everything still works. Great.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
A hundred percent. And this is one of the crazy things. I mean, even in a startup like an aerospace startup, the dev cycle on hardware is super long. So, you know, a lot of the hardware was designed and locked in and figured out before a lot of people got hired. Like the hardware was decided before I even got hired.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah. So there's a lot of, you know, by the time these things go up, like, you know, you've got three new generations of NVIDIA dev boards that have come out. You're running like Ubuntu 1804 in space for the next, you know, half decade.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It's like L-L-L-L-T-S. Long, long, long-term support. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, because you got to test the hell out of it before it goes up. And it's so interesting to kind of see this boon of aerospace startups. Like, before I came to OSK, like, I didn't work in aerospace. Like I said, I was at AWS. And I also had the draw of like, I want to work on space stuff. Like that sounds awesome.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And seeing this smashing of startup culture and aerospace, like you have this culture that wants to move incredibly fast and this culture that's traditionally very slow, trying to like figure out like where, where does this all meet in the middle? How do we speed this process up, become more agile? And that was to me like one of the most interesting things to observe.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Oh man, there's so many great questions to unpack here. So I'll try and go at it one at a time. So one of the saving graces to some degree is that as we launch more satellites, they're all based on the same hardware designs, like very minor, minor revisions between them, right? Like you have a satellite that works, like don't mess with it. Continue to launch more of the same.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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So but then also on the flip side, right, when the first one goes up and we realize like, ah, we really should have done some things differently as we learn the iteration cycle is even slower. So there's a lot of things that we have to kind of deal with on ground and we're making notes for what the next gen hardware is going to look like. additional concerns.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And when you talk about, you know, what kind of packages are we going to use? That's a huge concern of ours, right? Again, it's running 1804 in space. We're trying to do machine learning and data analysis. A lot of those libraries move very fast. They're very quick to drop support for older operating systems. So, you know, we have to make the call as a small team.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Are we going to compile these ourselves? Like, are we going to build our own versions of these dependencies to maintain them? So we're very cognizant, especially on the onboard data processing side of what libraries we pull in. I mean, more so than anywhere I've ever been, because not only is maintenance a concern, size is a huge concern. Pushing software updates to space is hard, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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It takes a while. You're going to test the hell out of it and you want to make sure that it works. And so I like to pick on Node.js because you have like the NPM package system, right? Where just everything sprawls out to infinity. You install.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Yeah, you install one thing and suddenly now you've got like 100 gigabytes of dependencies. And even in Python, right, we have to be really careful of that. Like, what does our dependency sprawl look like? And we've made conscious decisions to say, you know, that sprawls out a little too much. Like, we're not going to use it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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And something we really try to hold to our own frustration sometimes is parity between space processing and ground processing. So there's a library where it's like, all right, well, we don't want to ship it to space. Are we going to use it on the ground? I don't know. Maybe now we've kind of separated these paths and it makes it harder for us to verify results between the two.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So those are the kinds of things that we have to think about. It's interesting that to some degree, even space decisions can slow down ground decisions to some degree.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And you have to know like three years in advance.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, I don't want to fall into the trap of it's in space, so it's safe, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, it's a very different attack surface, but I will kind of pull that card a little bit, at least as far as the Python side of things goes. That system is very isolated. Like it's not, we're not running a web server up in space, right? But I will, you know, to the point of security and CVEs happening in space, Space Force is actually making a huge push. They were at DEF CON last year.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I got to go and watch the, they held the Hack-A-Sat hackathon, which was very cool. They actually, the Space Force launched a satellite for a hackathon.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It's pretty amazing. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Central Space Command, you know?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, so it's important to not fall into the trap of, like, we're in space, so we're safe, right? And especially in that startup culture of, like, wanting to move really fast and compete with these bigger guys, that's something that we're very cognizant of and trying to find those right balances, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
it's a big push pull because you definitely want to try and keep your space systems as simple as possible. And we're very much breaking that mold by saying like, we're going to do imagery analysis on board, on board of a satellite. And so it's, it's definitely something that we're constant of. And we have this nicety that we can test a lot of things out in the ground segment.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
We can use those libraries on ground initially before we make the call of, you know, this is something that we want to run in space. So let's retrofit. We can use all those nice libraries, have 100 gigabytes of dependencies to prove out those analyses on ground.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And then when we want to say, okay, this is high value, we want to run it on board, we can take that step to say, all right, let's strip this back. Let's make this bare bones. How do we leverage what's already on board to now ship this thing up to space?