About Our Service, “WarpHub InterSat”
WARPSPACE has originally started from satellite project at Univ. of Tsukuba, which is well known for fields of science and technology (of course including aerospace). Since then, we’ve pivoted several times and now, we work on the project named “WarpHub InterSat”.
Let us introduce with separating two parts, first is about market trend and issues, second one is about the architecture of our service.
What are the trends and issues in space industry?
Our service, “WarpHub InterSat” is optical data relay network building with three relay satellites orbiting MEO(Medium Earth Orbit: 8,000km ~ 10,000km) for earth observation satellite operators (our main target).
But why?
In recent years, plenty of startup companies have been established in space industry over the world as improvement of technology goes on, especially downsizing of hardware. It makes cheaper to develop the satellite and enables to get the clearer sensing data because satellites are orbiting near from earth.
So most of new comers operate small satellites on LEO(Low Earth Orbit: 600km ~ 1,000km) to observe the earth, let’s say logistics, monitoring of natural resources (e.g. oil & gas) and atmosphere(e.g. Co2), primary sectors, and etc. The market cap has been continuously growing and it’ll keep 15% growth per year.
And remarkably, the market report published by the Space Capital says, 2020 is the largest year on record for Infrastructure investment with $5.5 B invested year to date(YTD) despite the impact of COVID-19. In addition, it says, “we expect the Space economy to play an increasingly important role in the post-COVID.”
But meanwhile, some issues are happening and they are actually the bottleneck which obstructs the growth of market, and it’s brought by increasing the demand of satellite data. Here is what they are.
1. Inefficiency of Radio Wave Communication
As mentioned before, observing Earth by LEO satellite is recent trend in space industry. However, such satellite operators can’t fully downlink the sensing data to ground because sufficient telecommunication infrastructure hasn’t been implemented yet.
As shown in the image, available time to send satellite data to ground is limited and is not enough. Even some reports say, “over 90% of satellite data are wasted because of this issue”.
Some enterprises try to tackle this issue by increasing ground station to receive the data from satellite. It can’t solve the issue essentially though seems effective. There two main reasons.
①70 % of ground surface is covered by ocean
②Ground station operators need to get through the regulations in every single countries where they install.
Especially, handling the regulation issues is such a complicated and costs a lot (both time and money aspects) thus we consider it is unreasonable.
2. The Cost for Radio Frequency Arrangement
The satellite operators need to arrange the radio frequency (RF) for every satellites. Because if they try to communicate with same radio frequency, radio waves interfere each other. So ITU (International Telecommunication Union) assigns and manages frequency to refrain from such network confusion. Especially, the RF for satellite is strictly managed.
It usually takes operators long time to get the RF band, but market trend is shifting to Earth observation by small satellite using RF. Then, what happens?
Arrangement task gets much longer and heavier than before. It takes 5 years at most and this can’t catch up with the growth of market.
Then, WARPSPACE plans to build the inter-satellite telecommunication system using optical link. Because, through this system, satellite operators no longer arrange the RF by themselves and our system enables them to send sensing data to ground at all time. WARPSPACE could provide the telecommunication which realizes low-latency, real time, high responsiveness network.
In the next article, detailed information of “WarpHub InterSat” will be described.
