Hi! Jackson Wagner here, former aerospace engineer -- I worked as a systems engineer at Xona Space Systems (which is trying to develop next-gen GPS technology, and is recently getting involved in a military program to create a kind of backup for GPS). I am also a big fan of the ALLFED concept.
Here are some thoughts on the emergency satellite concept mentioned -- basically I think this is a bad idea! I am sorry that this is a harsh and overly-negative rant that just harps on one small detail of the post; I think the other ideas you mention are pretty good!:
1. No way will you be able to build and launch a satellite for $300K?? Sure, if you are SpaceX, with all the worlds' most genius engineers, and you can amortize your satellite design costs over tens of thousands of identical Starlink copies, then maybe you can eventually get marginal satellite construction cost down to around $300K. But for the rest of us mere mortals, designing and building individual satellites, that is around the price of building and launching a tiny cubesat (like the pair I helped build at my earlier job at a tiny Virginia company called SpaceQuest).
2. I'm pretty skeptical that a tiny cubesat would be able to talk directly to cellphones? I thought direct-to-cell satellites were especially huge due to the need for large antenas. Although I guess Lynk Global's satellites don't seem so big, and probably you can save on power when you're just transmitting the same data to everybody instead of trying to send and recieve individual messages. Still, I feel very skeptical that a minimum-viable cubesat will have enough power to do much of use. (Many cubesats can barely fit enough batteries to stay charged through eclipse!)
3. How are you going to launch and operate this satellite amid a global crisis?? Consider that even today's normal cubesat projects, happening in a totally benign geopolitical / economic environment, have something like a 1/3 rate of instant, "dead on arrival" mission failure (ie the ground crew is never able to contact the cubesat after deployment). In the aftermath of nuclear war or other worldwide societal collapse, you are going to have infinitely more challenges than the typical university cubesat team. Many ground stations will be offline because they're located in countries that have collapsed into anarchy, etc! Who will be launching rockets, aside from perhaps the remnants of the world's militaries? Your satellite's intended orbit will be much more radioactive, so failure rates of components will be much higher! Basically, space is hard and your satellite is not going to work. At the very least, you'd want to make three satellites -- one to launch and test, another to keep in underground storage for a real disaster (maybe buy some rocket, like a RocketLab Electron, to go with it!), and probably a spare. (If the disaster is local rather than global, then you'd have an easier time launching from eg the USA to help address a faminine Africa. But in this scenario you don't need a satellite as badly -- militaries can airdrop leaflets, neighboring regions can set up radio stations, we can ship food aid around on boats, etc.)
4. Are you going to get special permission from all the world's governments and cell-network providers, that you can just broadcast texts to anyone on earth at any time? Getting FCC licensed for the right frequencies, making partnerships with all the cell-tower providers (or doing whatever else is necessary so that phones are pre-configured to be able to recieve your signal), etc, seems like a big ask!
5. Superpower militaries are already pretty invested in maintaining some level of communications capability through even a worst-case nuclear war. (Eg, the existing GPS satellites are some of the most radiaiton-hardened satellites ever, in part because they were designed in the 1980s to remain operational through a nuclear war. Modern precision ASAT weapons could take out GPS pretty easily -- but hence the linked Space Force proposal for backup "resilient GPS" systems. I know less about military comms systems, but I imagine the situation is similar.) Admittedly, most of these communications systems aren't aimed at broadcasting information to a broad public. But still, I expect there would be some important communications capability left even during/after an almost inconcievably devastating war, and I would bet that crucial information could be disseminated surpisingly well to places like major cities.
6. Basically instead of building satellites yourselves, somebody should just double-check with DARPA (or Space Force or whoever) that we are already planning on keeping a rocket's worth of Starlink satellites in reserve in a bunker somewhere. This will have the benefit of already being an important global system (many starlink terminals all around the world), reliable engineering, etc.
Okay, hopefully the above was helpful rather than just seeming mean! If you are interested in learning more about satellites (or correcting me if it turns out I'm totally wrong about the feasibility of direct-to-cellphone from a cubesat, or etc), feel free to message me and we could set up a call! In particular I've spent some time thinking about what a collapse of just the GPS system would look like (eg if China or Russia did a first-strike against western global positioning satellites as part of some larger war), which might be interesting for you guys to consider. (Losing GPS would not be totally devastating to the world by itself -- at most it would be an economic disruption on the scale of covid-19. But the problem is that if you lose GPS, you are probably also in the middle of a world war, or maybe an unprecedented worst-case solar storm, so you are also about to lose a lot of other important stuff all at once!)
Concluding by repeating that this was a hastily-typed-out, kinda knee-jerk response to a single part of the post, which doesn't impugn the other stuff you talk about!
Personally, of the other things you mentioned, I'd be most excited about both of the "#1" items you list -- continuing research on alternative foods themselves, and lobbying naturally well-placed-to-survive-disaster governments to make better plans for resiliency. Then #4 and #5 seem a little bit like "do a bunch of resliliency-planning research ourselves", which initially struck me as seeming less good than "lobbying governments to do resiliency planning" (since I figure governments will take their own plans more seriously). But of course it would also be great to be able to hand those governments detailed, thoughtful information for them to start from and use as a template, so that makes #4 and #5 look good again to me. Finally, I would be really hyped to see some kind of small-scale trials of ideas like seaweed farming, papermill-to-sugar-mill conversions, etc.
Thinking about my point #3 some more (how do you launch a satellite after a nuclear war). I realized that if you put me in charge of making a plan to DIYing this (instead of lobbying the US military to do it for me, which would be my first choice), and if SpaceX also wasn't answering my calls to see if I could buy any surplus starlinks...
You could do worse than partnering with Rocketlab, a satellite and rocket company based in New Zealand, developing the emergency satellite based on their "Photon" platform (design has flown before, small enough to still be kinda cheap, big enough to generate much more power than a cubesat). Then Rocketlab can launch their Electron rocket from New Zealand in the event of a nuclear war, and (in a real crisis like that), the whole company would help make sure the mission happened -- the idea of partnering with someone rather than just buying a satellite is key, IMO, because then it's mostly THEIR end of the world plan and in a crisis would benefit from their expertise / workforce.
I'd try to talk to the CEO, get him on board. Seems like the kind of flashy, Elon-esque, altruistic-in-a-sexy-way mission that could help with making RocketLab seem "cool" and recruiting eager mission-driven employees. (RocketLab's CEO currently has ambitions to do some similar flashy missions, like sending their own probe to Venus.)
But this would definitely be more like a $30M project, than a $300K project.
Thanks for your thoughts Jackson! I wanted to take a moment to respond to a few of these things, and would love it if you'd ask follow up questions, or I'm happy to give you my #.
#1) Good news, we have already built the first 2u test satellite, and paid for the launch, that came in at about $230k (hardware and launch). Obviously there's a lot of free/unaccounted labor in there, and some choices that we would not make on the production units, which would be more in the $500k range most ideally. These have LoRA radios, SDR, VHF, etc
#2) We have an independent report by a bench test auditor that suggests its both possible and legal, but ultimately that's why we are launching the test sat, to demonstrate its capabilities and limitations with greater nuance. In general the power budget is aided by algorithms that trade data throughput for lower power via redundancy. Happy to connect you with the tech lead there. We have done prior projects with very small antenna receivers and been successful so we are fairly confident in this area. A phone app and relatively newish cell phone are necessary if the cell phone is the target (rather than the base stations).
#3) Very good question! The satellite works with low cost independent/open source ground stations, which we also designed and will be testing (though they are relatively normal gear). We are going to have several in addition to more standard iridium backhaul etc. The plan is to make 10 satellites, have some in the air, and some at Astra, LongShot, Space X and other launch providers if the project is fully funded. We've met with the CEO's of the first two.
#4) We have a regulatory filing with the ITU that allows us to broadcast with unlimited power from LEO on 25mhz of L band, including about 5mhz that corresponds with an LTE Channel, that is allowed in more than half the world (and most of our target areas) and in the rest we have to do coordination. We've already completed that with the US succesfully. It's also going to be allowed in an emergency in most of the rest of course.
#5) Militaries and governments do have ways of leadership staying in touch via satellites, and we are supporting offline nodes and synchronization software that can use things like starlink and other connections as a backhaul. This satellite is meant to be additive to all that and not a replacement -- it is basically a repeater that can connect any nodes that are up, with the ability to store and forward broadcast to a large number of humans with cell phones but without working cell service in disaster areas. It's just one currently missing component in a system of new space based technologies that will work together in a disaster.
#6) I have actually had a brief chat with US Space Command leadership on this topic! They thought it was interesting and reiterated to me how many basic things like financial transactions depend on GPS timing coordination which would go down in major great power conflicts and how the goverment and society are not prepared for it, or terrestrial internet separation. They were very encouraging and asked to be kept apprised of the results of the test platform.
Re: Rocketlab, I would love to have a connection to them. I had a similar discussion with Astra in Alameda CA which is one of their competitors I believe.
Re: Price, you are right -- a modest constellation of what we are talking about is more on the order of $10m, and $30 would be a reasonable final production budget. However we are open sourcing the plans, software, and tools, and believe that there are a number of organizations that will want their own / or joint satellites, and that meaningful capabilities start at less than that. The main goal is to reduce the entry costs of these kind of capabilities to the world in order to increase resilient systems, and enable us to press off switches without major humanitarian outcomes.
The cyber war plan in many countries involves cutting undersea cables and turning off civilian internet, and we've already show that major internet outages are hard to recover from with internet backhaul on everything from phones to radios. One of the current UN goals is to get emergency warning systems more widespread -- about half of all countries don't even have one, and they have a huge humanitarian and financial protection ROI.
The idea of this design is to fulfill a basic early warning system functionality in normal times, and to enable additional store capabilities to emergency systems, and to add some additional robustness in high risk lower probability scenarios like solar flare, nuclear war, great power conflict, major cyber event, etc.... However the satellite system is just one part of that, most of it involves offline synchronization tools, and other backend tooling where we are putting most of our efforts..
Our hope is that for a relatively low cost this project can inspire other institutions by showing what is possible on a minimal budget with open source tools and recently reduced space access costs (falling even further with starship).
We will be launching a website at some point so you can follow along with our test launch this summer.
Independent evaluations of cost-effectiveness of the type of work that ALLFED does can be found here:
CEARCH's in-depth analysis of interventions for Resilience to Nuclear & Volcanic Winter. They argue that policy advocacy campaigns are the most promising intervention, around 30x the cost-effectiveness of a typical GiveWell-recommended charity.
Speedrun: Demonstrate the ability to rapidly scale food production in the case of nuclear winter by Marie Buhl from Rethink Priorities: "my (extremely rough) estimate that this project reduces x-risk with a cost-effectiveness of ~$260 million per 0.01% absolute reduction[1] (~70% confidence interval: 2.2 million to 2.7 billion). If this estimate were accurate, then this project would clear our median roughly estimated cost-effectiveness bar of $500M per basis-point of x-risk averted".
Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations by Nuno Sempere: "I disagree strongly with ALLFED's estimates (probability of cost overruns, impact of ALLFED's work if deployed, etc.), however, I feel that the case for an organization working in this area is relatively solid." (Note that this is a 3 year old analysis, when the funding situation and risk landscapes were different).
Executive summary: ALLFED seeks funding to advance critical research and projects aimed at improving global resilience to potential catastrophic food system failures caused by scenarios like nuclear winter, extreme pandemics, or infrastructure collapse.
Key points:
Key potential projects include policy advocacy for sunlight reduction scenarios, building a refrigerated greenhouse to simulate nuclear winter conditions, and developing an emergency satellite communication system.
Research focuses on pandemic resilience, including investigating rapid scaling of safety measures and mapping critical workforce vulnerabilities.
ALLFED aims to develop response strategies for combination global catastrophe scenarios, particularly nuclear conflict and infrastructure loss.
Proposed technology demonstrations include extract
Current funding is significantly reduced, with the organization seeking $1,000-$10,000 donations from individual supporters to maintain critical research momentum.
Projects target preventing potential civilization-threatening scenarios that could result in billions of deaths.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
ALLFED needs your support for global catastrophe preparedness
As part of Marginal Funding Week, here is a brief update on Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), describing projects to which marginal funding would most likely be allocated. There is a much more detailed, in-depth picture of recent accomplishments in the ALLFED 2023 year-in-review, and updates for 2024 will be forthcoming on 18 November.
ALLFED works to help build resilience to global catastrophic food system failure through research, development, policy, and planning. ALLFED strives to increase preparedness against agricultural catastrophes, such as nuclear winter or an engineered crop pandemic, or disasters disrupting global electricity/industry, such as an extreme pandemic or AI-enabled cyberattack. These catastrophes could lead to billions of deaths and cause long-term damage, possibly even resulting in the collapse of civilization without recovery. Present-generation and long-term cost-effectiveness analyses are presented here.
From producing fifteen scientific papers on global catastrophes and forming the first blueprint for an Extreme Pandemic Resilience Plan for Vital Industry to being featured in over 90 media articles, 2024 has been a busy, productive year of impact for ALLFED. However, there is so much more we want to achieve in identifying, developing, and supporting the adoption of resilient food solutions by governments, companies, and communities—solutions that could ensure food security for all during and after a global catastrophe.
At ALLFED, we are deeply grateful to all our supporters, including the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has provided the majority of our funding for years. However, this year, we received around one-eighth of the average funding we’ve received from the Survival and Flourishing Fund over the previous three years. While we’re immensely appreciative of their continued support, this shift shortens our runway and emphasizes the need to seek additional funding sources to sustain and expand our impact. Your support at this time could make a particular difference on whether ALLFED will be able to pursue several key projects in 2025. Based on our current fundraising expectations, we think receiving $1,000 - $10,000 each from a few individual donors would make a sizable difference on what we can and cannot do over the next year.
Projects: where is marginal funding likely to be spent?
There are several key projects subject to raising additional funding over the next 12 months:
Leverage ALLFED’s research to launch one or more policy advocacy campaigns for response and resilience planning against an abrupt sunlight reduction scenario for one country among: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Singapore, New Zealand, and Brazil (costing $100-250k each). The external charity evaluator CEARCH has highlighted this type of campaign as particularly important for saving expected lives against volcanic- and nuclear-winter scenarios.
A refrigerated greenhouse simulating nuclear winter (in Australia) could validate models of nuclear winter climate and responses, informing crop expansion recommendations that could produce food for billions ($200-400k). This type of project could be fundamental for proving the viability of hugely promising agricultural interventions against ASRS related to cropland expansion and resilient crop relocation. Embarking on a project of this scale during a time of funding uncertainty is risky, so your support could be crucial in determining whether this happens at all.
In collaboration with Good Ancestors (US), build and launch an emergency satellite to transmit information to regular cell phones on response interventions for a catastrophe that disables comms infrastructure (~$300k). In a scenario such as widespread nuclear EMPs, this technology could be fundamental for distributing information on how to provide basic food and water needs to the population.
Perform a project aiming to safeguard vital services in extreme pandemics (~$300k). An extreme global pandemic, involving mass infection and resulting absenteeism, poses the risk of collapsing industry, instigating global catastrophic failures in the systems providing food, water, energy, and other basic needs to the world. Our proposal contains a selection of projects in four broad categories. First, investigate and quantify the ability of germicidal UV, filtration, and ventilation to be scaled up rapidly in a crisis (see preliminary research here). Second, profile vital infrastructure and workforce needs during the initial months of an outbreak to map critical workforce vulnerabilities, prioritize sectors, and govern strategic PPE allocation. Third, develop plans to secure food supplies without industrial processing, addressing high-contact, high-risk areas like food processing and distribution and developing post-collapse solutions for basic needs: low-cost, low-contact solutions to safeguard essential supply chains and prevent societal collapse. Fourth, create strategies to provide clean water in industry-free scenarios, following ALLFED's findings on global freshwater access gaps. Once effective interventions have been designed through this research, the next step would be campaigning for implementation.
Perform research on combination scenarios, which is crucial to understand not only how to prevent humanity from surviving a most-extreme scenario involving a global food production collapse combined with a loss of global industry and supply chains (e.g., via a full-scale nuclear conflict involving coordinated nuclear EMP attacks), but also how to best help regions likely to be a target of nuclear attacks in a war, such as the USA and European Union (where nuclear EMP is very likely given nuclear war even if it does not take place globally). We believe it is necessary to overhaul our global catastrophe response modeling project to incorporate varying degrees of severity and catastrophe considerations, including our current expected median NATO-Russia full-scale nuclear war scenario of ~40 Tg ASRS (~45% loss of agricultural yields from climate), ~1/4 of global infrastructure destroyed or disabled (~20% yield loss from disruptions of fertilizers, agricultural machinery, pesticides, and ), and widespread trade breakdowns. We’ve estimated a requirement of ~2 FTE+support to kickstart this ($180,000).
Here are additional examples presenting more general types of work we would expect to do with additional funding:
Continuing work on resilient food interventions that our research has uncovered as fundamental to survival in nuclear winter, including: resilient crop relocation, rapid redirection of crop-intensive animal agriculture and biofuel industries, rapid expansion of planted crop area, greenhouse technology, agricultural residue upcycling, and production of food without agriculture through emerging industrial technologies. We also aim to continue research on more exploratory interventions.
Continuing work on our more neglected line of research. Specifically, research into interventions to increase resilience and response capabilities to scenarios involving extreme, abrupt collapse of critical infrastructure (e.g., loss of electricity/industry due to extreme pandemics or nuclear EMP). Elements of this work include, designing low-tech transportation systems, defining how an effective resilient food response to this scenario would look, and developing the required methods and tool designs to achieve it.
We are also looking for funding to perform technology demonstrations of key technologies from our list of tech ideas that address current bottlenecks (see some examples in the table below).
Pilot
Total cost (including overhead)
Breakdown
Completion time
Demonstrating that water can be extracted from an electrically powered household well without electricity
$20,000
University student project sponsorship with materials and supplies
12 months
Developing an open source design of a rope twister for seaweed
$170,000
1 FTE $75,000 each year
$20,000 materials and supplies
24 months
Developing an open source design of a plastic extruder for greenhouses
$250,000
1 FTE $75,000 each year
$100,000 materials and supplies
24 months
Repurposing of a small scale university paper-production pilot plant for production of sugar
~$2,200,000
3 FTE $100,000 each/year
$1,000,000 equipment
~48 months
Thank you
Our ongoing and deep thanks go to all our donors and volunteers. Other than donating, you can also contribute your time through volunteering with ALLFED, including as a board member. Thank you for your interest and support in increasing the chances of humanity in the face of global catastrophic food system failure.
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Hi! Jackson Wagner here, former aerospace engineer -- I worked as a systems engineer at Xona Space Systems (which is trying to develop next-gen GPS technology, and is recently getting involved in a military program to create a kind of backup for GPS). I am also a big fan of the ALLFED concept.
Here are some thoughts on the emergency satellite concept mentioned -- basically I think this is a bad idea! I am sorry that this is a harsh and overly-negative rant that just harps on one small detail of the post; I think the other ideas you mention are pretty good!:
1. No way will you be able to build and launch a satellite for $300K?? Sure, if you are SpaceX, with all the worlds' most genius engineers, and you can amortize your satellite design costs over tens of thousands of identical Starlink copies, then maybe you can eventually get marginal satellite construction cost down to around $300K. But for the rest of us mere mortals, designing and building individual satellites, that is around the price of building and launching a tiny cubesat (like the pair I helped build at my earlier job at a tiny Virginia company called SpaceQuest).
2. I'm pretty skeptical that a tiny cubesat would be able to talk directly to cellphones? I thought direct-to-cell satellites were especially huge due to the need for large antenas. Although I guess Lynk Global's satellites don't seem so big, and probably you can save on power when you're just transmitting the same data to everybody instead of trying to send and recieve individual messages. Still, I feel very skeptical that a minimum-viable cubesat will have enough power to do much of use. (Many cubesats can barely fit enough batteries to stay charged through eclipse!)
3. How are you going to launch and operate this satellite amid a global crisis?? Consider that even today's normal cubesat projects, happening in a totally benign geopolitical / economic environment, have something like a 1/3 rate of instant, "dead on arrival" mission failure (ie the ground crew is never able to contact the cubesat after deployment). In the aftermath of nuclear war or other worldwide societal collapse, you are going to have infinitely more challenges than the typical university cubesat team. Many ground stations will be offline because they're located in countries that have collapsed into anarchy, etc! Who will be launching rockets, aside from perhaps the remnants of the world's militaries? Your satellite's intended orbit will be much more radioactive, so failure rates of components will be much higher! Basically, space is hard and your satellite is not going to work. At the very least, you'd want to make three satellites -- one to launch and test, another to keep in underground storage for a real disaster (maybe buy some rocket, like a RocketLab Electron, to go with it!), and probably a spare.
(If the disaster is local rather than global, then you'd have an easier time launching from eg the USA to help address a faminine Africa. But in this scenario you don't need a satellite as badly -- militaries can airdrop leaflets, neighboring regions can set up radio stations, we can ship food aid around on boats, etc.)
4. Are you going to get special permission from all the world's governments and cell-network providers, that you can just broadcast texts to anyone on earth at any time? Getting FCC licensed for the right frequencies, making partnerships with all the cell-tower providers (or doing whatever else is necessary so that phones are pre-configured to be able to recieve your signal), etc, seems like a big ask!
5. Superpower militaries are already pretty invested in maintaining some level of communications capability through even a worst-case nuclear war. (Eg, the existing GPS satellites are some of the most radiaiton-hardened satellites ever, in part because they were designed in the 1980s to remain operational through a nuclear war. Modern precision ASAT weapons could take out GPS pretty easily -- but hence the linked Space Force proposal for backup "resilient GPS" systems. I know less about military comms systems, but I imagine the situation is similar.) Admittedly, most of these communications systems aren't aimed at broadcasting information to a broad public. But still, I expect there would be some important communications capability left even during/after an almost inconcievably devastating war, and I would bet that crucial information could be disseminated surpisingly well to places like major cities.
6. Basically instead of building satellites yourselves, somebody should just double-check with DARPA (or Space Force or whoever) that we are already planning on keeping a rocket's worth of Starlink satellites in reserve in a bunker somewhere. This will have the benefit of already being an important global system (many starlink terminals all around the world), reliable engineering, etc.
Okay, hopefully the above was helpful rather than just seeming mean! If you are interested in learning more about satellites (or correcting me if it turns out I'm totally wrong about the feasibility of direct-to-cellphone from a cubesat, or etc), feel free to message me and we could set up a call! In particular I've spent some time thinking about what a collapse of just the GPS system would look like (eg if China or Russia did a first-strike against western global positioning satellites as part of some larger war), which might be interesting for you guys to consider. (Losing GPS would not be totally devastating to the world by itself -- at most it would be an economic disruption on the scale of covid-19. But the problem is that if you lose GPS, you are probably also in the middle of a world war, or maybe an unprecedented worst-case solar storm, so you are also about to lose a lot of other important stuff all at once!)
Concluding by repeating that this was a hastily-typed-out, kinda knee-jerk response to a single part of the post, which doesn't impugn the other stuff you talk about!
Personally, of the other things you mentioned, I'd be most excited about both of the "#1" items you list -- continuing research on alternative foods themselves, and lobbying naturally well-placed-to-survive-disaster governments to make better plans for resiliency. Then #4 and #5 seem a little bit like "do a bunch of resliliency-planning research ourselves", which initially struck me as seeming less good than "lobbying governments to do resiliency planning" (since I figure governments will take their own plans more seriously). But of course it would also be great to be able to hand those governments detailed, thoughtful information for them to start from and use as a template, so that makes #4 and #5 look good again to me. Finally, I would be really hyped to see some kind of small-scale trials of ideas like seaweed farming, papermill-to-sugar-mill conversions, etc.
Thinking about my point #3 some more (how do you launch a satellite after a nuclear war). I realized that if you put me in charge of making a plan to DIYing this (instead of lobbying the US military to do it for me, which would be my first choice), and if SpaceX also wasn't answering my calls to see if I could buy any surplus starlinks...
You could do worse than partnering with Rocketlab, a satellite and rocket company based in New Zealand, developing the emergency satellite based on their "Photon" platform (design has flown before, small enough to still be kinda cheap, big enough to generate much more power than a cubesat). Then Rocketlab can launch their Electron rocket from New Zealand in the event of a nuclear war, and (in a real crisis like that), the whole company would help make sure the mission happened -- the idea of partnering with someone rather than just buying a satellite is key, IMO, because then it's mostly THEIR end of the world plan and in a crisis would benefit from their expertise / workforce.
I'd try to talk to the CEO, get him on board. Seems like the kind of flashy, Elon-esque, altruistic-in-a-sexy-way mission that could help with making RocketLab seem "cool" and recruiting eager mission-driven employees. (RocketLab's CEO currently has ambitions to do some similar flashy missions, like sending their own probe to Venus.)
But this would definitely be more like a $30M project, than a $300K project.
Thanks for your thoughts Jackson! I wanted to take a moment to respond to a few of these things, and would love it if you'd ask follow up questions, or I'm happy to give you my #.
#1) Good news, we have already built the first 2u test satellite, and paid for the launch, that came in at about $230k (hardware and launch). Obviously there's a lot of free/unaccounted labor in there, and some choices that we would not make on the production units, which would be more in the $500k range most ideally. These have LoRA radios, SDR, VHF, etc
#2) We have an independent report by a bench test auditor that suggests its both possible and legal, but ultimately that's why we are launching the test sat, to demonstrate its capabilities and limitations with greater nuance. In general the power budget is aided by algorithms that trade data throughput for lower power via redundancy. Happy to connect you with the tech lead there. We have done prior projects with very small antenna receivers and been successful so we are fairly confident in this area. A phone app and relatively newish cell phone are necessary if the cell phone is the target (rather than the base stations).
#3) Very good question! The satellite works with low cost independent/open source ground stations, which we also designed and will be testing (though they are relatively normal gear). We are going to have several in addition to more standard iridium backhaul etc. The plan is to make 10 satellites, have some in the air, and some at Astra, LongShot, Space X and other launch providers if the project is fully funded. We've met with the CEO's of the first two.
#4) We have a regulatory filing with the ITU that allows us to broadcast with unlimited power from LEO on 25mhz of L band, including about 5mhz that corresponds with an LTE Channel, that is allowed in more than half the world (and most of our target areas) and in the rest we have to do coordination. We've already completed that with the US succesfully. It's also going to be allowed in an emergency in most of the rest of course.
#5) Militaries and governments do have ways of leadership staying in touch via satellites, and we are supporting offline nodes and synchronization software that can use things like starlink and other connections as a backhaul. This satellite is meant to be additive to all that and not a replacement -- it is basically a repeater that can connect any nodes that are up, with the ability to store and forward broadcast to a large number of humans with cell phones but without working cell service in disaster areas. It's just one currently missing component in a system of new space based technologies that will work together in a disaster.
#6) I have actually had a brief chat with US Space Command leadership on this topic! They thought it was interesting and reiterated to me how many basic things like financial transactions depend on GPS timing coordination which would go down in major great power conflicts and how the goverment and society are not prepared for it, or terrestrial internet separation. They were very encouraging and asked to be kept apprised of the results of the test platform.
Re: Rocketlab, I would love to have a connection to them. I had a similar discussion with Astra in Alameda CA which is one of their competitors I believe.
Re: Price, you are right -- a modest constellation of what we are talking about is more on the order of $10m, and $30 would be a reasonable final production budget. However we are open sourcing the plans, software, and tools, and believe that there are a number of organizations that will want their own / or joint satellites, and that meaningful capabilities start at less than that. The main goal is to reduce the entry costs of these kind of capabilities to the world in order to increase resilient systems, and enable us to press off switches without major humanitarian outcomes.
The cyber war plan in many countries involves cutting undersea cables and turning off civilian internet, and we've already show that major internet outages are hard to recover from with internet backhaul on everything from phones to radios. One of the current UN goals is to get emergency warning systems more widespread -- about half of all countries don't even have one, and they have a huge humanitarian and financial protection ROI.
The idea of this design is to fulfill a basic early warning system functionality in normal times, and to enable additional store capabilities to emergency systems, and to add some additional robustness in high risk lower probability scenarios like solar flare, nuclear war, great power conflict, major cyber event, etc.... However the satellite system is just one part of that, most of it involves offline synchronization tools, and other backend tooling where we are putting most of our efforts..
Our hope is that for a relatively low cost this project can inspire other institutions by showing what is possible on a minimal budget with open source tools and recently reduced space access costs (falling even further with starship).
We will be launching a website at some point so you can follow along with our test launch this summer.