The view from the ISS.

[MUSIC PLAYING] The overview effect is a term coined by Frank White, and it's used to explain a cognitive shift that astronauts experience when they see Earth from space. It's characterized by a feeling of awe and a sense of connection to the Earth and all the people on it. But what if you could feel that feeling with your feet placed firmly on planet Earth? Welcome to T-Minus Deep Space from N2K Networks. I'm Maria Varmazis. There are a few better ways of getting caught up in the awe of seeing the Earth from space than through a 4K livestream of the view from the International Space Station. Liam Kennedy from SEN TV has more on their new camera on the ISS. We have launched a 24/7 channel showing the views from our camera payload on the space station called Space TV 1. That one should give everyone the idea that, yes, there is going to be a two and more. That's really what it represents, that this is just the beginning. And obviously, before this, we launched several other camera payloads in the very early days of what we were doing in space in 2019. We did the first ever live 4K Earth viewing livestream from a satellite that we had a hosted payload on. And then we went to our own satellite. It's still up there. It was launched in 2022. And we are still capturing extraordinary views from two cameras on that dedicated CubeSat. It's just ours. No one else on it. But yeah, this is really where we were looking to go live 24/7. And that's thank you, NASA. Thank you, Space Station. Thank you, the partners that-- our implementation partner that's allowed us to do this. But we can now legitimately run our stream 24/7. And it started out in testing when-- so we were winding about the cock. We launched on CRS-30 in March of last year. So coming up for a year, this is the way it goes, folks. When you have a payload like this, you may not get installed like a day after you arrive on the Space Station. What? You mean they're busy up there? There's this thing called crew scheduling that just means it doesn't always go exactly the way that you think it should go. Realities-- the Space Station is always busy. But that period of time was extraordinarily super busy and schedules changing because there was this thing called Starliner. I was just thinking, I'm like, that timing works out with Starliner, doesn't it? Oh, yeah. Little busy. So Sunny and Butch were supposed to go home. They didn't, obviously. And the cool thing about that is that from what I understand, Sunny and Butch did have something to do with the installation of our payload. Oh, cool. Our payload was in bubble wrap or the equivalent of bubble wrap. Somewhere in the station for all of those months, but the end of August was when we were transferred over into the Bishop airlock, so the commercial airlock. And either Sunny or Butch, we believe, were the ones who pulled off the lens caps. Thank goodness. Thank you for pulling off the lens caps. Yeah, no problem. Of the six individual cameras that are on our payload. And then it was attached to the inside of the Bishop airlock. And then across two days, it was depressurized, undocked by the Canada arm, and then installed at the front of the space station on a platform called, a sub-platform called Argus, which is attached to Bartolomeo, which is a shelf on the front of the Columbus module. Amazing. Amazing. And now, thanks to all of that, we have the best eye candy possible. I mean, it's just-- which sounds like such a reduction of something that is a monumental effort. But truly, it captures imagination like nothing I have ever seen. I mean, how could it not? It is so beautiful. What has it been like since you launched? I imagine there's been a lot of really excited people like myself going, this is great. Yeah, so it has been an amazing moment in the company's development, both from the public comments and then also comments from industry partners. Because this is a major point. So we were installed the end of August, August 27, 2024. And from then until now, there were many moments where we were doing short-term live streaming. We were perfecting various settings on our payload, upgrading the software. Because when you launch in March and you're installed in August, what that means is everything that your payload is about pretty much has been completely redone for various reasons. Now, we operate the payload. I'm one of the ones who can switch cameras, do various things like that. But our engineering team is-- yeah, a whole of that. So we're doing all of that between August and now. But we had to do a whole raft of updates because it's wrong to put it in like we are operating because there's so much infrastructure that NASA has provided, the space station partners have provided. For instance, just the simple fact of getting our 4K signal, our data, down from the space station, we are going through multiple hops, using some of the things that many who follow space station payloads and communications will know about. There's the TDRS network of communication satellites. So we're going down through that. But we're not going through NASA's side. Who knew this? So if you are on essentially what is the ESA side of the space station, because we're attached to Columbus module and our implementation partner is Airbus, Defense and Space in Houston, our payload allocation comes from that side of the house. And when we get the video link, it's coming from a European data center. And then that's when we grab that. And then we're putting it through our systems to add our footprint on the video that you're now seeing. Yeah, the little watermark in the corner, as it should. I mean, it's your work. I mean, you should get that credit, of course. The watermark and there's various other bits of information that is in the lower quadrant. And unless you're on a 4K monitor going full screen, you may miss some of the graphics and text that's down at the bottom. So at the moment, it's saying we're currently going through a replay during orbital night. And the next sunrise is in nine minutes and two seconds. So that's at the bottom in a sort of graphic overlay. But depending on how you're looking at it, because this is the thing about showing live 24/7 images, unless you're into this thing, there may be some surprising things. Firstly, that the communications network to from the space to ground goes through expected and planned loss of signal events. Right, yes. So TDRS is a really reliable system. But the way that that works is there's geostationary satellites above the station. And there's antennas on the station that are tracking those satellites. And there is a regular breaks in communications when they have to switch from one satellite to the next. Or it could be the solar panels get in the way. Oh, just geometry causing the-- Just geometry, yeah. So all of that means that we're not 24/7 because of those. We're really more like 20 out of 24 hours. If anyone complains, we should smack them because-- No, keep complaining because maybe in the future that will be resolved through other ways to get data. So we're never-- I know people are working on it. --of hearing that feedback. And the other part of it is, what do you do when we're in darkness? There's a choice to be made. If the view is nothing, is that conducive to a 24/7 TV channel because you're going to get people tuning into it. And then there's nothing to see. So what do you do about that? The purest version of me says, hey, we should just be showing exactly what's below all the time. And maybe eventually we will have that. But at this moment in time, what we've chosen to do is to fill the loss of signal events with prerecorded content. So if anyone looks at our YouTube channel-- so it's just youtube.com/sen-- that takes you to our channel. And then there's a link right there to the live stream. But when you click on it, you may look at it and you may get a bit confused as to what you're seeing. But look at the bottom part of the screen for the graphics that tell you what's going on, really. And there's another wrinkle on this as well. Because saying that we don't have loss of signal, however, if the view is legitimately nothing at nighttime, the space station could be over a part of the Earth where it's full clouds and no cities and no electrical storms. If it's just black, we will display prerecorded videos as well. Is that something that you all decide on the fly? How do you know that? Or is that an algorithm that you have running somewhere? Yeah, so absolutely. The orbital path of the space station is very easily calculated. And so we have access to exactly when the station will be in darkness. And we know when there are loss of signal events about to come up and all of that. So but more than anything, so this was what we were perfecting is we can't predict when there's going to be electrical storms. We can't predict when the weather will be clear or not. And we want to make sure when there is something to see, even at night, that we will be displaying that. So that's part of all of our work, the engineering team, the software team. We are literally analyzing frame by frame, the image that we're capturing. And if we see that there is imagery available at night, we will switch the feed on and show that. So and we've during testing and going forward, we've had exceptional results of night views. So cities, bright cities, they look exceptional in our cameras. I bet they do. Yeah. On the NASA side of thing, if you were to check some of their views at nighttime, you would see that the screen is filled with what's called hot pixels, which are dead or defective pixels in the camera chip that have been damaged by the high radiation environment. And when they're in night mode, the NASA cameras go real high exposure. So you just end up seeing this amazing view of stars. Many people think it's stars because they're not moving. But if you see cities going by, you'll see bright clumps of the city lights from bright cities below. So it's cool, but it's filled with all of that. Now, our sensors-- Visual artifacting, right? Yeah, so our sensors do suffer from some of that. But we know from our previous hardware that we're using in space TV1 that the damage to-- I'm getting ahead of myself. The damage is very minimal. And so we've had our camera on ETV, the Earth TV satellite. That's that CubeSat. And it's remarkably stood up very well to the radiation environment in low Earth orbit. And our current one, which has still been up there for a year, although unused, it's still operating really amazingly well. So our night views over cities are exceptional too. We'll be right back after this quick break. I mean, the Earth is filled with a lot of ocean. That can be-- So would we see a full daytime sweep of the Pacific Ocean? Or is that just too boring to have just blue? Yeah, good question. Because mostly, I think, what we've been concentrating on is the Nadir view straight down. But we do have two other camera angles. We have a horizon view. I often say forward-facing horizon view, except it isn't forward-facing when the space station spins around. Did you know that happens? That actually happens. And so sometimes what you think should be forward is actually going the other way. So we have two other camera views. We have one pointed at the horizon. And then we have another one pointed at the docking port, the PMA-2 forward. Currently, there's no spacecraft dock there. So it's a little bit boring to see. However, we will be implementing a whole automated system to switch to the horizon cam slightly before sunrise. So we get to see sunrise. So we will be seeing that coming up very soon. And so we'll be on sunrise. Then we'll switch to the docking cam. And then we'll switch to the nadir. And that's sort of the sequence that we're planning on going forward with is that kind of automated system that handles that. That is amazing. So I was saying earlier, is there an algorithm? And it's like it is a team of very talented people, it sounds like, in part. So that's amazing. So thank you to everyone doing that. That's got to be a really cool job. You've been mentioning hints of camera number two and saying, I'm getting ahead of myself. And I'm going, OK, well, now I need to hear more about this. Oh, yeah. What y'all working on? Space TV2. Yes. Space TV2. Oh, my gosh. How much do I give away in this one? I'll probably give it all away, just because why really hide where we're up to? So it's probably no surprise that once we started showing our views, there's a lot of people that are interested in that, in the industry. People that are related to the space station, there is a lot of interest. It started because-- remember when I said we first went live was August the 27th? Well, it wasn't very long after that, that Starliner undocked. And we just happened to get our live stream working. I am not kidding you, 30 minutes before Starliner undocked. Wow. Wow. Wow. Dang. About the last minute. So bearing in mind, when we launched, we had this bonkers idea that we thought we would be ready to capture Starliner docking. But thank goodness, we did at least get installed just before Starliner undocked. And it was just an exceptionally exquisite moment. And we did share that view with NASA. Although it wasn't publicly available, we shared the private live stream with NASA, some on the flight control team, and with Boeing. So they at least got to see just the magnificent moment when Uncrewed, the Starliner, was released. And then the Reaction Control Thrusters worked. And the sun angle at that time just meant that-- because we literally remember we just went live 30 minutes before-- it was a little bit overexposed. But I actually think the overexposed view allowed us to see the thrusters operating in a really exquisite way. We got great feedback from NASA just in terms of how wonderful that view was. How useful I imagine that was too, my goodness. Yes, yes, it was. If you were looking at the official live stream at that moment, you would have seen nothing like what it is that we were providing on the live stream. Amazing. So what that means is we've already been receiving significant feedback on both how wonderful the views are from those who are part of the ISS program in various aspects. And yeah, discovered that there are potential use cases of our cameras in vehicle inspection, things like that. So-- Things like that, yep. --are our space TV2 that we're hoping to launch. When it does happen, it will likely be early next year. But now we know how everything goes. Things should be smoother as far as the deployment time and things like that. But yeah, think of everything from, OK, you like what you see right now, and our space TV version is just going to be infinitely better. I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but it will just be extraordinary. With the number of cameras, with just the resolution that we can get to by using multiple cameras, and also think steerable too. So we will have the ability to move things around, which was on our first mission that that hosted Payload in 2019. We had our own steerable cameras on that. And we're now iterating the design down to make it smaller and to be more accessible in that way. That's exciting. I have to wonder also, are you talking to any of the private space station companies, like Vass or any of those folks? Or-- We certainly are. OK, yeah. So it should be no surprise. We want to be everywhere that human beings, in particular, are in space. We also obviously have our own plans for additional satellites, CubeSats, or others at different orbital altitudes and different locations. But yeah, the space station on paper, it's 2030. And then we know that there are other players who are looking to create additional platforms, both to really keep everything going, as far as the wonderful commercialization that has happened. I mean, we are here legitimately because NASA had the foresight to create a program that worked for our small company to do what we've done. So number one. But 2030 comes around. And between now and then, there are several other platforms that are available. And yes, we have our sights on those. I can't really discuss anything around, are we going on these platforms or whatever at the moment. But you can bet your bottom dollar that that is an important aspect of where we are spending a lot of our time. I'm so, so glad to hear that. So I look forward to hearing that news whenever it drops. It'll be wonderful. And I just want to go back before we conclude about the idea of CISL interviews. Is this something that's actually really in the works right now, or is this still sort of theoretical? I mean, where is that? Until you've got a payload on the bench being worked on, I can tell you Space TV is on the bench being worked on and very close to really going through on that one. You can always say it's a bit theoretical. But it is key to where we expect ourselves to be. That's it for T-Minus Deep Space, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpey is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. [MUSIC PLAYING] , [MUSIC PLAYING] . [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]