you today about making satellites and
not making a single satellite but making
lots and lots of them
and before I can do that I would like to
take you to space right so space the
final frontier these are the voyages of
the Starship Enterprise
it’s continuing mission to explore
strange new worlds to seek out new life
and new civilizations to boldly go where
no one has gone before
well as a space engineer I can actually
tell you this is a very lonely voyage
right so the crew of the enterprise
actually had it very good right so every
week they would meet somebody a new
civilization a new entity in space but
actually the whole business up until now
is very lonely the reality is it is
basically in business of one a prime
example of this is the International
Space Station this is probably the most
complex and for sure the most expensive
technical machine that we have ever
built it costs more than 100 billion
dollars and was built over a decade and
when it will be retired in 2024 right
these chances are very very limited that
there will be a machine like this the
same is true for other space projects
right you know there are hundreds and
hundreds of thousands of people who have
backyard telescopes and even the
professional astronomers every mountain
range in the darkness of of the remote
places has telescopes but we only have
one Space Telescope the Hubble Space
Telescope so since its launch we have
spent about 10 billion dollars to build
this telescope to launch it and to
service it and will there be another one
the International Space Station and the
Hubble Space Telescope are by its
definition singular devices and surely
for normal satellites you know that must
be different because there are so many
of those but no it is virtually the same
basically if you take the
telecommunication satellites right every
nation has one so we have more than 150
of these satellites in space
however they live for about 15 years
that means in every year all over the
world less than 10 satellites of this
type are being built in fact this year
only five satellites have been built the
reason is very easy they’re the size of
a truck and they cost about half a
billion to build and construct and shut
one of them fail each of us here would
feel the consequences and so what do we
do we can’t just really send a mechanic
up there to repair it right well
technically we can so satellite services
exist but you know we have tried it and
it doesn’t really work the few missions
that we have done that relied on two
astronauts and the Space Shuttle that’s
no longer in service
are actually much more expensive than
building a new version so each of the
Hubble Space Telescope service missions
cost about twice of the expected amount
to make a new hub Hubble Space Telescope
so that doesn’t really make sense so
until we have robotic service craft that
doesn’t rely on astronauts and
satellites that are specifically
constructed to do so there’s not much
feasibility in this type of stuff so
high development costs are the status
quo of the industry these highly
development costs lead to a very very
small number of devices and so if we
really want to go boldly to where no one
has gone before this has to change
and to change this I basically drew an
inspiration from a different industry an
industry that has faced these problems
before the automotive industry so before
1914 cars were very rare they were
luxury items and only very select few
you know mostly very rich or very noble
people could actually afford a car so
they were built in very low quantities
and where they’re not really accessible
that all changed in 1914 when the
conveyor belt correction was introduced
and the Ford team model became the first
car that was manufactured on a large
scale and was available for larger
audience it was produced until 1927
until today it is one of the most
produced cars in the world and you have
to keep in mind without any robots it
was produced about 9,000 times a day and
the peak of its production cycle and so
what it came to this is you started in
1914 and basically up until today we
have about 200 million cars in the
United States alone and we are building
about 100 million cars every year so car
manufacturing has actually come a very
long way from the humble beginnings of a
tool for the very few and a rich and
basically it has been become something
that everybody can have so how have we
get how did we get there it started with
an idea and the idea was for first
formulated by a by Henry Ford which
basically said in a bridge version I
will build a motor car for the great
multitude so low in price that no man
making a good salary will be unable to
own one so that brings us back to the to
the satellites right so we are in a very
similar system that we have one
satellite
where it is actually cheaper to replace
than to repair and the the actual
devices are actually not very cheap
either so with the miniaturization of
electronics wouldn’t it be more sensible
to building satellites much smaller
instead of these truck size devices with
swing spans of 30 meters so can we build
smaller satellites indeed we can this is
a small satellite that has been built by
my company and was launched into space
in 2015 however there’s no such thing
like a free lunch so the same way that
not the same amount of people fit in a
sedan that then fit in a bus the physics
physics dictates that such a small
satellite has not the same capabilities
then has a big satellite so do we really
only have the chance at a choice to
either have a very very large satellite
very expensive very powerful but not
accessible for everybody or smaller
satellites that are lower cost but then
not really useful no we have other
options as well the same way that a
genius can be smarter than it than one
of us right
it cannot does that same genius cannot
be smarter than all the people that are
there and so a constellation is
basically the idea to replace one big
satellite by a great multitude of
smaller satellites
so essentially imagine yourself standing
on a very high tower right the higher
you built the tower
the further you can be seen the farther
your signals reach but the more powerful
that transmitter in that tower has to be
if you have a smaller Tower you need
much more towers to cover the same area
a communication satellite is essentially
and a consolation is the number of
smaller towers but many many so the idea
is why should I fly in 40,000 kilometers
above the ground where there are normal
very large satellites are for
communications cannot fly them much
lower and produce them in such a high
number but much smaller that itself I
can replace that bigger satellites and
what would you what would you know even
though we are producing such a very
large number the pure fact that we
remove them from the high orbit to a low
orbit makes disposal of those satellites
at the end of the lifetime much easier
which means that the whole problem of
space debris is much more addressable
however the business of that
constellation only works if we are able
to in fact produce this large number of
satellites in a short lifetime otherwise
we have the problem that once we built
the last satellite the first satellite
has already died so let’s have a look on
how we’re building satellites today so
let’s the satellite of us in the lab so
he would need actually some kind of new
technology but this technology exists it
has been pioneered here in Berlin by
research institutes and small companies
the big challenge of these satellites
today is that they’re actually built
very similar to these large satellites
so teams of about 50 people would need
about 2 years to build one and then you
can do easily the mass the salary of
these people alone would amount to about
10 million if you just built one device
every two years and if you multiply that
with a large number even though it is in
itself much cheaper it would be not
feasible so what does it actually take
to make such a constellation feasible we
have to reduce the build time and we
have to reduce the build time a very
great deal we have to reduce it from
by this we can reduce the production
cost which is largely basically your
salary of the engineers that do that so
we need to reduce the the costs to build
such a device from ten million to less
than five hundred thousand preferably to
three hundred thousand each that is a
cost reduction by ninety seven percent
and lots of at least we need to increase
our yearly production by a factor of
1,000 that sounds crazy right so we are
trying to improve the production by a
factor of 1,000 but we have to keep
something in mind one thousand devices a
year compared to the nine thousand cars
that force was able to build in one day
that’s actually very reasonable because
one thousand even though it’s a very
large number it is means that we only
have to build 20 devices per week so I
think that puts things into a into a
perspective so the question remains how
do we get into space basically to get
into space is made out of three
distinctive things you need to build a
device and then in order to make it work
in space you need to test and qualify it
and an obviously you need to fly it and
my company has basically managed to
speed up all of these three key tasks so
we can build and assemble these take
these technologies into components that
normally takes years into a matter of
weeks we can do the qualification and
testing and have proven that not into a
matter of six months but we have done
that in one or two weeks only to the
same level of quality that the others
have achieved well the launch is a bit
outside of our control right so the
rocket is not what we built but the way
a satellite is placed onto a rocket
involves a lot of testing if you can
automate this testing you can basically
shrink down the time you have to show up
before the rocket launch
from a matter of months to a matter of a
few hours so thus with these three steps
we can basically send more satellites to
space and make it a little less lonely
the question that you might ask yourself
well how does that effect mean well
let’s have a look into into back into
what the cars actually done right so the
idea of fort was I introduced a mass
manufacturing to allow everybody every
one of us to have a mobility and so the
question of the mass manufacturing from
the car industry is a great inspiration
for me not only from the technical point
of view but also from what resulted from
it more than just a feature of
technology it
it revolutionized the paradigmatic sess
the captains of industry back in the
20th centuries like Henry Ford child
Cinda or Howard dudes really recognized
that mobility was and has become the new
gold of the 20th century without a doubt
they applied as revolutionized the way
we can afford mobility and well for an
emperor owner perspective made them rich
in the process so that’s very welcome so
what was once only accessible for the
rich and the powerful became accessible
for all today cars are affordable trains
are plentiful and tickets for app
airplanes are accessible for most or
everybody these accessibility is a
testimony of the democratizing of the
access to this mobility and the East
which we enjoy this mobility has become
a part of our everyday life so what will
be the gold
of the 21st century most people believe
it’s gonna be information information
and data will make the difference
whether you can participate in the in
the society or not whether your business
will prosper whether your nation will
prosper and so on so the proverbs that
information is King and knowledge is
power basically come become more more
abundant because of their usefulness for
our everyday life so today big
nation-states and corporations spend a
lot of money to invest in systems that
can generate this type of data to yield
information and insight by interpreting
this data and accumulating it and so
this data and this information that is
generated from it allows them to have a
decisive advantage and for all of those
coming back to the satellites these are
actually tools which generate a large
amount of data they furthermore transmit
a large amount of data and thus are
enablers for our understanding and so in
a day and age of you know alternate
effects and fake news it’s very
important that not only a select few is
able to access this type of information
so and as long as these nations and
corporations which can afford this type
of stuff are the gatekeeper to this
information the general public will have
a disadvantage so what we actually have
to do in order to democratize this data
is to make it more accessible and to
make it more accessible you need to make
it more affordable and with the
generation of data via satellite that
means we need to make them affordable as
well and that we can do by the
introduction of mass
Manufacturing and so we believe here in
Berlin we believe in my company that
this time has come like it was the 20th
century to introduce mass manufacture
into cars and many other industries that
became then accessible for the great
multitude to make that accessible for
that production as well for satellites
so that all of us can benefit from that
and not just a few thank you very much [Applause]