When I was a kid, like, 6 or 7 and watching Star Wars: A New Hope playing over and over and over on Showtime back in like 1980, I was completely in love with R2D2 and C3PO. No no no… not a grown-up kind of love. I was 6! Robots were ridiculously fascinating, and I wanted to know how I could create them. Adult people knew how to do this, right? I started to figure out maybe that wasn’t the case when I watched a behind the scenes special and learned about the man who played R2D2, Kenny Baker. No, we were a long way away from creating that kind of AI.
Sometime between the age of 6 and 8, if you had asked me what I was going to do when I grew up, I would have told you I was going to be CEO and President of a company I founded. (President and CEO sounded super impressive.) We were going to build robots. The android-like kind. I was picturing a Data in every house before Data showed up in ST:TNG. (Or maybe more of an Andrew Martin from Bicentennial Man, years before that movie came out, but certainly after I was aware of Isaac Asimov and his robots.) And our headquarters would be on the Moon. Why the Moon? I’m not sure other than to say that besides robots, space travel had always fascinated me…
…and in the early 1980s, I thought we went to the Moon regularly. I’m pretty sure I thought that was the destination of the first flights of the space shuttle.
Before I left elementary school, I learned the truth: that we hadn’t been to the Moon since well before my birth. That was crushing blow number one. Number two was that my explorations into learning about AI were limited. This was, after all, the pre-internet era and if an adult around didn’t know, and if it wasn’t in the local library, it was very difficult to learn about something. Such is the tragedy of an 80s childhood. It was a very disappointing time in my life. So disappointing, that I think I spent the last year or two of middle school thinking I was going to be some sort of musician. Def Leppard needed a female keyboardist. That would be me. (When I dream, I dream big.)
While in high school, I started to entertain reality. A little. It was still the pre-internet age and finding specific information about anything remained a challenge. I think I went down a lot of rabbit holes in the library looking for things I didn’t quite understand. But I also knew I wanted to have a career in space. I mean, maybe not *in* space. I was up and down about the concept of being an astronaut myself, but I certainly wanted to do something related to space.
I was in high school in the late 80s/very early 90s. While I loved the shuttle missions, I was more keen on things like the Magellan probe that was headed to study Venus, and Hubble, and COBE… all missions that launched while I was in high school. I was more than a little fascinated by the time it was going to take Magellan to get to Venus and the fact that it was going to do interesting science once it was there. Hubble fascinated me, too – it was going to take amazing pictures of the Universe. COBE was going to study the origins of the Universe, too.
During this time period, I remained in love with robots, although that felt less tangible as a career. I couldn’t articulate it back then, but the stuff that I loved most of all about robots, and still do, was the AI – the cognitive reasoning portion. This might be why Data was always one of my favorite characters in the Star Trek universe. He has cognitive abilities that I find fascinating to recreate (*I’ll have more things to say about this some other day…)
Let’s skip ahead to… now.
Satellites. My career has primarily been about building and controlling them. I’m pretty happy with how this worked out. After all, I got what I wanted. I wanted to work in the space industry.
…and I wanted to work with robots.
There are a few definitions of “robot” to include everything from a simple automatic machine to something more human-like. If we stick with the one that’s closer to: “a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer” then a satellite is most definitely a robot.
While there are a lot of satellites out there, I’m going to focus on one way to break it down: LEO vs GEO satellites. LEO stands for Low Earth Orbit. LEO satellites orbit the Earth approximately every 90 minutes, so roughly 14-16 times a day. That means, if you’re standing some place and looking up, any LEO satellite in view might only be so for 5-10 minutes at a time. Contrast that with a GEO satellite, which stands for Geosynchronous. GEO satellites appear to “hover” over their spot over the equator at about 23,000 miles up. So if you’re on the ground and see a GEO, you’ll always see that GEO. (** note to my fellow industry nerds. I know this is an oversimplification and there are many subtleties in describing the different orbits of satellites.)
That “always see” versus “only see a few minutes every hour and a half” makes a big difference in how we think about controlling that satellite from the ground. For the always see GEO, we don’t need to worry about programming it ahead of time. We can always talk to it, so we can always send it a command in the moment. No biggie.
But for LEOs, since we don’t always talk to it… we have to program it to tell it what to do for the next hour and a half. This programming, so the satellite can carry out its tasking automatically, is what makes it a robot.
Period.
Coincidentally, as I was drafting this blog post, the following news article appeared:https://spacenews.com/northrop-grumman-to-launch-new-satellite-servicing-robot-aimed-at-commercial-and-government-market/
The satellite mentioned in the article, MRV, is going to have a robotic arm. How’s that for mixing satellites and robots!
And it gets even better for me personally, as a lover of both satellites and robots: this is the project I currently work on at my day job. I’m the Lead Systems Engineer for the satellite referred to as MEP in the article. I am in the best of both worlds… working on robotic missions in space!
Because videos speak louder than words, check these videos out:
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