Episode 2 | Naeem Altaf | IBM Space Tech CTO, D.E.

Luke: Welcome to In The Open with Luke and Joe. I'm your host, Luke Schantz, and here's my co- host, Joe Seppi. And a big welcome to our guest, Space Tech CTO, Naeem. Before we get to our show, don't forget to like and subscribe. Thank you for joining us today. We have an exciting show for you. We're going to be talking about Space Tech and edge computing. But before we bring in our guest Naeem, let's bring in our co- host, Joe Seppi. Hey Joe.

Joe: Hey, how are ya?

Luke: I'm good. Welcome back. Glad to have you back on In The Open.

Joe: Yeah, it's great to be here. Second show. Rocking and rolling.

Luke: So... Oh, go ahead.

Joe: The weather is great here and I know you know that too because you're in Connecticut as well, but it's 58 degrees. It's fantastic.

Luke: It is. I feel like winter may give us another little taste, I think, but I am feeling that the hope springs eternal. This is very, it's a beautiful time of the year.

Joe: For sure.

Luke: I think there's even been some space weather lately. I saw something in the news about a space hurricane. We're going to have to ask Naeem about that.

Joe: Yeah, fascinating.

Luke: Yeah. This is going to be such an interesting show because edge computing is a big topic that I'm interested in and it seems to me like edge computing in space is the ultimate edge. Right? The edge of our known world.

Joe: And one of the things that kind of, I don't know if pride is the right word, but having joined IBM a few years ago, the work that we've done with NASA with the moon landing, I love the Space Tech stuff. I'm excited to talk to Naeem.

Luke: Before we bring him in. He gave me a short video that we could play that's going to set up one of our first topics we're going to be talking about. So let's get to that video and without further ado.

Speaker 3: From the earliest days of Apollo, when NASA landed the first humans on the moon, IBM has had the distinct honor of playing a key role in NASA's space exploration efforts. Fast forward 50 years to today when the International Space Station is helping to lay the groundwork for living and working in space. A baseline for future NASA missions Traveling at over 17,000 miles per hour and orbiting the earth every 90 minutes, the ISS offers one of a kind microgravity environment where crew members perform research that cannot be done anywhere else. Critical research like DNA sequencing on the ISS provides foundational knowledge that will be essential as NASA seeks to venture further into space than ever before. However, analyzing this research often requires data to be down linked to earth and processed by personnel on the ground, a procedure that can take several weeks and delay results. That's where IBM comes. In partnership with NASA, ISS National Lab, HPE and Red Hat, IBM created the edge computing and space solution, eliminating the need to move massive libraries of DNA sequencing data by presenting containerized analytical code locally right on the ISS where the data originates. This solution has the potential to cut analysis time by nearly 50%, opening the door for many new mission possibilities. In addition, NASA researchers will use this platform to more rapidly develop, test, and push code to the ISS in a fraction of the time by leveraging Red Hat code ready containers and connecting to IBM cloud running OpenShift on the ground. This groundbreaking partnership will not only expedite NASA's ISS research but will help to lay the foundation for future exploration opportunities on ISS and beyond. We can't wait to support what comes next.

Luke: Hello, welcome to In The Open, Naeem. Thank you for joining us.

Naeem: Thank you so much for having me.

Luke: So before we dig into so many exciting topics today, let's just help our audience out with a brief self introduction so they get to know who you are and where you're coming from.

Naeem: Sure. So yes. My name is Naeem Altaf. I'm IBM's distinguished engineer and CTO for Space Tech. I run a innovation lab which is based here in Austin, Texas.

Luke: Excellent. And maybe we should lay a little foundation here too for our audience. Maybe we need to let people know what edge is and why. Obviously the thing that comes to mind here is bandwidth issues. Right? You can't have all the data in space and bring it back down. So I think this is actually, if people weren't familiar with edge, this is maybe one of the best use cases to help you understand why edge.

Naeem: Sure. Yeah. So let's start from the terrestrial, on the ground stuff. So there's a huge buzz in the industry about the 5G networks. So basically what edge, at a very high level, what edge means is that edge, or what edge computing means wherever the data is being produced, you do computation right there. So let's say if you have a sensor far away in the ocean which is looking for temperature, you don't want to bring all that data onto wherever you're on- prem or on the cloud and do processing. You want to do processing right there. So that's what basically edge computing means. Another good example is the smart cars and the smart phones of the future and the autonomous cars. So imagine if the car in autonomous cars, the future, every time they have to make a decision, they're asking the cloud or coming back to on- prem data center and saying, " What should I do now?" Can you imagine what can go wrong there? It has to make decision in milliseconds right there. So that's like a moving edge computing platform right there where it's making decisions, learning from its surrounding from all the sensors and making a decision right there.

Joe: So essentially, it's really decentralizing where the computational stuff is happening, which is really important with all the IoT devices that are proliferating around the world.

Naeem: Exactly. inaudible is very dense now. The micro controllers we have right from Raspberry Pi, inaudible, they are so powerful they even have GPUs on them. So you can do inaudible, you can even do modeling. So whatever in the remote areas, you can do that. And in our case we wanted to extend that to space. Because like you mentioned, Luke, the latency issue, the bandwidth issue, if we have challenges on the ground, there are much bigger challenges when we are in the orbit around 500, 600 kilometers above. So there's lot of stuff which happens there and we will talk about that. And the idea was, can we do competition right there and get the action level insight and send that piece of info nugget?

Luke: That makes so much sense. So walk us through a little bit more detail than what was in the video about-

Naeem: Sure.

Luke: What's being done now and maybe how it's going to be used in the future.

Naeem: Yes. So last year we got together with the International Space Station, National Labs, NASA and HP. And we were looking for the projects where we can extend the concept of edge computing and space. And they mentioned this is project, DNA sequencing which runs in the space station. Space station, in simple words, it's a big laboratory which is orbiting the earth. There's so many experiments happen for microgravity for the future exploration as we heading towards the next few years towards moon and planning towards Mars. This is like a lab in the orbit so you can do this different test. So one of these use cases of DNA sequencing was where they take a sample from the surface or they're looking for microbes in the environment and they can do a DNA sequencing right there in the orbit. So I think three years ago they sent this inaudible iron device up there, which is a handheld device which can plug into as a USB device into a computer. And the way it worked inaudible was last year that the PI, which is the principal investigator on the ground, they'll put a request in and they'll say, " We want to astronauts to take a sample," and based on whatever the schedule of astronaut, they'll take a sample and it can create up to half a terabyte of data. So it's one run. And then all of the data needs to come down and then it needs to be processed and all the logistics and everything. A significant time has passed since I put the request in and when I get my results back. And what I'm looking for is basically a resulting file, like a PDF file which tells me that resulting data. So we said, "Okay, you know what? We can do all this processing right there." Because on February 20th this year the SVC2 computers from HP, they were going up inaudible computers and we were in partnership with them. You know what? We have the computer right there which has GPU and CPUs. So all we need to do is take this open source code. And it has multiple steps. It's very complex. It has the base scaling, it has the multiplexing alignment analysis. So we broke it down into, okay, for the base scaling we need a much more powerful processing, which is GPU. So we used GPU for that. And then when the results comes out, we'll take a second system, because there are two systems for the CPU computation. So we took the open source code, we containerized it and then we used our OpenShift code ready container platform. So we packaged that whole thing. Of course there's a lot of testing, security scans you have to go through on the ground because we had a exact replica of those two systems on the ground at NASA's facility. So we can test it before you can push it out. So we did all the testing, that stuff. The code was put on, I think around October on the flight system and now they're up there. So we are hoping by end of this month or first week of April we will be able to bring systems live up and start running through the process. And this will, and just to close, the whole process will take around six to eight hours. So let's say if PI put a request in and next week it's scheduled for the astronauts to take a sample, literally after that, it will take probably a day or two and we'll have the results.

Joe: And that's as compared to what before you...

Naeem: Probably six to eight weeks easy. Yes.

Luke: That is huge. So something Joe and I were talking about, Naeem, when we were prepping for this, this is also exciting and I must say I have serious jealousy when I hear you talk about, " Oh yeah, I was working with the space station and they asked me if I could do this." I like what I do, but that is definitely cooler than I think what I do. So let me ask you this. Is there any way that the average developer or student could get involved and somehow be doing something with space computing?

Naeem: Definitely. So let's say for example, if you go onto the NASA websites, they put out these different projects all the time for the community to get involved. They're big in open source. IBM is big, huge in open source. So we open sourced two projects last year which was recognized as a top five open source projects for the game changing of future. One was about the space inaudible awareness and one was about the cube set frameworks for the autonomous cube sets or drones. So it's open to public. Anybody should be able to hit inaudible. Should be able to hit them and let's contribute work together.

Joe: Yeah, that's really cool. I'm super excited about this sort of work. I get these alerts when the ISS is flying over my sky and can go out there and take my son out and... They're out there in space flying over. So that's really cool and it's great that folks can get involved with that work. I'm really excited.

Naeem: Definitely. And if you folks get a chance, right, we'll talk later a little bit about StarLink. It's like a train of 60 sets. It's like a reindeer passing by. You cannot miss it. So go on the site. There are many sites which tells you when these satellites will do a pass over your location and you can see these things. Really could see inaudible.

Joe: And that's a good segue, too. There's lots of stuff orbiting the earth and I was reading a little bit about the Link is down there too, the Space Tech SSA. Talk to me about that because it's amazing how much stuff is out there from small to really large and traveling at great speeds. And it seems like it'd be a little bit of chaos.

Naeem: Yes. So by the way, the speed in the lower earth orbit, which is around between 100 to 1000 miles, that's classified as a lower earth orbit. They're traveling at 17, 500 miles per hour, these objects. It is extremely fast. Right? And even if you have a small debris, 10 centimeter, no, one centimeter, it can do a substantial damage if it collides with an object. So this is a very hot topic in the space industry. And you will see the names like Space Situational Awareness, space debris, right? Space traffic management. But still we are trying to have a grip on what's out there in the orbit. Now think about you have seen these sites like flight radar and stuff like that where you are, you're tracking your flights going from a point A to point B. Imagine if your control tower is saying that a flight coming from Austin to Connecticut and it shows you four paths. Right? Now it can be a disaster on the runway. You don't know which one to trust, which is the right path. And you have thousands of flights every day. So this is a problem where we need to track what exactly is there and what is the path of these different objects. And the way today it's done is with the radars and it's done through different department of data and there are some private companies doing that. So going back to your point, what's out there, what's this? Right? So today before StarLink came two years ago when they started launching these satellites, we had launched 9, 000 satellites which the public knows of. And out of those, 5, 000 are active. The rest is debris and stuff like that. Now, just today there was another launch from SpaceX to put these StarLink satellites this morning. And their count, I think has gone to 1, 200 plus now. They plan to put 14, 000 satellites in next two, three years. Then there is Amazon inaudible. They want to put 3,200 there and there is OneWeb. They want to put another 2, 000. And then there is an unknown company. It's still being talked about from China. They want to put 13, 000 more. So you're talking about around 30,000 to 40, 000 sats in the next three to five years. Whereas to date we only have between 5,000 and 10,000. So can you imagine what's going to happen in that congested space? Because commercial reason why they want to put broadband, all this stuff. So that's why we inaudible conjunction search. So we want to know when the objects are coming closer to each other. Just last year, space station had to maneuver three times. Maneuvering in the orbit is the last resort. You don't want to burn your fuel. It's very limited and expensive. And one of the part from our previous rocket, it was coming within few kilometers range. And actually, the astronauts had to go into the evacuation mode, I think, into the Soyuz capsule to exit in case. It was that serious. I think this is where the open source community, the developers can really take it to the next level. And I would even go as far as this is an optimization problem. This is where quantum. These are the magnitude of problems that quantum can help even though we are in early strategies of quantum computing. But start thinking about it. What can be done? And how can we use this next generation of compute to solve these problems? And another thing is it's causing also lots of challenges for these astronomers on the ground. You have seen these billion dollar telescopes in South America and Chile and Europe which are doing these deep space observations. Now, imagine if you have this web of stuff in their path. You are obstructing with the data light coming back in. So we have to think about it. How can we optimize all these things and everybody's happy?

Joe: Yeah. And that doesn't seem inaudible. Our producer Scott, is blasting messages at us that I think is apt. Massive air traffic controller problem. This sort of stuff isn't managed by humans, right? I would have to think that this is AIML sort of work. And you even mentioned quantum. How do you manage, especially with the proliferation of stuff in the future, how do you really manage all that?

Naeem: It's hard to know what's in the orbit just for the commercial companies, even though there are few which are emerging. Mostly this domain is owned by the DoD and the forces, right? Because they have these radars and all this stuff. So what needs to happen? First of all, this is a policy thing where the governments needs to come together and say this is a serious threat for humanity. We have to come together and work, just like climate change kind of stuff. We need to work together. We need to have policies. And technology is there. Technology is not a problem. For example, we can use blockchain. So let's say all the agencies, they start sharing data. We can use blockchain. So we can have the transparency, provenance, trust built from there so everybody knows who's touching what in the data sphere. And then we can have AIML to figure it out, to detect these orbits and predict better movement of these objects. And this year, I think this year, yeah, ESA is sending out a spacecraft to clean up, to remove that debris. And that's a classic traveling salesperson problem. Again, looking at supercomputing, potentially quantum in future. It can be done but the governments have to come together. Which what I fear is, like any other thing would happen, that they probably wait for something happen and then say, "Oh, now we have to get together." So I hope before something bad happens, we come together and pay attention. This is a serious problem.

Joe: Yeah. It's the classic kind of thing. Code is easy. People are hard. It's not just the code. It's the government entities and policy and getting everybody on board and working together. I imagine that's probably not easy. And then I don't know if this is a question from the chat or from our producer here, but it's a good question. Are there multiple orbit layers, like high earth versus low earth, varying opportunities and challenges within that?

Naeem: So there are three layers on the top. One is a lower earth orbit, one is a middle earth orbit and one is a geosynchronous orbit. So in the lower earth orbit, that ranges between 100 to 1,000 miles and that's where most of your earth observing satellites, space station is above, 254 miles above. Majority of the stuff is in lower earth orbit. And that's why inaudible moving so fast. That's why you can see them orbiting almost 12 to 13 times a day, these satellites. And for earth observation, this modern satellites which should go up, they can scan the whole globe right now in two days. In future, in one day. So your data is only over 24 hours. So imagine that. And the resolution is 50 centimeter. They can literally watch what's in your pocket kind of stuff. The second is the middle earth orbit. That's where your GPS satellites are there and military stuff is there. And then you have the geo, which is the above 22, 000 miles above. This is where if you have the dish inaudible, like dish network or dish, because it's synchronous with the earth's rotation. So it's not like lower earth orbit, it's going zoom, zoom, zoom. So you will lose connection every 10 minutes because the pass is only eight to 10 minutes. In geo, you are in sync. Your dish is. So you always have a constant connection. These are three orbits. Yes.

Luke: Fascinating. So let me ask you about the other project we're linking below here. The CubeSat project. Where does that fit into the orbits and where does that fit into the hierarchy of CubeSat? So I'm imagining you've got these space telescopes and communication satellites at the top and then we've got this whole continuum down now to the CubeSat.

Naeem: So the idea behind that open source CubeSat project was basically a distributed computing. And if you have a swarm of these CubeSats. So what's happening in the industry, and I think from our developer point of view in the cloud native world, they can probably relate to this. Before the cloud native containers cube, we had these monolithic products. Right? Takes long time to develop and have a very, less frequent releases and all that stuff. It's big, big thing. Think of those big satellites which we build for 200 to 300 million, takes three to five years. Huge cost. And you send it up and they stay there for 10, 15 years and that's the end of life. But the concept of CubeSat is very similar to microservices. So you have these very small, lightweight, cheap, raw cube sensors and everything is half million compared to 200 to 300 million. Students build these CubeSats for less than$ 50,000. So let's say even if you take a pro stuff, half a million dollar. You can build these things within six months. Within one year you can launch them. So if we have these swarm of these CubeSats, and because the technology is so advanced, the cameras we have and the compute power, you have Raspberry Pi with inaudible memory with a quad core processors and everything and GPUs as well with other microprocessors. It's very powerful. So what's happening in the industrial trend, we are watching that companies are going with these small sat category like CubeSats, even nano sats. So what we thought, okay, if we have a swarm of these, let's say 13 of these, we launch them and there is a hurricane which is coming in the Atlantic, so basically it's fully automated, fully autonomous. So a signal goes from the bottom or the machine learning model detects that there's something being formed in the ocean. It asks all of its peers. Basically it's based on messaging system, open source inaudible. It asks, okay, who has the bandwidth in terms of resources to go and look at this problem? inaudible we are available. It forms a virtual cluster and it goes, let's start working towards this problem. And then you can get the payload from the ground and say, " Here's a new model. Start doing inaudible on this kind of problem." So basically, distributed computing at the edge, you're forming clusters to tackle a problem. The same concept can be applied under drones. So we can have cluster of these drones in the ground. Actually, that brings another point. There is a very interesting thing happening in the industry. So the next generation of communication between the ground and satellites is the optical. It's a laser communication. Much faster, high bandwidth. Today we do mostly radio signals. But the challenge over there is clouds. And most of the time, the earth is covered with clouds over the areas which are of interest. So how do you handle that stuff? There are companies who are saying, " You know what? We can build these drones which can fly above the clouds so they can be like a middleware. So they will intercept the signal from the satellite and they will do processing and then they will fly to where they have a line of sight to the ground station clear and then do a down link." So a lot of innovation is happening. But I think these light optical connections, it's going to move even more compute up there because you will have so much fast connections. See, the compute is not a challenge. You saw with Mars Rover, we are using the IBM's chip, power PC chip from 10, 15 years ago, right? inaudible. The network bandwidth and speed is the challenge. If we solve that problem, it'll be really cool.

Luke: That is amazing to think about. It really is some kind of science fiction scenario you just laid out about beaming data to drones that are relaying it. It reminds me, I saw in eastern Europe where they didn't have a lot of infrastructure, this is 20 years ago, they were building open source line of site IR network devices. They would just use a piece of PVC and literally the IR generator from a remote control with a lens and they could create these one kilometer, 10 megabit connections. But again, like you're saying, once it gets foggy or is raining the network's down.

Naeem: Yes.

Joe: Yeah. People talk about clouds, moving everything to the cloud, but now the clouds are in the way.

Naeem: We move that cloud up into the orbit.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. inaudible. When you were talking about drones, I was like, is it going to blow the cloud away?

Naeem: That can be interesting too, right? Have much bigger drone with the fan and say just move aside.

Joe: Yeah. At least enough to get the optical connections. It's fascinating.

Naeem: But that also brings, again, these are new problems. So it's a very challenging, interesting stuff. So optimization path for the communication from the orbit, the ground station. Again, opportunity for machine learning, AI, potential quantum in the future. Because you cannot have ground stations like the towers, like the cell towers. Earth will not look pretty if we had 50,000 70,000 grounds. So if we have only limited one, how do you route efficiently? How do you route it down, and how do you route between them? This is optimization problem.

Joe: Yeah. And like you said, the traveling salesman. I imagine, we talk about quantum emerging over the coming years and I wonder how much more that will come into play with these scenarios that you're describing.

Naeem: Yes.

Joe: It's really interesting.

Luke: So Naeem, you were on my podcast last year. And when we were talking then, you had mentioned there were all of these Mars missions coming up within the next six months. And now I think all of them have played out. So could you give us just a quick little industry snapshot of what's happening with Mars and help give us some context around why it's important?

Naeem: Sure. Yeah. So last year around summer in, I think, August, July or August timeframe, these three missions flew. The first one was the UAE Mars inaudible and that was a orbiter. The second one was inaudible went from China. That was orbiter plus a rover and the lander, and then the third one was Perseverance, which was the lander and the rover. So the first one, of course, it takes six months to travel. And in February the first one was the Hope probe. The second one was the Chinese probe and rover and third one was the US rover. So the US probe Hope is orbiting and its primary goal was to look at the weather patterns on the Mars because that will help in the future if you want habitability and sending people to the Mars in next decade or two decades. So it's going to learn about the atmosphere of Mars. The Chinese, similar thing. It's looking for ancient life. They will deploy their rover in May. And that is the most hardest aspect of this. You saw the seven minutes of terror, as they say, when it's coming down be because the lag is 11 minutes of communication between Mars and earth. So if I told you something, " Go and execute this," for next 11 minutes, I have no idea what you did. And then within those 11 minutes and seven minutes it has already landed, right? So China will attempt that in May. And so they're also orbiting Mars and looking for the atmosphere and then they will go to look for ancient life. So this is also very interesting because they have a helicopter, Ingenuity, also attached underneath the rover. So they are doing multiple things. They want to also go and look for any signs of life. Then the very interesting thing, they're going to collect these samples and then hand over to this helicopter and the helicopter will go and then there will be a future rocket come, will pick up the samples and bring it back. That's to be in future. But that's what the plan is about. So yeah, very fascinating. I think it made some movements yesterday or two days ago and it can hear inaudible because we have much more interesting the computers on the top. The chip was, as was the power PC 750 single port. If you just want to do a comparison, so that chip is 233 megahertz and the clock speed you have on your iPhone is 3. 2 gigahertz. So it's comparing six billion transistors to almost 16 billion transistors. You can imagine how much difference is. But the name of the game is liability because it has to be radiation hardened. The environment is very harsh. So anyways, it's just glad to have that chip over there and running. But in near future we'll start seeing some very interesting things coming back. You already see the pictures coming from the Perseverance, right?

Joe: Yep.

Naeem: It's very fascinating,

Luke: Amazing. And there's talk of, within decades or decade, even sending people to Mars. Does this seem realistic to you? I know that's a out of the blue question there, but...

Naeem: The biggest challenge first is the landing. The landing is the hardest part on the Mars because of its inaudible. You saw this time they used parachute to land that over. Not if you are talking about Starship, it's a gigantic ship, almost like 10 story store. I think in next 10 years if they can successfully, multiple times launch, and as the window is so long. It's six month window to get there. So I think maybe after 10 years. Because this robot is also going to inaudible atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide so you have to convert that CO2 into the oxygen. So I think 20, 30 years, yes. It's far.

Luke: So interesting.

Joe: Yeah, it's fascinating. I want to bring in a question from our producer, Scott. And this was something I was thinking about earlier too. Scott asked, " Are there any concerns about a critical mass of orbiting devices and crafts that somehow impacts weather systems, global temperatures, reflected sunlight?" Which is something I had wondered about too. And how can we help monitor that?

Naeem: You mean for the inaudible orbit, correct?

Joe: Yeah. The orbit.

Naeem: Yes. So it's a big concern. One concern we heard from the astronomers and the scientists on the ground was that the light which is being produced by the StarLink satellites because of so many of things is reflection and causing disturbance from the data. But the solar weather. So you guys mentioned, you were mentioning earlier that hurricane, which we just saw this phenomenon. First time, we have witnessed that. Basically, you probably are aware of Aurora, right? When the solar winds or the solar activity happened from the sun and it hits the magnetic field on the north and south pole. When they're both combined, this beautiful thing happens in inaudible which we call them the northern lights, they call them. So yeah, it's a huge concern. Actually, it's a very good question you asked. Our next open source and resource project, which we just kicked off last week is going to be space weather. Because space weather plays a huge impact the communication. So you probably have heard about that in certain regions of the world, the satellite communications were not available for this amount of time. This is because your sun becomes so active and it sends these flares. And we can get two to three days in advance. NASA has the website where you can get all this data. And based on that, it'll damage the electronics over there. But it hits directly on the ground as well where it can damage the grid. So this is serious stuff and we are going to start working on the space weather now. And this is, again, open to the community who wants to help. But this is a very another interesting use case and definitely it has an impact.

Luke: I remember reading the scenario like this. It happened in, what? The late 18 hundreds. They called it the Carrington event where there was some sort of solar weather that took down the telegraphy system and maybe we haven't had an event of that equivalence, but we actually experienced solar weather affecting telegraphs.

Naeem: And now we have the technology, we have the probe. There is a solar probe which is so close. It's just mind boggling that this probe is so close, it's watching the sunlight. So we have probes between sun. And we have, I think, at least two or three layers of these probes which are watching the solar activities and that can help us to predict the events happening on the earth and how we can maneuver. And again, like I said, in next three, five years, if the skies are going to be covered with all these 50,000 sats, the first thing is the sats are going to get affected. So everybody needs to be smarter how to use these resources because the space is for everyone. It's not for one person. It's for all of us. So we have to be very smart how we use these resources.

Luke: You had mentioned, too, the regulation around this is, I guess my question here is this seems like a scenario where it's almost like the age of the ocean from a bygone era where you have the law of the sea and you're saying it's based on precedence. And so it seems like there, obviously we've been in space for a while, less than a hundred years. But a lot of this is like you're saying. It's uncharted territory literally and figuratively that we've got to work out with these different countries for a collective good.

Naeem: Yes. For example, if you have a half a billion dollar satellite in lower earth orbit and I have my CubeSat and they're coming in each other's way, who should move? Common sense will tell you who should move. But so as similar incident happened, without naming the two companies last year, one had a big satellite and one had the pizza box. And they said, " Move. Because in the next three days there's a possibility of collision." And the messaging which is happening is through, " I sent you an email." And the pizza box company said, " Oh, we never saw your email." And of course the half a billion dollar guys had to move their stuff. They don't want to get destroyed, right? So you can see this. So yeah, there needs to be policies, laws, more real time system. We have fixed this problem with the social media, the amount of traffic which flows every day. This is a very small problem compared to that. So I think it can be. It's just a matter of people coming together.

Joe: So when you say pizza box company, I'm just imagining a thank you for ordering box flying through the sky. What?

Naeem: It's just a very small. But there was a company, I think last year or a year before, they said they want to advertise from the orbit. So they want to have a big display. Come on. Let's not go that far. Because there's so much great work happening on the ground for deep space observation. We don't want now ads showing up at the middle of night from the lower earth orbit. But there's lots of crazy ideas happening right now.

Joe: I'm reminded when I lived in Boise a long time ago, there was a local pizza place that actually delivered a pizza to Alaska. And it was a big story. But I'm curious though, as there's more consumer sort of stuff, how do you manage that? And maybe that's off topic, but it seems like the proliferation would just be astronomical, pun intended.

Naeem: The regulatory authorities, they're the only ones. Otherwise it's the wild west. Just go and claim. And the next thing is moon, right? Okay. Whoever goes there first put their flag, it's theirs? The whole moon is theirs? So there has to be a agencies coming together and the regulatory authorities and have a plan for it. We are not opposing the technology. It's great for everyone. But let's have a plan. Let's not pollute it.

Joe: Yeah, I was trying to explain to my son last week. He was talking about selling property on the moon and I'm like, " You can't just sell it." Anyway, just reminded of that.

Luke: That's interesting. He was going to be a, he's already, he's enterprising. He wants to be a real estate agent on the moon.

Naeem: Let me add one more thing. On that note, right? The astro mining. I think that's a trillion, or I don't know what's higher than trillion. I don't know. It was a very interesting word which has many zeros I can't count. That's the industry to go in. Because to go and get that rock from that flying asteroid, we already saw attempts last year. The Japanese agency and the NASA, they both took a sample and bought back. That's another huge area of exploration.

Joe: You combine that with NFTs and forget it.

Luke: What? I'm going to short asteroid mining.

Joe: Were we talking about some sort of astro mining thing a long time ago, Luke? What was...

Luke: Yeah, we were at an event, I think, on Roosevelt Island at that tech inaudible campus and I had just read about it and I came to you and I'm like, " Joe, this is a trillion dollar idea. We're going to do space mining and I'm going to set it up for IBM. Trillion dollar idea." And I think people were looking at me, they were like, " What is he talking about? Should I be listening to this?" I'm still into it. I want in.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. That's funny.

Luke: One question that came to mind about the idea of edge on satellites we're talking about now too, but I could envision now that we're going to be going more to the moon and Mars, are we going to see a data center on Mars where, let's say, IBM puts a data center on Mars and we extend that model? Is that what's going to happen? Okay.

Naeem: So in the next 40 years, yes, we are at the Artemis program going back to the moon. So Nokia, they got a contract to put 4G network there. And NASA team, they want to put a data center. There are already these discussions about lunar gateway. So yes, it is happening. So putting data center... Because this time their mission is to go and stay and to set up a base there for future launches from there. Especially if they can find water over there and they can use that as a fuel and stuff to go to the next one, that will be huge. So yes, data centers are coming on the moon. If this Artemis program, everything goes smoothly, we will see some flavor of Kubernetes and containers running on the lunar data center.

Luke: That is so cool.

Naeem: But that won't be, for example, it'll be edge from else, but everything is relative. From there it will be, they'll call it on- prem.

Luke: That's a good point you bring up too because I feel like the term, I think that's why edge is such a confusing term sometimes inaudible. Because one person's edge is another person's regional CDN or something. It's all relative to where your work's being done.

Naeem: Yeah. The spectrum is huge, right? So let's say all the way from traditional ways of where on- prem, you had data centers, then the evolution in cloud came into the picture. And then you have this, let's say, if you talk about telco, right? They have MTS for the switching offices. So you can just, wherever you stop, you can say this is my edge, right? You stop there. If you go one more further, you say now that's cell site. Which if you have looked at the cell site, they have the room next to it. It has computers, everything. You can say, " That's my edge." Or you can say, " This raspberry pi in my hand, which is talking to the seller network all the way back to the cloud. This is my edge." Or somebody can say, " My sensor is my edge." So spectrum is huge for edge computing. Yes.

Joe: That's really interesting. I want to ask you what you are excited about in the future, but I feel like a lot of what we've been talking about is what you're excited about and coming up. But another project I think we've talked about, I don't know if we want to get too much into it here, but the Mayflower project. Are you involved in that as well?

Naeem: Yeah. So me and inaudible and Brett and Dawn who are actually from the Mayflower, we actually worked together three years ago on a napkin to put this thing together. How are we going to build this whole thing? So yes, we were involved from the very first day. And you have seen last year it went to the waters and most of it is happening. To me, what Mayflower is in very simple words, it's a lab. It's a lab in the ocean. And for folks, if you can go inaudible, you will see the live dashboard, everything. That's what we, our team, folks on our team that built. I want to give a shout to inaudible and my team. He did all the development of most of the backend stuff. So what we see, this boat is a lab. So think about this. I was actually just talking to Brett two days ago. I was like, okay, you know what? Your lab is floating in some far, far areas in the ocean because almost one fourth of the world is oceans. Plenty of water there. And there is no connectivity. What if we have our satellite and I want to see what, because of GPS I know where you are. Can you go and check for certain things around here? Because we have so many sensors there. And I send you a payload, I send you a containerized code, relay through the satellite and down to your boat. And then you can do your stuff and send me the results back. So that's the next thing which we are thinking about to connect space to the ocean and to the boat with the satellite and how we can do communication. And now that is inaudible, right? That's inaudible in the ocean somewhere. And we have an edge in the space. So we are trying to bring all these things together now.

Joe: Yeah. That's fascinating. Really cool stuff.

Luke: Reminds me too, maybe two years ago Joe and I were doing an event in New York at a makerspace called Fat Cat FabLab and one of our advocates at the time bought one of those iridium satellite rock block development boards. And it was this, he did the demo, sent it out through the cloud and then everyone's looking out the window and then... It was a lot of anticipation of is this going to work? Is it going to come down? And it did. We sent the message through the cloud and we got it back through the thing and it was a huge hit. But I'm imagining the bandwidth there was limited and the coverage was somewhat limited. But now we're seeing this, you're mentioning there's going to be a, over this next few years, a proliferation of global bandwidth connectivity with, like you said, at least three or four different companies or governments putting up these huge communication networks.

Naeem: Yes. And for anybody out there who's listening, if you're interested just to start playing with this stuff. You need a inaudible dish which is like 120 bucks and then a Raspberry Pi and a SDR, software defined radio. Just plug that in. And if you have seen the images from the GOES-16 and - 17 satellites, the full globe picture with the weather pattern, everything, the clouds, colorful pictures, you can get that every 15 minutes. I have in my bag here. And because it's not geo, so you point to it. That's it. So every 15 minutes you'll get the latest picture which everybody's getting you'll get in your inaudible. It's that easy. And you will learn a lot how the communications are happening between the satellite because you have built a ground station now. So you have a ground station back home and you plug it into your laptop and you're getting his images. And if anybody interested, just Google it, GOES- 16 open source SDR, you'll get the whole stuff written there. Just follow the instructions, you'll have it.

Joe: Yeah, that's really cool. I've mentioned before, I have a young son. I'd love to put that together and just really explore the connection between us and what's out there in space and whatnot. It's really cool. And I was going to ask too, I'm glad you jumped in with that, but are there other ways to get general, regular people involved in some of this work in that tangible way?

Naeem: Yes. So there's a community called Satnauts and basically these are amateurs all over the country and all over the world. And you can get the code run on Raspberry Pi and they're basically getting signals. You just need a software defined radio dongle. It's a USB device. And you can start getting signals from... They're actually the first ones, whenever you launch the CubeSats or small sats, they basically broadcast a message to all these amateurs who can find first signal. And it's very cool. So if you want to learn about that, yes, be part of that community.

Joe: Very cool.

Luke: We should do that. I feel like that would be a great project. We could even, I'm sure, like you said, there's tutorials out there, but maybe we could even do a blog post on IBM developer about that.

Joe: Yeah.

Luke: And yeah, that's so interesting. I definitely want in.

Joe: Yeah. We had a dish satellite on our new house here, but we use regular DSL or whatever it is. And so I actually took the dish off and we're using the arm part to hang up bird feeders.

Naeem: I did the same when I got that parabolic dish, I used the old arm of that dish and I plugged it in and I put it on the floor and it's not pointed up yet.

Joe: Great, I'm glad I didn't take the whole thing down. I can just hook up a better parabolic dish on there too and just get started. That's great.

Luke: And I also wanted to mention that regarding the CubeSat stuff, I found a blog post that your team put up. And that's the link to the blog post that has some stuff about the CubeSat project.

Joe: Cool. And it looks like we've got a question from Facebook. What's the role of Kubernetes in this, from edge to satellite?

Naeem: Yes. So this was the experimentation which we did with the ISS for the DNA sequencing. Basically, we containerized the code and we use the cube platform so we can run multiple workloads in the future. But again, depending upon the footprint of your hardware, let's say if you only have Raspberry Pi, you can use inaudible to run your container. The goal was to run a containerized code, which is a self containable, clean, I don't have to be dependent upon. Because when you are in the space there, it's air gap environment. You don't have luxury to go and let me go and grab something from the internet. You can't do that. It has to be everything enclosed. So that was the reason we... And plus we had higher resources to run this DNA sequencing. But for example, if I had to do my CubeSat, unless I don't have a very lightweight footprint of cube, I will probably use inaudible.

Joe: Interesting. And you, I don't know if it's what we've mentioned here in the video, I saw Red Hat's as well, is that OpenShift running on some of this?

Naeem: Yes.

Joe: And is it the code ready containers? I'm curious. Do code ready containers, are they able to be deployed on these smaller systems? I was under the impression that you needed a development machine to really run those. But how is that working for you?

Naeem: Yeah, because again, on this system, these are the enterprise class servers, so it wasn't a problem to run this. But if we are looking at a lightweight, then yes. A little bit more power. But I know there's some work been happening but you'll see some interesting stuff happening in the next few months.

Joe: Yeah, really cool. Really cool.

Luke: And this is a question slash comment. Joe, I know you're deep into the JavaScript, but if you do any computing for these satellites, no hot linking any MPM stuff. You got to put that in the container. It's just not going to, can't have that.

Joe: Yeah.

Luke: Sorry.

Joe: This is dumb. But in last year's Open JS World conference, we had a NASA astronaut as one of the keynote speakers. And of course my question is NPM modules are the heaviest thing in the world. Yeah, I don't know if that's actually true but I had to ask. Silly. Cool. Are there any other things that you are excited about that you want to share, Naeem? Before we look to wrap up?

Naeem: Yes, a couple of more things. One thing as IBM's, we are going to very soon release an official Space Tech report, our vision. And we reached out to industry leaders. Instead of just going to, hitting NASA, ESA, 30 times, we went to all the different startups on the terrestrial networks and see what they think of space. How are they related to the space? So to get a much broader view of what the industry thinks about space. So we will have our vision, what we think. We have a long history, like you mentioned in the beginning. So we are no strangers to space. So we put our vision there based on the current and future technologies. And then we will have a point of view from all these industry leaders. And so stay tuned. That will be coming soon. And just a teaser. I think I mentioned about the CubeSat stuff. I want IBM to be seen as democratizing access to space for everyone inaudible. Because imagine, to build something and launch, it's a privileged thing. It's only few nations. And within those few nations,, only few groups can do that. And think about majority. Because space is an inspiration. When you talk about space to anyone, regardless of their, whatever field they're in, it's very inspiring. It's just like we look at above... Every night, just go up and then just look at the sky. It's so peaceful and calm and it gives you inspiration. So the goal over here is that we open it up to everyone in the world. What the goal here is the kids sitting somewhere in far, far part of the world and they write this very simple Python code and just submit to us and we will push that code all the way to the space and it'll do some computation and come back with the results. So they can also feed attached to the space. Yeah, that's the goal.

Joe: Yeah, that's cool. If you could put a message up in space, that would be even cooler. But I know that's probably... But it's true. I walk the dogs every night and I do it. I live in the woods now and the lights are out and I just stare up at space and it's just really amazing. It's really cool.

Naeem: Yes.

Luke: There was some company a while back I saw that was doing some sort of artificial meteor showers where they would basically send up some sand and then throw it at the certain time and you'd see this thing. But I don't know if that really, that didn't scale, I'm pretty sure.

Joe: It's a good question though. Is that part of the air traffic controller work that's being done? Not just are they colliding, but any sort of meteors or meteorites coming into the atmosphere?

Naeem: Any activity over there. Yes. Because they have the equipment to watch for those things. Yes, definitely.

Joe: inaudible.

Naeem: Measure it and share it. Sharing is key. Yeah.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. And are you finding in this work, collaborating with other entities and governments, like I said earlier, people is the hard part, but are people generally working together well and coming up with policies collaboratively in a positive way?

Naeem: Yes. So one of the leading professors, his name is inaudible. He's from UT Austin here. And he is the most vocal in this space. And he's very well versed with the knowledge and everything. So we have been collaborating with him since last year. And these open source projects for the space, we were working with him. Actually, we had a call with him yesterday also. We are going to look for the space whether it has an impact on the objects in the orbit. Does it move? Whatever happens to the characteristics of the object? Yes, we are collaborating with the universities very closely. Yeah.

Joe: That's great. That's great. I encourage folks to follow Naeem on Twitter and the work that he's doing because there's just so much interesting stuff happening now and happening in the future. It's really cool.

Naeem: Thank you.

Luke: Yeah. And it seems like if we get this figured out and we do this, the potential upside here is we live on this finite earth with finite resources. And if we can make this transition and get into space mining, get communication, energy, really, it could be the new boom up there.

Joe: Yep. Very cool.

Luke: Let's see if there's any other questions coming through. I think we are going to try to wrap at the top of the hour because that's what we're scheduled for. There was some question about, it's not really a question, but it says something about making the environment safe for... I think it's a question about, is the DNA, does it get damaged in space? Or I guess imagine if it's inside the space capsule that's radiation shielded.

Naeem: Yes, it is. Yes.

Joe: And it seems like we have another question here. Can satellite images provide real- time traffic control, maybe for self- driving communications too? Do we have a system perhaps good enough to continuously track so many areas and so many vehicles? I guess maybe is the question.

Naeem: Of course. GPS is there, right? So if you use Wayze and all these apps about the traffic stuff. But the interesting thing which we just heard two days ago that StarLink is going to open up for the mobility for the trucks, vehicles, ships. So I think that the more connectivity you have, the more precision will come in the picture. So yeah, I think this is a big disruptor. For example, for the people who are listening, think about these use cases. So think about when the natural disaster, anything appears like that or the fires or any of these things for the first responders, right? You're in very remote areas. If you have little bit of light compute and you have this StarLink antenna, you just plug it there, now you connected with the world. So there's so many use cases because internet connectivity is not everywhere. Even though we assume that maybe it's everywhere. But if we go a little bit north of cities, the connection drops drastically. The speed and everything. So that's why the FCC awarded these big contracts to provide a broadband connectivity to all over the US. And that's where the governments are coming up now and thinking, " Okay, if I will have connectivity at 200, 300 mag in far, far areas, what can I do?" You can do so much environmental monitoring, so many things. So yeah, I think it's a game changer. Let's keep an eye on that.

Joe: Yeah, really cool.

Luke: Thank you so much for your time. It's been really a pleasure having you as a guest. And thank you our audience for spending this time with us chatting. And I think Naeem, let's maybe later on this year at least, we'll come back. Give us up because there's so much going on in this space. We'd love to have you back on.

Naeem: Thank you so much, Luke and Joe, and for having me on. It's a pleasure.

Joe: Yeah. It's been great.