Sara Spangelo didn’t quite make it as an astronaut. But four years after an unsuccessful tryout with Canada’s space agency, she’s achieved her own space milestone: unveiling the world’s lowest-cost always-available satellite communications network.
Spangelo, who holds a PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan, is CEO of Swarm Technologies, which seeks to provide affordable data services for devices anywhere on Earth. Today, nearly 90% of the planet’s surface, including oceans, deserts, and polar regions, lacks internet access. Connecting via satellite has long been cost-prohibitive, because satellite networks typically cost billions of dollars to deploy and maintain.
The key to lowering costs was to bring down size: Swarm’s satellites, roughly the size of a slice of French toast, are the smallest two-way communication devices in orbit today. Because they’re so compact, they can hitch rides on commercial rockets for bargain prices: total launch costs for Swarm’s full constellation of 150 satellites, which the company will finish placing in low Earth orbit by the end of 2021, will run less than $3 million.
Swarm’s data connection, which uses the VHF radio spectrum, won’t enable seafarers to stream Netflix: its current transfer rate of 1 kilobit per second is similar to 1990s dial-up. Swarm’s niche, rather, is giving customers the ability to transmit small yet highly useful packets of information from the world’s most far-flung places. This enables them to remotely monitor water supplies, detect leaks in pipelines, measure soil contents, track wildlife, or guarantee the temperature of vaccines in cold-chain transport.
