Democratization of Space

Democratizing "New Space"

Planet Labs @ Planet.com

Planet Labs / GreenPolicy360

To image the entire Earth every day, Planet Labs has worked out that it needs 150 satellites in orbit concurrently...

Planet Labs democratizing space / Forbes - April 2014

Re/Code

How NASA led tech to the Cloud / WSJ - May 2012

Robbie Schingler, a co-founder of Planet Labs, met Worden in Houston, TX.

“For five hours we were yelling at each other across the table,” recalls Robbie Schingler, now 33, who was then between master’s degrees at the International Space University and the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. “The next day he said, ‘Let’s write a paper together on the pros and cons of weaponizing space. You write the cons, I’ll write the pros.’”

The paper never materialized, but an unusual friendship and mentoring relationship did. When Worden became director of the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley four years later, he recruited the group of Houston 20-somethings, along with a handful of their friends. Included were Schingler and Chris Kemp, then 28, who would become Ames’s director of business development and later its chief technology officer.

NASA review

NASA Oversight Hearing, Feb 25, 2015

Launched March 3, 2015, NASA #TechPort website #‎NASA‬’s latest tech development activities

Pete Worden - NASA Ames departure - SpaceNews - Feb 2015 / It would be a profound shift to see the Strategic Defense Initiative-SDI guy, who helped launch 'new space' (and Planet Labs) continue his move from maverick military to earth/biology... so to speak

Worden told SpaceNews that the nine years he spent at Ames were the most enjoyable of his 40 years of public service.

“In the last nine years we have launched dozens of small, low-cost satellites – and helped ignite a major new industry in this area. Ames people have revitalized space biology and begun to apply the new field of synthetic biology,” Worden said via email Feb. 26. “Ames has provided entry technology for the emerging commercial space launch sector. We have helped launch small satellites working with a number of nations. And we’ve hosted and inspired thousands of students.”

[Ed: from early Cold War 'spin offs' of military R&D and defense spending came ARAPANET from DARPA, the genesis of today's Internet]

The future of NASA and SDI are a separate topic for others to address. Here at GreenPolicy we are tracking the utilization of technology that has moved from 'first generation' military purposes to first generation "New Space" 'open' uses. The democratization of space envisions moving from military-dependency to civilian/educational/environmental/scientific/engineering/resource monitoring and management -- a full spectrum of #EarthScience that, hopefully, brings a future of environmental-national-global security. Our position is that the application and re-purposing of initial space-borne military systems can be and should be applied to earth resource monitoring and management as legislative *technology transfer* has codified over the past two decades. The successful restructuring of the old Cold War systems is a challenge, without question, yet the example of Pete Worden and Planet Labs bring both hope and a direction that is worth pursuing in the face of rising security challenges that are global and threats to security within and across borders.

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• OpenStack strategy

OpenStack "Cloud in a Box"

https://www.nebula.com/

• “New” model of Citizen Science

Micro-satellites, Nanosats

OTS components