Apply HN: openastro – an open stack for the space industry | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: openastro – an open stack for the space industry

10 pointskartikkumar7 comments

PROBLEM

Finding the right parts for your satellite is time-consuming and inefficient: matching specs consumes a lot of engineering man-hours. Why can't it be as easy as shopping for a laptop, cell phone or flight?

SOLUTION

We've launched a satellite parts search engine: https://satsearch.co. Satsearch will deliver parametric-search for the space industry for engineering, procurement and market analysis.

We are building a set of open-source & open-data tools to break open the traditionally conservative space sector. Satsearch belongs to this set of tools. We have open-sourced a number of simulation libraries: https://github.com/openastro.

TEAM

I am an Aerospace Engineer with 10+ years of experience developing software for mission analysis, trajectory design and mission planning. I've directly faced the pain of trying to find parts for mission concepts that I've worked on. I am founder of the thriving Tudat library (http://github.com/tudat) and I'm finalizing my PhD from Delft University of Technology. My co-founder, Alberto, is a software developer (iOS and Node primarily) with a PhD in Bioengineering from Politecnico di Milano.

WHY WE'RE APPLYING

We're bootstrapped and could use the money offered through YCF. More than that though, we think that YC is ideal for what we're trying to build, given that they've recently supported teams building launchers and small-satellites. We would greatly benefit from access to and mentorship through the YC network.

A few more details due to the character limit:

BACKGROUND

There are a slew of new applications that can benefit from space technology, e.g., "internet everywhere", IoT (M2M messaging), asset tracking etc. Rapid growth of the small-sat sector and robust consumer electronics have precipitated a drastic drop in the cost of space-based infrastructure.

BUSINESS MODEL

We'd love to put together something like the Red Hat business model: delivering enterprise-level, open-source software under SLAs. With satsearch specifically, we plan on delivering a comprehensive analytics report (likely monthly) that allows suppliers to monitor what's being search for and how the market is evolving (under a subscription model).

We've already had a number of inbound requests from suppliers to be listed in satsearch. We are in advanced negotiations with a major space agency (direct procurement), a supplier that wants our structured data for market analysis, a university small-satellite team and two governmental organizations seeking to raise the profile of their space clusters.

Besides directly serving the space industry, we have supported an indie game developer in adopting our libraries for a new space-based strategy game. We have also had discussions with a company interested in leveraging our tools for tech transfer.

Are we talking about the commercial/military space sector, or about the burgeoning public/research/cubesat sector? I can't help but feel like the former doesn't really have an incentive to make things more efficient given the way the contracts typically work, while the latter might be more interesting.

We are indeed talking about the burgeoning sector that is often referred to as NewSpace, which is made up of universities, research institutes, agencies and commercial companies. The idea is to use our network in the Cubesat/PocketQube community to prove the benefits of integrating the spacecraft design phases, ultimately leading to more robust designs and cost savings. It's also a sector that is highly fragmented at the moment, with parts suppliers popping up all over the world.

If we reach the target of proving the benefits of our open stack, I think large industry players will have to take note. We've had some discussions with the likes of Airbus DS in Europe and the sales cycle is very long, but not impossible.

The mission that we're on is really to open up the sector to completely new applications and teams. We want to expose the tools and technologies that are needed, so that it's not just a select few that can reap the benefits of space technology and infrastructure.

I think you have to better explain the key difficult or problem for those who try to build satellites.

This sounds cool at first glance, I think you have to elaborate a lot more on the user pain intensity and who they are.

Thanks for the feedback.

Satellites are complex machines and there's a lot of engineering work that goes into figuring out exactly what to build. The goals for a mission are usually set by a client/end user: e.g., I want images of San Francisco at a resolution of 5m/pixel or less.

Engineering work goes towards simulation and analysis to figure out what the size of the solar panels are that you need to generate enough power on-board to power the camera, what the size of the battery needs to be to make sure that the satellite keeps functioning during eclipse, what the size of the thruster is that you need to keep the camera pointing at the right spot, etc.

Once you've figured out what you need, the job of finding a vendor that has your part involves wading through their websites to find data sheets, calling them, emailing them etc. It's a really time-consuming process and all you want to know is if there's a part that matches what you need, within your budget, that has heritage in space, etc.

The engineering work is iterative because the subsystems within the satellite all depend on each other. Hence, you're doing this search over and over again. Usually, you just end up making sub-optimal choices.

We've tried to explain the search problem in the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlHEoq7utW4. The low-hanging fruit comes from the fact that a lot of data is already available online, just completely unstructured.

The idea of tying this in with simulation tools is that it allows you to do things like programmatically figure out what happens to your design if the vendor you've picked for e.g., your battery fails to deliver. This kind of sensitivity and robustness analysis is very important during the design process, because it allows you to reduce uncertainty and figure out the main risk items that you need to devote engineering time to.

Bit a long explanation, but hopefully that gives you a better sense of the immediate problem we're trying to tackle for engineers.

For vendors, the pain simply comes from not knowing where their users are, i.e., teams that need the parts that they are selling.

Does this help explain the pain better?

Great. I think to win, you've got to have aggressive conversation with the folks who buy sattelites/ your customer base.

While your answer to this question right now is generic, in the future, you can have a lot more insight and it will shine through in your pitch with customer stories you can tell.

Thanks for the feedback! It's a slow process, but we're plugging away at trying to on-board users and pinpoint where our open stack can directly address challenges they're facing. Our best starting point at the moment seems to be universities building satellites, as we have a good network and the barriers to get started on evaluating product/market fit are lower than B2B.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com