Colonizing the stars is our destiny. Rocket technology is improving and a renewed impetus around the importance of the celestial is clear to see. From American renewal of their space program to herculean efforts by China and India to reach skyward, the space race is back on. It’s not just government entities either, but commercial ones too. The sky is littered with man-made moons waxing and waning over the earth to power advanced communication technology on the ground and plot our way through the heavens above. 

The State of the Stars: Crucial Satellite Utility

There are currently over 9,900 known satellites currently orbiting the earth, mostly owned by the USA, China, and the UK - but most developed nations have some footprint in space. It’s a number that has been exponentially growing too - nearly doubling in the last three years alone. And they’re getting smaller. Micro (<300kg), Super-Micro (<100kg), Nano (<10kg), and even Pico (<1kg) satellites all adorn the night sky. A vast tapestry of starry nodes that perform vital missions with the data they transfer to the ground and between each other. The vast majority are communication satellites providing internet and broadcasting - but that’s far from everything satellites do. 

Other primary missions include earth observation, providing weather forecasting, climate change tracking, and agricultural monitoring. Navigation satellites (GPS, Galileo, BeiDou) to help us get around on the ground. Pioneering scientific missions like the Hubble and James Webb telescopes charting the stars and seeking out new life. There are military satellites for reconnaissance and electronic warfare, and satellites guiding the planes in the air and the ships in the sea. In short, satellites are utterly essential to the function of our techno-sapien civilization - a sky-wrought weave of floating computers watching over us and helping us go about our daily lives and learn more about the infinite cosmos where our fragile intelligence resides.

Data Demands for Satellites 

With all these petabytes of life-enabling and life-changing data flying around in the sky, the question turns, of course, to how to manage it. Satellites, like we said, are just floating computers. They need the same data sovereignty, security, interoperability, resilience and accessibility as the computers on the ground do. Indeed, the facts of their environment, thousands of miles above the Earth, and the essential utilities of their sensitive missions make them even more in demand of the local-first, device-centric, P2P approach to data that Source Network offers. By reducing reliance on centralized infrastructure to power satellite arrays, we can vastly improve their resilience, data availability, data integrity, and operational uptime that their vital missions rely on. By helping satellites sync, process, and share data on-device and between each other, we can help eradicate the problems satellite arrays face.

Currently, satellites must communicate with centralized ground stations for processing and relaying the data they collect. Considering they’re in space, this obviously causes vicious latency issues and clogged bandwidths. As you can imagine, it’s enormously expensive to collect this data and oftentimes, a lot of what is collected is junk. Yet it’s impossible to discern what’s junk data from what isn’t without collecting and analyzing it first. 

P2P Satellite Communications

A local-first solution, perhaps aided and abetted by a locally running AI model, means this data could be processed and validated - perhaps in conjunction with other neighboring satellites - before then passing that data to the ground station. This vastly improves efficiency for commercial fleets and operational integrity for national fleets of satellites. Rather than transferring gigabytes of unprocessed imagery, the satellite can instead transfer only salient imagery needed for a particular operation.

Local-first massively improves satellite security, too. Naturally, satellites are vulnerable to interference. Whether it be the centralized ground stations through which their data flows that operate through traditional old data paradigms, and the centralized authentication servers for their operation that are open to spoofing, hacking, and even state-level interference. 

Source Network’s DIDs can help prevent rogue satellite takeovers by verifying which devices can participate in data exchange locally. This helps reduce reliance on centralized key management systems and opens up multi-national and inter-agency collaborations on the deployment and use of satellite fleets by creating better data integrity. Secret Rings can then be used to horizontally add new actors to a network of satellite operations at a fine-grained level. Rather than excessive trust between these actors, only permitted data could be exchanged on a per-device level through ACPs that are finely tuned and relationship-based. Implementing ZK-Analytics could also help satellites share information, confirming identities and access without exposing sensitive national security details.

Horizontal Scaling in the Skies

As the skies above continue to fill with more satellites, this kind of functionality will only increase as P2P communications between satellites horizontally scales with the adoption of distributed data management and communication between satellites themselves. They can share key telemetry, data, and updates directly with one another - creating faster response times and autonomous coordination between satellite swarms that would then be endowed with the ability to self-organize and share their updates with each other. It can be something as basic as repositioning to avoid cloud cover to something as advanced as resynchronizing orbits to provide coverage due to failures or interference with other devices in their network. 

This P2P data connectivity wouldn’t be just between the satellites themselves, but could also be between satellites and edge devices on the ground - without having to be relayed through a central server first and bypassing traditional infrastructure bottlenecks. Emergency responders could have the data they need to perform beamed directly to their device - online or off. Firefighters working in remote areas tackling wildfires could have satellite data sent directly to their devices too. 

The Source of Futures Beyond Imagination

Maybe you could have your own satellite controlled directly by your phone. It sounds Bond villain, sure, and perhaps a preserve of the ultra-wealthy, but if the proliferation of devices increases at its current geometric rate, and the size of satellites continues to decrease, perhaps many of us could have their own personal satellites up in the heavens, quite literally watching over us and sending alerts and data about local activity. If that sounds like a nightmare for space traffic management - fear not - each individual satellite could talk seamlessly to its peers to avoid collisions and continually update its location in real-time. Soon Earth will have its own Saturnal rings of silicon, a data blanket that protects us all from the trials of life on the ground. 

This might sound almost absurdly future tech in conception, but we say it for an important reason - the distributed data management tools that Source Network is building are the key to unlocking utopian advances in computing. Application data is quite literally the magic that powers our civilization. If we can get it to flow better, safer, and more between our computer wands, then we unlock the type of insane sci-fi advances that seem almost beyond imagination. DefraDB, Orbis, LensVM and SourceHub are the arcane wiring that allow data to propel us beyond the horizon of our current conceptions, changing not just life here on Earth, but our future in the stars above.