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SPEAKER_01: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_00: There's a beloved story about the dimensions of the space shuttle. Apparently the booster rockets had to fit through railway tunnels, a railway whose gauge went back to the days of a horse and cart. In short, the space shuttle boosters were the width of two horses' backsides. That tale is probably apocryphal, but a similar and quite true story can be told about the new poster child of the space industry. Its dimensions were determined by the size of a Beanie Baby, a stuffed toy. Beanie Babies were all the rage in 1999, at a time when Stanford University professor Bob Twiggs was teaching his graduate students to design satellites. Back then, satellites were big. For example, the Artemis telecommunications satellite, launched in 2001, weighed more than three tonnes, was eight metres tall and each of its two solar panels was as long as a bus. With that much space and weight to play with, the temptation was to pack more and more gear into the satellite, making it more and more expensive. Not to mention an encouragement to lazy thinking. If you've got lots of room to put everything in, says Twiggs, you end up not being too careful with it. So he and his colleague decided that the students needed a constraint. Twiggs went to the local store where he spotted a Beanie Baby neatly packed in its box. He went back to class, placed the Beanie Baby box on the desk and told his students, your satellite needs to be able to fit in this box. As modern smartphones have revolutionised the quality and power of small off-the-shelf components, this educational challenge has evolved into a practical standard for tiny satellites. The CubeSat. CubeSat is a slight misnomer. The unit is 10 centimetres by 10 centimetres by 11.35 centimetres and many CubeSats are several units big, but still about the size of a shoebox. Kilograms rather than tonnes. Most CubeSats are designed to take photographs and other images of our planet from above. The basic ingredients, a smartphone processor, solar panels, a camera and some batteries. CubeSats are cheap to make and cheap to launch. Traditionally the entire process of building and launching a major satellite might cost $500 million. You could get a CubeSat into low Earth orbit for closer to 100,000. Big rockets such as the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 or Russia's Soyuz 2 are about 50 metres tall. But CubeSats and other tiny satellites can ride on much smaller private sector rockets, say the 18 metre Electron rocket from the New Zealand launchpad of Rocket Labs. CubeSats can also piggyback on a large satellite launch. Early in 2017 India's official space agency ISRO launched 104 satellites in a single launch, a world record. Three of the satellites were large, but the rest were tiny. 88 of them were CubeSats owned by a new Silicon Valley company, Planet. Planet was founded in 2010 and has the world's largest private fleet of satellites, 140 of them taking 800,000 photographs a day, covering anywhere on the globe once every 24 hours. They can't match the sophisticated imaging of a large satellite but they make up for that by being able to provide better coverage, more photographs of more places within any given time frame. And Planet's 140 satellites may be the vanguard of something much bigger. Both SpaceX and Amazon have announced plans to launch thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit. CubeSats have three lessons to teach us about the modern economy. First, the importance of cheap, standardised modular components. While we reserve our attention and our plaudits for unique and complex projects, being cheap changes everything. Second, CubeSat pioneers have embraced the fail-fast model of Silicon Valley. NASA, as a public agency, has a very low tolerance for risk, but an expendable CubeSat allows a different approach. If you're launching dozens at a time, you can lose one or two here and there. While NASA was focusing on ensuring that expensive kit worked perfectly, the Silicon Valley model of the CubeSats says, don't worry, failing with disposable satellites is cheaper than succeeding with big ones. If it doesn't work, try again. But the third lesson is, don't dismiss the public sector too casually. It's easy to define private space exploration in contrast with NASA and the other national space agencies. In fact, I just did. But NASA has quietly supported CubeSats. For example, by funding small CubeSat launching rockets and by giving CubeSats free rides to the International Space Station where they can be launched through a special CubeSat airlock. CubeSats may soon be teaching us something entirely new about the way the economy works. The great economist Alfred Marshall, who died in 1924, described economics as being the study of humanity in the ordinary business of life. CubeSats allow us to observe the ordinary business of life as it unfolds, all around the world, day by day and in some detail. Economic forecasters haven't been slow to notice this possibility. Lots of people would love to know whether the price of oil is likely to go up or down, whether there's a glut in the market for wheat or a shortage of high-quality Ethiopian coffee. Commodity traders, crop insurers, supermarkets, oil companies, even Starbucks. It doesn't take much imagination to see how daily images of crops would give you an edge. And with the right analysis and the right photographs, you may also be able to spot trucks on the road, count oil storage tanks or even how much electricity a power plant is generating by looking at the plumes of smoke. But beyond those narrow trading forecasts, satellites promise to illuminate hidden connections in the way the world economy works. We can measure pollution, congestion, deforestation, even attempts at ethnic cleansing. Algorithms are starting to extract subtle information at scale. How many of those houses in a Kenyan village have metal roofs? Which roads in Cameroon are in good condition? And has foreign aid money made any difference? There's so much going on under the surface of a big economy and so much that doesn't show up in regular statistical releases for months, sometimes years. Now we can see it day by day. As the old story about the Space Shuttle and the horses' backsides reminds us, some things in our economy change slowly. But a lot of the modern economy moves very quickly indeed. No wonder some people are keen to take snapshots. We first found out about the wonderful world of CubeSats from
SPEAKER_01: the Planet Money podcast on NPR. For a full list of our sources, you can find the full list on our website. Please see BBCWorldService.com slash 50things.
SPEAKER_03: More questions to scientists working at the limits of human knowledge. I wanted to know
SPEAKER_02: how cells, how do they know what to do? They're yanking on their neighbours, they're pushing
SPEAKER_00: on their neighbours. We also try and demonstrate exactly what they're telling us. What are
SPEAKER_00: the limits of human endurance? You've just run a marathon and been hit by a car, how
SPEAKER_03: are you? That's CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. So if you'd like to inject
SPEAKER_00: a bit more science into that. Just search for CrowdScience wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_03: I knew it! Amazing!
