With a history in space engineering and astrophysics, a stint with the European Space Agency (ESA), and experience across global space technologies, Jordan Vannitsen is now pioneering the exciting market of space to Earth optical communication together with his team. In a recent interview, Vannitsen detailed the story of his journey from space consultancy to the company he started with two friends, Odysseus Space, outlining its role in the space industry and his views on the prevailing misconceptions surrounding the sector.
Vannitsen’s fascination with space and the unknown helped shape his career and was the impetus behind founding Odysseus Space. Originally conceived as a space consultancy firm in Taiwan, the company has now shifted its focus entirely towards space to ground laser communication. This transition, according to Vannitsen, was made possible by reinvesting their revenues into innovating their own product line-up and with the support of the Luxembourg Space Agency (LSA) and ESA.
Their first breakthrough came when they entered a satellite consultancy project which involved a pointing and tracking system for detecting exoplanets. Vannitsen’s team thought that such system could be repurposed to solve the pointing and tracking challenges of free space optical communications.
“We were thinking that the next big thing in the space business will be optical communication and that we found a way to tackle one of the main challenges,” Vannitsen explained.
Unlike radio frequency communication, optical communication allows for greater volumes of data to be downloaded. However, one of the key challenges is creating an efficient and reliable tracking system, a technological hurdle Vannitsen’s enterprise is primed to tackle.
Odysseus Space is now creating a unique, in-house, end-to-end space-to-ground optical communication solution.
“We are not planning to sell the technology. We are going to sell a service,” Vannitsen clarified.
The core business encompasses providing the client with a terminal for the satellite and access to an optical ground stations network.
As Vannitsen sees it, traditional radiofrequency communication in space is akin to “very slow internet at home,” while the optical communication solutions his company offers are similar to the high-speed broadband of today. This approach has significant implications for future data collection in space. Earth observation satellite operators are already struggling to download all the data their satellites produce, and this will only worsen with the increasing resolution of the optical remote sensing payload. In two to four years, some satellite operators will be capable of downloading no more than 20% to ground if they continue with their current radio communication systems.
Vannitsen gave an apt example to illustrate the competitive edge Odysseus offers:
“Companies are compressing the data and not downloading everything today. But when we talk to satellite operators, they want to have the raw data to unlock more use cases… by unlocking this data bottleneck, we can unlock new business models.”
The overarching message from Vannitsen’s interview highlights the need to confine our understanding of space technology not just to off-planet activities, but to realize space tech’s massive real-world, on-Earth applications.
“Everything that we are doing in space is actually useful for us on Earth… we try to help make this happen,” Vannitsen concluded.
His company’s mission to refine space communication offers an interesting case study of how space tech firms are continually leveraging technology, meeting challenges, and invariably shaping the increasingly interstellar future of our world.
Featured image: Credit: Odysseus Space
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