What Company Turns Down $23 Billion? - NC2C015 - podcast episode cover

What Company Turns Down $23 Billion? - NC2C015

Jul 31, 202434 minEp. 15
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Is Google Cloud truly the underdog in the cloud industry despite a 28% revenue spike? Tune in to uncover the hidden drivers behind Google Cloud’s impressive financial performance, and learn why its AI and data analytics capabilities might be the secret sauce. We also dissect a shocking move by the cybersecurity giant Wiz to back out of a $23 billion acquisition deal, delving into the complex mix of regulatory fears and strategic recalculations that may have influenced this decision.

Ever wondered how a simple software update could wreak havoc across millions of devices? Our deep dive into the recent CrowdStrike update catastrophe reveals how it triggered blue screen errors and authentication nightmares, resembling a full-blown supply chain attack. Discover how bad actors took advantage of the chaos to launch phishing scams and why Microsoft partly blames EU regulations. To lighten things up, we pivot to our mandatory AI news update, offering a refreshing break from the technical turmoil.

Finally, let's take a nostalgic journey as we explore the potential revival of classic digital assistants like Ask Jeeves, now empowered by advanced AI like GPT-4. We also spotlight Astranis and its ambitious plans to revolutionize internet connectivity with geostationary satellites, having just secured a hefty $200 million in Series D funding. With targets to churn out 24 satellites annually, Astranis aims high, but what are the real challenges of maintaining such technology for a decade? Plus, we address the looming issue of space debris. Join us for a compelling episode brimming with industry insights and forward-thinking discussions!

Purchase Chris and Tim's new book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/

Check out the Fortnightly Cloud Networking News
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/

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Transcript

Cloud Industry Updates and Outages

Chris Miles

If you're living a lifestyle similar to Alex did in his mid-20s , you may not have heard of this particular event . So last week there was a major , major outage from CrowdStrike .

Tim McConnaughy

Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast , your one-stop shop for all things hybrid and multi-cloud networking . Now here are your hosts , tim , chris and Alex . Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Cables to Clouds fortnightly news With me as all . First of all , I'm Tim McConaughey at Juan Golbez on Twitter .

With me , as always , are my co-hosts Chris Miles at BGP Main on Twitter , alex Perkins at bumps in the wire on Twitter . It's been it's definitely I won't say it's been a slow two weeks , but there there's some really big . There's at least one really big story that we're going to cover , but there's there wasn't a huge amount of stuff .

So we're going to we're going to have a little bit of roll up of everything , for you Should be able to get it through pretty easily . So let's go ahead and get started with the first story , which is Google Cloud . Giving kind of the earnings report to the street .

Turns out that Google Cloud itself is up quite a bit over 10 billion in revenue , which is a 28% growth over last year . So I don't have the other numbers for the other CSPs handy . I know that the law of small numbers , which is to say , if you only have 10 and then you go up by one . That's a full 10% .

So I don't know what that means in terms of comparing it to other CSPs , but 28% growth in this economic climate is still , I would say , pretty pretty good Right . So I'm I don't know , guys , are you still , are you seeing , with your customers , more adoption of GCP lately ? I haven't . I haven't seen more of it , so I'm kind of curious .

Chris Miles

I'm here and there . I'll be honest , it seems like nine times out of 10 , whenever I hear about a business growing and specifically venturing into Google cloud , it's nine times out of 10 . What I see , at least in my experience , is an acquisition .

So someone gets acquired and they're already running in GCP , and then all of a sudden that that customer is , is , or you know that that enterprise is now running in GCP as well . Um , and just you know , by um , uh , by way of that , they say they start to expand that footprint as well . So I'm sure that attributes a little bit to it .

Um , yeah , I don't know .

Alex Perkins

Uh , I don't know if new new customers are finding alternative reasons to expand into Google Cloud . I'm not hearing a ton of that , so I was a little bit surprised to see this at such a high number . But yeah , that's where I work at .

It's mainly just AWS and Azure , but you know , I know Google cloud has a lot of people like their tooling and data analysis stuff , so AI tooling as well .

Chris Miles

Right so .

Alex Perkins

I'm sure a lot of that kind of helped with this . I think it's funny that they said the revenue growth was driven by search as well as cloud . I feel like that's just talk , because search is dying , according to every other report that you can read , because of all the AI craziness .

So it seems like a company that was built on search kind of has to say oh yeah , of course our growth is driven by search , right ?

Tim McConnaughy

Well and add revenue from it right Add revenue and all of that right , that's always been Google's bread and butter stuff . You bring up a good point , though I wonder how much of the growth that they are seeing now is directly related to the AI craze and the fact that Google is pretty well known as a .

I don't know if AI leaders right , but certainly with machine learning and analytics , that's definitely way big . They're bread and butter . So I'm wondering if there's a large spike because of that , maybe . So let's move on to the next one . So cybersecurity firm Wiz has called off a reported $23 billion with a B deal for Google to acquire them .

When I saw this story this story comes from us from Reuters . Sorry , real quick . The previous story was from Investopedia , I forgot to mention it up front .

This one comes to us from Reuters when I first saw this story , my thinking was like how could anybody you know , two in the hand , one in the bush like why would anybody walk away from $23 billion with the B dollars you know ? Like what else are you holding out for ? I guess would be my thought .

I looked into the article and also had heard some rumors and whatnot about you know , maybe that WIS was concerned that the Securities Exchange Commission was going to get really cracked down and make it hard for this acquisition to go through .

Possibly the article itself suggests that the CrowdStrike outage has something to do with them walking away from this , coming out of the other side of the CrowdStrike outage looking even more good , basically just looking at even as a better product and even possibly spiking their valuation even higher . So , for whatever reason , they walked away from $23 billion .

So what do you guys think about that ? I think that's nuts .

Alex Perkins

Yeah , there's a couple of things to pull out of this article . Like you said , they walked away from $23 billion . The first thing I want to point out is the CEO said they're going to focus on an IPO and aims to achieve an annual recurring revenue of $1 billion . So they're not even at a billion in recurring revenue .

Not even at that sounds ridiculous to say . I know right , because at a billion dollars recurring revenue .

Tim McConnaughy

Not even at that sounds ridiculous to say I know right , Because at a billion dollars I know . But again , given the money on the table , yeah , 23 billion .

Alex Perkins

I mean for what ? And just to tie it together , there's another part that says they had just raised $1 billion in a private funding round in May , two months ago , at $12 billion valuation two months ago , at $12 billion valuation . So this is almost double that .

And they're walking away from this because , as you said , there's something about how the CrowdStrike vulnerability or whatever happened with CrowdStrike made they think that makes all these cybersecurity companies more valuable . It's just a weird that's not how I would look at it , I guess it's weird .

Tim McConnaughy

It kind of sounds like a bullshit reason . Honestly , that's my opinion .

Chris Miles

It does it does . Sorry , go ahead , Alex .

Alex Perkins

No last thing , Tim mentioned the SEC stuff . I did see something else somewhere about that yeah , something to do with antitrust laws that they thought that this would take a long time to get tied up , but still $23 billion .

Chris Miles

Yeah , the CrowdStrike thing does sound like it's a bit of a ? Um , I don't see the correlation there , unless they're really banking on that just being out of like the how do I put this ? Uh , misinformation or misunderstanding of the common user , because they don't really address the same problem .

Whiz versus crowd strike , right , um , one's focused on , you know , like cloud workloads and things from from what I see anyway , and then the other ones focused on endpoint security , like yeah , you know , like , agent based and security data versus endpoint .

Yeah , yeah and so it's like I could see that they was being seen as something that's , you know , more critical to the business , I guess just by proxy of that , but not , like you guys have said already , not enough to walk away from that much money . So that is . I agree that that feels like a bit of a bit of a wash there , but I don't know .

They must be expecting things to really fucking take off in the next few years .

Alex Perkins

Yeah , I hope they're not relying on the fact that they use AI in their product and thinking that maybe AI is just going to keep going crazy , Because I just don't personally . I mean , other people might think differently , but I don't think that's going to be true forever . All right .

Chris Miles

I don't think that's going to be true forever , all right . So next up we have which . If you've been living under a rock , you may not know about this . So if you were living a lifestyle similar to Alex did in his mid-20s , you may not have heard of this particular event .

So last week there was a major , major outage from CrowdStrike , which Tim alluded to a little earlier . So really , what this boils down to is CrowdSt know an agent software that runs on endpoints to do threat detection and data security and things like that , right . So they pushed an update which they actually detected .

They have an article here from sorry , from TechTarget that kind of goes over the the outage and how it kind of boiled down from beginning to end . And then we have additional commentary from the Verge and even CrowdStrike themselves on what caused the issue and what went into it .

So if you want to read a little bit more about this , please take a look into the cloud news document that we publish in the show notes . In the show notes , um .

But so basically , they pushed an update to their , their Falcon platform which went out and they detected it within about 79 minutes that they they knew that there was a problem , but the issue was that the um , the faulty um software that they pushed to Falcon runs .

You know , falcon runs in the kernel um on on windows OS systems and it was causing a blue screen of death . So while they could detect the issue and push out an update to remedy the issue , that doesn't help systems that can't boot and are getting a blue screen of death right .

So it's funny because this article from TechTarget actually compares it to kind of like a manifestation of Y2K , which is actually a pretty good comparison that I'm surprised I didn't even think about . Like this is pretty similar to what people were worried about you know airports going crazy , public transport being down and you know health care .

And here in Australia I will say , yeah , I was hearing reports of you know people not being able to get medicine because systems were down . Obviously , I'm sure the financial sector was in quite a quite disarray . So , and I feel like immediately the sentiment from the public was like how could CrowdStrike do this ?

How could this make its way to the general public ? You know , don't they test this stuff internally ?

This is um , this is crazy Um and it's it was good that they finally put out a response and um , we see some updates , like I said in this Verge article , and from CrowdStrike themselves , um , that this was actually due to a bug in their validation software that they were running to validate the um uh the updates in the first place , right , so it uh , albeit

internally , it was pretty much a bunch of false positives um , before things went out , but there was a validation process , um , and they've they've issued some uh comments about how they're going to avoid this in the future by um doing what . What did they say ?

Um , local developer testing , content update and rollback testing , stress testing , fuzzing and fault injection , stability testing , content interface testing . I mean , obviously they're really leaning in that they're going to make sure this doesn't happen again , because this is probably going to be the biggest outage that we're going to see for quite a while .

I hope , fingers crossed , I don't want to see this again . Yeah , that that we're going to see for quite a while . I hope , fingers crossed , I don't want

Software Supply Chain Attack Analysis

to see this again . But yeah , so there's , there's a lot in these , in these three different articles here , so I'll I'll pause there and and and get your guys commentary .

Alex Perkins

I mean you covered , like most of most , of all the talking points here . But yeah , I mean I even had like family members reaching out asking if I was affected by this or something , because working in IT , but I mean there were pictures of airports , craziness happening at airports . I think Delta had a whole bunch of issues with trying to get people .

Yeah , that's crazy . I know that we had some authentication errors and stuff because of this at work , a lot of servers that wouldn't come back up and it's . It's just a big mess .

And , like chris said , the the y2k reference was was a really good one and I saw that in a couple places yeah , I mean , don't forget that , like azure services were impacted as well , so anything that was and of course , microsoft being the identity king that it is , you know , like that just trickled down right from there .

Tim McConnaughy

Um , of course , uh , I , I kept seeing all these weird the fun . I think the most interesting or funny thing about it was you have all these pundits giving their their two cents , either on Twitter or on their shows or whatever , and they're all saying like , oh , microsoft's like screwed up everybody's lives again and it was like well , actually .

But what's interesting , of course , is that CrowdStrike is used by Windows Defender as a product , as a feature of the product . I was talking with Steve McNutt about it . He's a friend of the show , he's been on the show before and we were talking like this looks like the most unintentional supply chain attack , because that's how this would work .

Right , if you were going to do a supply chain attack , of course , if you were doing it maliciously , you would want to probably not be detected like a normal supply chain attack . That's done . This is how you would get your agent or get your back door is you would package it in something that then gets rolled up to another product , right ?

So it ends up being kind of an inadvertent supply chain attack , just a really bad one .

Alex Perkins

I mean , if people didn't have that idea before , they definitely do now . Right With how this worked .

Tim McConnaughy

Yeah . So I think that's one of the big things , of course , is that the actual update affected windows , because it was the windows file that you know it detected as the thing , but also , like it was like double whammy because it was packaged with windows defender , like as a as a .

You know , if you , if you had a crowd strike , of course you were screwed anyway cause you , you had the but anyway , so that . But that actually contributed to the confusion about like well , I don't have CrowdStrike but I have Windows , or , when it was , defenders turned on , am I going to get bricked ?

So there was a lot of fear and running around and there's that as well , almost pandemic style , where everybody thinks everybody's getting a different story from everybody about what's happening . Am I vulnerable ? Am I going to get hit with it ?

Chris Miles

So the usual panic associated with these things as well , yeah , additionally , one thing that I thought was really interesting is like the , the number one thing that started to permeate out there once this happened was like oh , crowdstrike got hacked . Like this is a , this is a security breached . Right now , that was kind of the sentiment that I was hearing .

And then one thing that I didn't know about is in this TechTarget article they talk about how there was kind of wrongdoers that took advantage of this and I was like how did they do that when things were blue screen right and what it was is they were talking about you know , phishing attacks and things like that people calling people , pretending to be crowd

strike and and preying on on taking advantage of vulnerability making uh , making websites to download malware like hey , download our package to fix your computer and stuff . Yeah , yeah , which is just crazy , that that came right . I mean , to be fair , I guess that is the time to do it .

If you are , I shouldn't say to be fair , it's not very fair , but that would be the most opportune time to do it when people are in a panic and worried about something like that .

But , yeah , and one last point that I want to make about this , which I found was relatively funny , was that Microsoft actually , when the outage was happening , I remember shortly after they came out and actually blamed a bit of this on EU regulations for how their software needs to run , right , I know , because obviously that was one thing that you know , a lot

of the general public notice was like it was only on windows-based machines . You know Mac and Linux were not affected , um , and that related to the way that the CrowdStrike agent runs within , uh , windows OS , right , um , so it runs as a , as a kernel level process , and that's why it has that power to cause such a thing as a blue screen of death .

And Microsoft actually came out and said that that was tied to EU regulations in some way , like the way they have to build their software , whereas Apple has built this kind of closed ecosystem so they do not allow any kind of kernel process to run on their , on their system .

Interesting , which I probably have to look a little bit more into it , but I remember I think that was like that is the weirdest way to frame it and like I don't know how much I would agree with that , but yeah , that was , that was an interesting point that I remember seeing online .

Alex Perkins

Yeah , that is weird . All right , let's transition into our mandatory AI news that we always have , and then the fun one kind of fun one , for me , at least at the end . So we got a .

Open Source AI and Ethics

This is an article directly from Meta . Mark Zuckerberg wrote a whole essay basically about how open source AI is the path forward , and this kind of coincided with the new Lama 3 models that were released .

I've watched a lot of interviews that Mark has done talking about this release and kind of why Meta believes in open sourcing everything and what this enables and kind of what his beliefs are behind this . The article is pretty long , but it's a good read . Or you can just find an interview and he says the same thing in basically all these interviews .

I think the most important thing that I got from this is he calls out Apple very harshly in part of this blog . The way he explained it in an interview I watched is he's gotten in trouble in the past for kind of trying to use like their own like .

So Apple intelligence was just recently announced , right , so the issue he's talking about is in the future , if they want to do anything with AI , they're going to have to use Apple's AI product and they have to build on top of that , instead of bringing their own platform that other people can build upon .

They're kind of beholden to Apple , and that was one of his biggest points .

He doesn't want to be beholden to another company because that's bit meta a lot in the past and he kind of wants to be able to , you know , have people build directly on anywhere , right , like that's what the open source part of this is and that way , like we don't have all these walled gardens , especially when it comes to AI .

So I just thought that was a cool , interesting way that he was looking at it . I don't know how much you guys have read about this or if you've been using it .

I've been using Lama basically since it came out and honestly , or if you've been using it , I've been using Lama basically since it came out and honestly , it's amazing Like I have not even I have like stopped using ChatGPT this week and I've just been using Lama for everything and it's incredible just how much , how well this thing works already .

Tim McConnaughy

Yeah , we yeah , so we I mean we just recorded an episode that's not going to be out for a while about some AI stuff . It's going to be one of our regular episodes . And I remember now that we didn't do Lama . Right , we did everything but Lama . I think that was out there the main commercial ones .

Alex Perkins

right , we didn't do Lama , we should 3 hadn't been announced , though we did it like a couple days before 3 was announced . That's true and two was not on par with the current .

Tim McConnaughy

That's true , that's a very good point , right , so we should redo so , at least when we we're going to have a followup to that , and we'll probably include Lama at that time . But yeah , no , I mean . So the thing with Lama first of all , I love the name , obviously . I was talking to someone , I .

I was talking to someone I think I was talking to Andrew Brown about it and he was like about the episode we just recorded , and he was like what you didn't do , you want to use Lama ? I was like you know , we didn't use Lama , but he's been using it actually and he likes it a lot as well .

From an open source perspective , obviously , open source should generally equal better ethics , better , you know , I won't say security , although there's that whole debate about whether or not open source ends up being better or worse for security , right . But yeah , I mean you would hope that if it's not a closed model , you can actually see how things work .

You know , maybe there'll be better ethical outcomes . I think that was actually something he talked about in this article . Generally , as you know , things are better in that case when it's open source . I am curious .

I mean , here's the thing Meta doesn't have a good track record , right In terms of privacy , like we've probably been ringing the privacy bell since the AI started about . Like how everybody's going to just ignore privacy laws and ignore copyright and everything and just suck as much as possible into their models so they can be first to market with the best model .

Nothing in this article alleviates that fear . Just because we've seen this from Meta before . That fear just because he's you know , we've seen this from Meta before , so that's you know . Anyway , I'm cautiously optimistic compared to all the others , just because it'll be open source , but I don't know .

Chris Miles

Yeah , I kind of am right there with you , tim .

So I mean , like , I think , in the past , what we've seen up to date is usually , if something is kind of either in kind of a trailblazing state or at least kind of a newcomer state , it's always pushing open source right , and that's , that's a , you know , a huge adoption advocator thing , and and and eventually , like , things are open source until they're not ,

um , like , just like you saw with the HashiCorp thing , right , as soon as they started to adjust the licensing , as soon as they need to make money because things grow legs and then they needed to be profitable to be sustainable , that's right . Um , things change .

Now meta is in this unique scenario where , um , you know they're they're not top of the heap , but they're at least in the top five , top 10 somewhere . So I don't think that they're going to pull the rug out from people and switch this to be , you know , use a different licensing or something like that to achieve .

Alex Perkins

Real quick before you go too far . There is actually something in the licensing that says I think it's if you're serving over 7 million it's either like 700,000 or 7 million users then you have to contact them to talk about licensing Gotcha .

Chris Miles

Yeah . So I mean that's fair . Shout , right , I get that . So that makes sense . Um , so that that makes sense , um . But even I'm kind of with tim in this scenario . I'm like I'm like okay , like this is cool , it seems to be working well , but it's meta . So what's the catch ? Right ? Uh , where does this ? Where's the major drawback ?

Because I mean , meta has obviously had all this personal data about millions and millions of people for several years now , and I don't know if I necessarily trust them enough to with that information and and and I'll be at the with the with the AI integration of all that data as well .

So I'm , yeah , like cautiously optimistic is probably the perfect way to put it . Like it's like , yeah , it's good until it's hopefully bad or hopefully not bad , but we'll see .

Alex Perkins

Yeah yeah , one crazy thing I have to just mention here is in one of the GitHub repositories someone pointed this out it only took them 300 lines of code to run this model on top of all these 405 billion weights . 300 lines of code is all it took . That is so mind-blowing Like it's just crazy .

Chris Miles

Yeah , I mean , that's the thing . There's no doubt that the engineering teams at Meta are amazing , right . They've obviously been doing very good things . So I do have trust in that . It's a capable platform . Good thing , so I do have . I do have trust in that it's a capable platform .

Tim McConnaughy

Um uh , just whether or not they will , they will do right by the public is kind of , um , let's not forget , uh , cambridge analytica in the last election , you know , like I mean there the track record is not there , right , like it's bad , especially everybody's ringing the alarm bells for the election and , and you know , fake news , the actual fake news , and uh

, and all of that , right , that's I don't know very good point all right .

Alex Perkins

well , speaking of closed ai , I mean uh , sorry , open ai . Um , there's a open ai announced a new beta feature , uh , that they're calling search gpt .

This is essentially if you could combine AI into your typical you know what everybody's used to with Google search , where you don't have to do a thousand searches , just you know you do a search and then you find an answer to something . Then you have to do another search to find like a deeper answer to something that you're looking for .

The point of this is kind of to streamline all of that and put it all into like one place . The funniest thing that I have seen from this is on Twitter . In the announcement post it was basically hey , join the waitlist , right , this is a beta test .

Here's a link to join the waitlist and Perplexity AI , who already basically does this , but across all of the models , not just OpenAI . The CEO just posted right under it skip the wait list right here , and it was like a link to Perplexity AI . I just thought it was great .

Tim McConnaughy

I'm curious to see how the I'm waiting .

Reviving Ask Jeeves and Satellite Advancements

I think this is the time when we bring back Ask Jeeves . It's his time to shine . It's time to bring him back .

Chris Miles

Someone send Jeeves his flowers man .

Alex Perkins

Ask Jeeves and Clippy need to come back right .

Tim McConnaughy

Yeah . So yeah , I mean you can already do this with GPT-4 , but it doesn't give you like search-formatted output , right ? They can just confidently give you an answer on whatever it is the hell that you asked for , and it'll go search the web for it and give you that answer .

This seems more like what you would expect from an actual search , like , okay , I searched for you and I intelligently found the information you're looking for and , instead of me vomiting it out token-based text , I'll just give you the results that you can dig in on .

Alex Perkins

Yeah , it's like I hate to even say this , but it's like AI-enhanced search , right .

Tim McConnaughy

Yeah , that's what it sounds like . That's exactly it .

Chris Miles

But that's the thing We've been talking about this for several , several months now . People are replacing their muscle memory to go to search , to go to chat . Gpt , right . So this is just the evolution . Obviously they're going to enrich that process , right , if they know that's how people are using the product and that's all . This is right .

I don't think it's really changing too much under the hood . It's just giving you a rich user interface that looks pretty and when you ask for what the weather is , it's outlined and has you know the sun and the clouds and shit like that . So it's like , yeah , it's , it's I'm sure this is .

Alex Perkins

The birds are going to be out yeah yeah , the birds , are the birds .

Chris Miles

Uh , here for for breakfast exactly but yeah , it's just just the evolution did . But no surprise to me whatsoever .

Alex Perkins

All right . So the last article a company called Astronis just did a 200 million Series D round . This is really cool . So Astronis makes satellites that are for internet , a constellation-based internet Like , think , spacex .

Tim McConnaughy

Like Starlink .

Alex Perkins

Yeah , like Starlink Except . So the difference is Starlink . And why am I blanking on the Amazon one , kuiper , kuiper , starlink and Kuiper are both LEO satellites , which means low earth orbit , so there needs to be a lot of them and it's like a constellation , right ?

That's why everybody's concerned about how many there are going to be and why they can launch so many at a time . The goal with Astronis is actually geostationary , which means they basically follow the Earth Like they're locked into a spot .

Tim McConnaughy

More like the TV satellites . Right , Right yeah .

Alex Perkins

And these are huge satellites , right and so because of that , historically the manufacturing process has been really slow . I think they call out in this article Historically the manufacturing process has been really slow . I think they call out in this article . This article is from TechCrunch , that's in the notes .

You can obviously go to the site and find a lot more information , but they call out that currently it takes like years just to manufacture one and with their new manufacturing process , a lot of which will be funded by this round , they can do 24 per year , or at least that's the stated goal . They aim to manufacture 24 per year .

Tim McConnaughy

So going from like one a year to two every month , no one like every couple years . So that's an insane acceleration .

Alex Perkins

Absolutely insane . Yes , and they credit because they brought 70% of the manufacturing in-house . So I you know I don't know exactly all the details behind that , but that is a crazy increase in the ability to make these things .

Tim McConnaughy

Yeah , that's nuts . The more satellites we put into orbit , the more I think of . There's an anime that I watched years ago and it's not like a super exciting anime or anything .

It's called Planetus and the idea was these guys were like space trash people , because there's so many screws and nuts and bolts , like basically at some point earth had become so encased in debris that you couldn't safely launch anything .

Because I mean , of course , when you're moving at those speeds , uh , a fucking washer , could you know , rip a , a hole a meter thick for your spaceship , right , like it's and that's and it's real . That's not just it wasn't , I mean , with sci-fi and the anime , but like it's based on a real idea , which is that more and more debris . Well , actually there's .

There's a doomsday scenario among all the other ones we have , where you know , basically there's so much debris in earth , in low earth orbit , that we can't get off the planet anymore , like we have no way to get out of here yeah , I mean .

Alex Perkins

Earth rotates about a thousand miles per hour , so , geostationary , these things are keeping up with that right , that's crazy okay , nerd , just kidding , um , but yeah , that's , uh .

Chris Miles

One other thing that I thought was really interesting about this was saying that each , each unit , has like a 10 year lifespan . Yeah , and like that is crazy to me because I'm sure that they've thought of this . I don't know what goes into it , but thinking about doing maintenance and updates to something over a 10 year lifespan .

Because think about , think about how much technology changes in 10 years , right , or the needs of technology , right .

Like if this is going to be something that is servicing anything capable , like Kuiper or Starlink , is right that there's going to be bandwidth constraints and things could change , but like that thing is stuck up there for 10 years unless they I don't know if they go up there to service it or like do ?

Alex Perkins

you guys know anything about I don't think so either I would think they just de-orbit it , like you can send commands to start the de-orbit process , and that's and that's really another way that they get rid of space junk right , yeah , you dump it in the pacific , basically things to burn up yeah , yeah .

Tim McConnaughy

So the reason it has a 10-year lifespan is probably because of the maneuvering thrusters and the fuel cells and all of that right more than anything else . Um , that's the , that's the real limiting factor . Because they can't , it makes no sense for them to even try to to send somebody up there to right to try to work on the thing , right yeah , especially .

Alex Perkins

I don't know how many they plan on ending up with , but this will be a lot . Um , I think one of the really cool things they talk about too is , as part of the process , the reflector is like folded up super small and then when it gets into orbit , it expands up to the size of a boxing ring so it's really cool .

Chris Miles

It's kind of like how they did the james webb telescope .

Alex Perkins

Like everything just gets in place and then unfolds once it's in space .

Tim McConnaughy

I just think that's awesome but it makes sense , right , because if you're going to put it on an orbit vehicle an orbit vehicle , like something that's going to take off it's gotta be small enough to fit , right . So that's . There's definitely a lot of science and some origami involved in that . Yeah , yeah , yeah , okay , I think that go ahead .

I think that wraps it up for this week . So , as always , thanks for joining us for the news . If you like what you heard today , please share it with a friend , give us feedback . We're on all the social medias cables to clouds on Twitter . We're on LinkedIn as well . We're even on X .

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