>> Okay. We're now going to go into the customer panel, and we'd like to welcome Angelo Fausti, who's a software engineer at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and Caleb Maclachlan who's senior spacecraft operations software engineer at Loft Orbital. Guys, thanks for joining us. You don't want to miss folks this interview. Caleb, let's start with you. You work for an extremely cool company, you're launching satellites into space. Of course doing that is highly complex and not a cheap endeavor. Tell us about Loft Orbital and what you guys do to attack that problem. >> Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me here by the way. So Loft Orbital is a company that's a series B startup now, who, and our mission basically is to provide rapid access to space for all kinds of customers. Historically, if you want to fly something in space, do something in space, it's extremely expensive. You need to book a launch, build a bus, hire a team to operate it, have a big software teams, and then eventually worry about, a bunch like, just a lot of very specialized engineering. And what we're trying to do is change that from a super specialized problem that has an extremely high barrier of access, to a infrastructure problem. So that it's almost as simple as deploying a VM in AWS or GCP is getting your programs, your mission deployed on orbit with access to different sensors, cameras, radios, stuff like that. So, that's kind of our mission and just to give a really brief example of the kind of customer that we can serve. There's a really cool company called Totum Labs, who is working on building IoT cons, an IoT constellation for, internet of things, basically being able to get telemetry from all over the world. They're the first company to demonstrate indoor IoT which means you have this little modem inside a container that container that you track from anywhere in the world as it's going across the ocean. So, and it's really little, and they've been able to stay a small startup that's focused on their product, which is the, that super crazy, complicated, cool radio, while we handle the whole space segment for them, which just, you know, before Loft was really impossible. So that's our mission is providing space infrastructure as a service. We are kind of groundbreaking in this area and we're serving a huge variety of customers with all kinds of different missions, and obviously generating a ton of data in space that we've got to handle. >> Yeah. So amazing Caleb, what you guys do. Now, I know you were lured to the skies very early in your career, but how did you kind of land in this business? >> Yeah, so, I guess just a little bit about me. For some people, they don't necessarily know what they want to do like earlier in their life. For me I was five years old and I knew I want to be in the space industry. So, I started in the Air Force, but have stayed in the space industry my whole career and been a part of, this is the fifth space startup that I've been a part of actually. So, I've kind of started out in satellites, spent some time in working in the launch industry on rockets, then, now I'm here back in satellites and honestly, this is the most exciting of the different space startups that I've been a part of. >> Super interesting. Okay. Angelo, let's talk about the Rubin Observatory. Vera C. Rubin, famous woman scientist, galaxy guru. Now you guys, the Observatory, you're up way up high, you get a good look at the Southern sky. And I know COVID slowed you guys down a bit, but no doubt you continued to code away on the software. I know you're getting close, you got to be super excited, give us the update on the Observatory and your role. >> All right. So, yeah. Rubin is a state of the art observatory that is in construction on a remote mountain in Chile. And, with Rubin we'll conduct the large survey of space and time. We're going to observe the sky with eight meter optical telescope and take 1000 pictures every night with 2.2 Gigapixel camera. And we are going to do that for 10 years, which is the duration of the survey. >> Yeah, amazing project. Now, you earned a doctor of philosophy so you probably spent some time thinking about what's out there, and then you went out to earn a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics. So, this is something that you've been working on for the better part of your career, isn't it? >> Yeah, that's right, about 15 years. I studied physics in college. Then I got a PhD in astronomy. And, I worked for about five years in another project, the Dark Energy Survey before joining Rubin in 2015. >> Yeah, impressive. So it seems like both your organizations are looking at space from two different angles. One thing you guys both have in common of course is software, and you both use InfluxDB as part of your data infrastructure. How did you discover InfluxDB, get into it? How do you use the platform? Maybe Caleb you could start. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the first company that I extensively used InfluxDB in, was a launch startup called Astra. And we were in the process of designing our first generation rocket there, and testing the engines, pumps, everything that goes into a rocket. And, when I joined the company our data story was not very mature. We were collecting a bunch of data in LabVIEW and engineers were taking that over to MATLAB to process it. And at first, there, you know, that's the way that a lot of engineers and scientists are used to working. And at first that was, like people weren't entirely sure that that was, that needed to change. But, it's, something, the nice thing about InfluxDB is that, it's so easy to deploy. So as, our software engineering team was able to get it deployed and, up and running very quickly and then quickly also backport all of the data that we collected this far into Influx. And, what was amazing to see and is kind of the super cool moment with Influx is, when we hooked that up to Grafana, Grafana as the visualization platform we used with Influx, 'cause it works really well with it. There was like this aha moment of our engineers who are used to this post process kind of method for dealing with their data, where they could just almost instantly easily discover data that they hadn't been able to see before, and take the manual processes that they would run after a test and just throw those all in Influx and have live data as tests were coming, and, I saw them implementing like crazy rocket equation type stuff in Influx, and it just was totally game changing for how we tested. >> So Angelo, I was explaining in my open, that you could add a column in a traditional RDBMS and do time series, but with the volume of data that you're talking about in the example that Caleb just gave, you have to have a purpose built time series database. Where did you first learn about InfluxDB? >> Yeah, correct. So, I work with the data management team, and my first project was the record metrics that measured the performance of our software, the software that we used to process the data. So I started implementing that in our relational database. But then I realized that in fact I was dealing with time series data and I should really use a solution built for that. And then I started looking at time series databases and I found InfluxDB, and that was back in 2018. The, another use for InfluxDB that I'm also interested is the visits database. If you think about the observations, we are moving the telescope all the time and pointing to specific directions in the sky and taking pictures every 30 seconds. So that itself is a time series. And every point in that time series, we call a visit. So we want to record the metadata about those visits in InfluxDB. That time series is going to be 10 years long, with about 1000 points every night. It's actually not too much data compared to other problems. It's really just a different time scale. >> The telescope at the Rubin Observatory is like, pun intended, I guess the star of the show. And I believe I read that it's going to be the first of the next gen telescopes to come online. It's got this massive field of view, like three orders of magnitude times the Hubble's widest camera view, which is amazing. Like, that's like 40 moons in an image, amazingly fast as well. What else can you tell us about the telescope? >> This telescope it has to move really fast. And, it also has to carry the primary mirror which is an eight meter piece of glass. It's very heavy. And it has to carry a camera which has about the size of a small car. And this whole structure weighs about 300 tons. For that to work, the telescope needs to be very compact and stiff. And one thing that's amazing about it's design is that, the telescope, this 300 tons structure, it sits on a tiny film of oil, which has the diameter of human hair. And that makes an, almost zero friction interface. In fact, a few people can move this enormous structure with only their hands. As you said, another aspect that makes this telescope unique is the optical design. It's a wide field telescope. So, each image has, in diameter the size of about seven full moons. And, with that, we can map the entire sky in only three days. And of course, during operations everything's controlled by software and it is automatic. There's a very complex piece of software called the Scheduler, which is responsible for moving the telescope, and the camera, which is recording 15 terabytes of data every night. >> And Angelo, all this data lands in InfluxDB, correct? And what are you doing with all that data? >> Yeah, actually not. So we use InfluxDB to record engineering data and metadata about the observations. Like telemetry, events, and commands from the telescope. That's a much smaller data set compared to the images. But it is still challenging because you have some high frequency data that the system needs to keep up, and, we need to store this data and have it around for the lifetime of the project. >> Got it. Thank you. Okay, Caleb, let's bring you back in. Tell us more about the, you got these dishwasher size satellites, kind of using a multi-tenant model, I think it's genius. But tell us about the satellites themselves. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, we have in space some satellites already that as you said, are like dishwasher, mini fridge kind of size. And we're working on a bunch more that are a variety of sizes from shoebox to, I guess, a few times larger than what we have today. And it is, we do shoot to have effectively something like a multi-tenant model where we will buy a bus off the shelf. The bus is what you can kind of think of as the core piece of the satellite, almost like a motherboard or something where it's providing the power, it has the solar panels, it has some radios attached to it. It handles the attitude control, basically steers the spacecraft in orbit, and then we build also in-house, what we call our payload hub which is, has all, any customer payloads attached and our own kind of Edge processing sort of capabilities built into it. And, so we integrate that, we launch it, and those things because they're in lower Earth orbit, they're orbiting the earth every 90 minutes. That's, seven kilometers per second which is several times faster than a speeding bullet. So we have one of the unique challenges of operating spacecraft in lower Earth orbit is that generally you can't talk to them all the time. So, we're managing these things through very brief windows of time, where we get to talk to them through our ground sites, either in Antarctica or in the North pole region. >> Talk more about how you use InfluxDB to make sense of this data through all this tech that you're launching into space. >> We basically, previously we started off when I joined the company, storing all of that as Angelo did in a regular relational database. And we found that it was so slow and the size of our data would balloon over the course of a couple days to the point where we weren't able to even store all of the data that we were getting. So we migrated to InfluxDB to store our time series telemetry from the spacecraft. So, that's things like power level, voltage, currents, counts, whatever metadata we need to monitor about the spacecraft, we now store that in InfluxDB. And that has, now we can actually easily store the entire volume of data for the mission life so far without having to worry about the size bloating to an unmanageable amount, and we can also seamlessly query large chunks of data. Like if I need to see, you know, for example, as an operator, I might want to see how my battery state of charge is evolving over the course of the year, I can have, plot in an Influx that loads that in a fraction of a second for a year's worth of data because it does, intelligent, it can intelligently group the data by assigning time interval. So, it's been extremely powerful for us to access the data. And, as time has gone on, we've gradually migrated more and more of our operating data into Influx. >> Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about, we throw this term around a lot of, you know, data driven, a lot of companies say, "Oh yes, we're data driven." But you guys really are, I mean, you got data at the core. Caleb, what does that mean to you? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think the, and the clearest example of when I saw this be like totally game changing is what I mentioned before at Astra where our engineer's feedback loop went from a lot of kind of slow researching, digging into the data to like an instant, instantaneous almost, seeing the data, making decisions based on it immediately rather than having to wait for some processing. And that's something that I've also seen echoed in my current role. But to give another practical example, as I said, we have a huge amount of data that comes down every orbit and we need to be able to ingest all of that data almost instantaneously and provide it to the operator in near real time, about a second worth of latency is all that's acceptable for us to react to see what is coming down from the spacecraft. And building that pipeline is challenging from a software engineering standpoint. My primary language is Python which isn't necessarily that fast. So what we've done is started, and the goal of being data-driven is publish metrics on individual, how individual pieces of our data processing pipeline are performing into Influx as well. And we do that in production as well as in dev. So we have kind of a production monitoring flow. And what that has done is allow us to make intelligent decisions on our software development roadmap where it makes the most sense for us to focus our development efforts in terms of improving our software efficiency, just because we have that visibility into where the real problems are. And sometimes we've found ourselves before we started doing this, kind of chasing rabbits that weren't necessarily the real root cause of issues that we were seeing. But now that we're being a bit more data driven there, we are being much more effective in where we're spending our resources and our time, which is especially critical to us as we scale from supporting a couple of satellites to supporting many, many satellites at once. >> Yeah, of course is how you reduced those dead ends. Maybe Angelo you could talk about what sort of data-driven means to you and your teams. >> I would say that, having real time visibility to the telemetry data and metrics is crucial for us. We need to make sure that the images that we collect with the telescope have good quality, and, that they are within the specifications to meet our science goals. And so if they are not, we want to know that as soon as possible and then start fixing problems. >> Caleb, what are your sort of event, you know, intervals like? >> So I would say that, as of today on the spacecraft, the event, the level of timing that we deal with probably tops out at about 20 Hertz, 20 measurements per second on things like our gyroscopes. But, the, I think the core point here of the ability to have high precision data is extremely important for these kinds of scientific applications and I'll give an example from when I worked at, on the rockets at Astra. There, our baseline data rate that we would ingest data during a test is 500 Hertz. So 500 samples per second, and in some cases we would actually need to ingest much higher rate data, even up to like 1.5 kilohertz, so extremely, extremely high precision data there where timing really matters a lot. And, you know, I can, one of the really powerful things about Influx is the fact that it can handle this. That's one of the reasons we chose it, because, there's, times when we're looking at the results of a firing where you're zooming in, you know, I talked earlier about how on my current job we often zoom out to look at a year's worth of data. You're zooming in to where your screen is preoccupied by a tiny fraction of a second, and you need to see same thing as Angelo just said, not just the actual telemetry, which is coming in at a high rate, but the events that are coming out of our controllers, so that can be something like, "Hey, I opened this valve at exactly this time," and that goes, we want to have that at, micro, or even nanosecond precision so that we know, okay, we saw a spike in chamber pressure at this exact moment, was that before or after this valve opened? That kind of visibility is critical in these kind of scientific applications, and absolutely game changing to be able to see that in near real time, and with, a really easy way for engineers to be able to visualize this data themselves without having to wait for us software engineers to go build it for them. >> Can the scientists do self-serve or do you have to design and build all the analytics and queries for your scientists? >> Well, I think that's absolutely, from my perspective that's absolutely one of the best things about Influx and what I've seen be game changing is that, generally I'd say anyone can learn to use Influx. And honestly, most of our users might not even know they're using Influx, because, the interface that we expose to them is Grafana, which is a generic graphing, open source graphing library that is very similar to Influx zone Chronograf. >> Sure. >> And what it does is, it provides this almost, it's a very intuitive UI for building your queries. So, you choose a measurement and it shows a dropdown of available measurements. And then you choose the particular fields you want to look at, and again, that's a dropdown. So, it's really easy for our users to discover and there's kind of point and click options for doing math, aggregations. You can even do like perfect kind of predictions all within Grafana, the Grafana user interface, which is really just a wrapper around the APIs and functionality that Influx provides. >> Putting data in the hands of those who have the context, the domain experts is key. Angelo, is it the same situation for you, is it self-serve? >> Yeah, correct. As I mentioned before, we have the astronomers making their own dashboards because they know what exactly what they need to visualize. >> Yeah, I mean, it's all about using the right tool for the job. I think for us, when I joined the company we weren't using InfluxDB and we were dealing with serious issues of the database growing to an incredible size extremely quickly, and being unable to like even querying short periods of data was taking on the order of seconds, which is just not possible for operations. >> Guys, this has been really formative, it's pretty exciting to see how the edge, is mountaintops, lower Earth orbits, I mean space is the ultimate edge, isn't it? I wonder if you could answer two questions to wrap here. You know, what comes next for you guys? And is there something that you're really excited about that you're working on? Caleb maybe you could go first and then Angelo you can bring us home. >> Basically what's next for Loft Orbital is more satellites, a greater push towards infrastructure, and really making, our mission is to make space simple for our customers and for everyone. And we're scaling the company like crazy now, making that happen. It's extremely exciting, an extremely exciting time to be in this company and to be in this industry as a whole. Because there are so many interesting applications out there, so many cool ways of leveraging space that people are taking advantage of, and with companies like SpaceX and the, now rapidly lowering cost of launch it's just a really exciting place to be in. We're launching more satellites, we are scaling up for some constellations, and our ground system has to be improved to match. So, there's a lot of improvements that we're working on to really scale up our control software to be best in class and make it capable of handling such a large workload, so. >> Are you guys hiring? >> We are absolutely hiring, so I would, we have positions all over the company, so, we need software engineers, we need people who do more aerospace specific stuff. So absolutely, I'd encourage anyone to check out the Loft Orbital website, if this is at all interesting. >> All right, Angelo, bring us home. >> Yeah. So what's next for us is really getting this telescope working and collecting data. And when that's happened is going to be just a deluge of data coming out of this camera and handling all that data is going to be really challenging. Yeah, I want to be here for that, I'm looking forward. Like for next year we have like an important milestone, which is our commissioning camera, which is a simplified version of the full camera, it's going to be on sky, and so yeah, most of the system has to be working by then. >> Nice. All right guys, with that we're going to end it. Thank you so much, really fascinating, and thanks to InfluxDB for making this possible, really groundbreaking stuff, enabling value creation at the Edge, in the cloud, and of course, beyond at the space. So, really transformational work that you guys are doing, so congratulations and really appreciate the broader community. I can't wait to see what comes next from having this entire ecosystem. Now, in a moment, I'll be back to wrap up. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Welcome. Telegraf is a popular open source data collection agent. Telegraf collects data from hundreds of systems like IoT sensors, cloud deployments, and enterprise applications. It's used by everyone from individual developers and hobbyists, to large corporate teams. The Telegraf project has a very welcoming and active Open Source community. Learn how to get involved by visiting the Telegraf GitHub page. Whether you want to contribute code, improve documentation, participate in testing, or just show what you're doing with Telegraf. We'd love to hear what you're building. >> Thanks for watching Moving the World with InfluxDB, made possible by Influx Data. I hope you learned some things and are inspired to look deeper into where time series databases might fit into your environment. If you're dealing with large and or fast data volumes, and you want to scale cost effectively with the highest performance, and you're analyzing metrics and data over time, times series databases just might be a great fit for you. Try InfluxDB out. You can start with a free cloud account by clicking on the link in the resources below. Remember, all these recordings are going to be available on demand of thecube.net and influxdata.com, so check those out. And poke around Influx Data. They are the folks behind InfluxDB, and one of the leaders in the space. We hope you enjoyed the program, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you soon. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're now going to go into the customer panel. And we'd like to welcome Angelo Fausti, who's software engineer at the Vera C Rubin Observatory, and Caleb Maclachlan, who's senior spacecraft operations software engineer at Loft Orbital. Guys, thanks for joining us. You don't want to miss folks, this interview. Caleb, let's start with you. You work for an extremely cool company. You're launching satellites into space. Cause doing that is highly complex and not a cheap endeavor. Tell us about Loft Orbital and what you guys do to attack that problem? >> Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me here, by the way. So Loft Orbital is a company that's a series B startup now. And our mission basically is to provide rapid access to space for all kinds of customers. Historically, if you want to fly something in space, do something in space, it's extremely expensive. You need to book a launch, build a bus, hire a team to operate it, have big software teams, and then eventually worry about a lot of very specialized engineering. And what we're trying to do is, change that from a super specialized problem that has an extremely high barrier of access to a infrastructure problem. So that it's almost as simple as deploying a VM in AWS or GCP, as getting your programs, your mission deployed on orbit, with access to different sensors, cameras, radios, stuff like that. So that's kind of our mission. And just to give a really brief example of the kind of customer that we can serve. There's a really cool company called Totum labs, who is working on building an IoT constellation, for Internet of Things. Basically being able to get telemetry from all over the world. They're the first company to demonstrate indoor IoT, which means you have this little modem inside a container. A container that you track from anywhere on the world as it's going across the ocean. So it's really little. And they've been able to stay small startup that's focused on their product, which is that super crazy, complicated, cool radio, while we handle the whole space segment for them, which just, before Loft was really impossible. So that's our mission is, providing space infrastructure as a service. We are kind of groundbreaking in this area, and we're serving a huge variety of customers with all kinds of different missions, and obviously, generating a ton of data in space that we've got to handle. >> Yeah, so amazing, Caleb, what you guys do. I know you were lured to the skies very early in your career, but how did you kind of land in this business? >> Yeah, so I guess just a little bit about me. For some people, they don't necessarily know what they want to do, early in their life. For me, I was five years old and I knew, I want to be in the space industry. So I started in the Air Force, but have stayed in the space industry my whole career and been a part of, this is the fifth space startup that I've been a part of, actually. So I've kind of started out in satellites, did spend some time in working in the launch industry on rockets. Now I'm here back in satellites. And honestly, this is the most exciting of the different space startups that I've been a part of. So, always been passionate about space and basically writing software for operating in space for basically extending how we write software into orbit. >> Super interesting. Okay, Angelo. Let's talk about the Rubin Observatory Vera C. Rubin, famous woman scientists, Galaxy guru, Now you guys, the observatory are up, way up high, you're going to get a good look at the southern sky. I know COVID slowed you guys down a bit. But no doubt you continue to code away on the software. I know you're getting close. You got to be super excited. Give us the update on the observatory and your role. >> All right. So yeah, Rubin is state of the art observatory that is in construction on a remote mountain in Chile. And with Rubin we'll conduct the large survey of space and time. We are going to observe the sky with eight meter optical telescope and take 1000 pictures every night with 3.2 gigapixel camera. And we're going to do that for 10 years, which is the duration of the survey. The goal is to produce an unprecedented data set. Which is going to be about .5 exabytes of image data. And from these images will detect and measure the properties of billions of astronomical objects. We are also building a science platform that's hosted on Google Cloud, so that the scientists and the public can explore this data to make discoveries. >> Yeah, amazing project. Now, you aren't a Doctor of Philosophy. So you probably spent some time thinking about what's out there. And then you went on to earn a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics. So this is something that you've been working on for the better part of your career, isn't it? >> Yeah, that's right. About 15 years. I studied physics in college, then I got a PhD in astronomy. And I worked for about five years in another project, the Dark Energy survey before joining Rubin in 2015. >> Yeah, impressive. So it seems like both your organizations are looking at space from two different angles. One thing you guys both have in common, of course, is software. And you both use InfluxDB as part of your data infrastructure. How did you discover InfluxDB, get into it? How do you use the platform? Maybe Caleb, you can start. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the first company that I extensively used InfluxDB in was a launch startup called Astra. And we were in the process of designing our first generation rocket there and testing the engines, pumps. Everything that goes into a rocket. And when I joined the company, our data story was not very mature. We were collecting a bunch of data in LabVIEW. And engineers were taking that over to MATLAB to process it. And at first, that's the way that a lot of engineers and scientists are used to working. And at first that was, like, people weren't entirely sure that, that needed to change. But it's something, the nice thing about InfluxDB is that, it's so easy to deploy. So our software engineering team was able to get it deployed and up and running very quickly and then quickly also backport all of the data that we've collected thus far into Influx. And what was amazing to see and it's kind of the super cool moment with Influx is, when we hooked that up to Grafana, Grafana, is the visualization platform we use with influx, because it works really well with it. There was like this aha moment of our engineers who are used to this post process kind of method for dealing with their data, where they could just almost instantly, easily discover data that they hadn't been able to see before. And take the manual processes that they would run after a test and just throw those all in Influx and have live data as tests were coming. And I saw them implementing crazy rocket equation type stuff in Influx and it just was totally game changing for how we tested. And things that previously it would be like run a test, then wait an hour for the engineers to crunch the data and then we run another test with some changed parameters or a changed startup sequence or something like that, became, by the time the test is over, the engineers know what the next step is, because they have this just like instant game changing access to data. So since that experience, basically everywhere I've gone, every company since then, I've been promoting InfluxDB and using it and spinning it up and quickly showing people how simple and easy it is. >> Yeah, thank you. So Angelo, I was explaining in my open that, you know you could add a column in a traditional RDBMS and do time series. But with the volume of data that you're talking about in the example that Caleb just gave, you have to have a purpose built time series database. Where did you first learn about InfluxDB? >> Yeah, correct. So I worked with the data management team and my first project was the record metrics that measure the performance of our software. The software that we use to process the data. So I started implementing that in our relational database. But then I realized that in fact, I was dealing with time series data. And I should really use a solution built for that. And then I started looking at time series databases and I found InfluxDB, that was back in 2018. Then I got involved in another project. To record telemetry data from the telescope itself. It's very challenging because you have so many subsystems and sensors, producing data. And with that data, the goal is to look at the telescope harder in real time so we can make decisions and make sure that everything's doing the right thing. And another use for InfluxDB that I'm also interested, is the visits database. If you think about the observations, we are moving the telescope all the time and pointing to specific directions in the sky and taking pictures every 30 seconds. So that itself is a time series. And every point in the time series, we call that visit. So we want to record the metadata about those visits in InfluxDB. That time series is going to be 10 years long, with about 1000 points every night. It's actually not too much data compared to the other problems. It's really just the different time scale. So yeah, we have plans on continuing using InfluxDB and finding new applications in the project. >> Yeah and the speed with which you can actually get high quality images. Angelo, my understanding is, you use InfluxDB, as you said, you're monitoring the telescope hardware and the software. And just say, some of the scientific data as well. The telescope at the Rubin Observatory is like, no pun intended, I guess, the star of the show. And I believe, I read that it's going to be the first of the next gen telescopes to come online. It's got this massive field of view, like three orders of magnitude times the Hubble's widest camera view, which is amazing. That's like 40 moons in an image, and amazingly fast as well. What else can you tell us about the telescope? >> Yeah, so it's really a challenging project, from the point of view of engineering. This telescope, it has to move really fast. And it also has to carry the primary mirror, which is an eight meter piece of glass, it's very heavy. And it has to carry a camera, which is about the size of a small car. And this whole structure weighs about 300 pounds. For that to work, the telescope needs to be very compact and stiff. And one thing that's amazing about its design is that the telescope, this 300 tons structure, it sits on a tiny film of oil, which has the diameter of human hair, in that brings an almost zero friction interface. In fact, a few people can move this enormous structure with only their hands. As you said, another aspect that makes this telescope unique is the optical design. It's a wide field telescope. So each image has, in diameter, the size of about seven full moons. And with that we can map the entire sky in only three days. And of course, during operations, everything's controlled by software, and it's automatic. There's a very complex piece of software called the scheduler, which is responsible for moving the telescope and the camera. Which will record the 15 terabytes of data every night. >> And Angelo, all this data lands in InfluxDB, correct? And what are you doing with all that data? >> Yeah, actually not. So we're using InfluxDB to record engineering data and metadata about the observations, like telemetry events and the commands from the telescope. That's a much smaller data set compared to the images. But it is still challenging because you have some high frequency data that the system needs to keep up and we need to store this data and have it around for the lifetime of the project. >> Hm. So at the mountain, we keep the data for 30 days. So the observers, they use Influx and InfluxDB instance, running there to analyze the data. But we also replicate the data to another instance running at the US data facility, where we have more computational resources and so more people can look at the data without interfering with the observations. Yeah, I have to say that InfluxDB has been really instrumental for us, and especially at this phase of the project where we are testing and integrating the different pieces of hardware. And it's not just the database, right. It's the whole platform. So I like to give this example, when we are doing this kind of task, it's hard to know in advance which dashboards and visualizations you're going to need, right. So what you really need is a data exploration tool. And with tools like chronograph, for example, having the ability to query and create dashboards on the fly was really a game changer for us. So astronomers, they typically are not software engineers, but they are the ones that know better than anyone, what needs to be monitored. And so they use chronograph and they can create the dashboards and the visualizations that they need. >> Got it. Thank you. Okay, Caleb, let's bring you back in. Tell us more about, you got these dishwasher size satellites are kind of using a multi tenant model. I think it's genius. But tell us about the satellites themselves. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we have in space, some satellites already. That, as you said, are like dishwasher, mini fridge kind of size. And we're working on a bunch more that are a variety of sizes from shoe box to I guess, a few times larger than what we have today. And it is, we do shoot to have, effectively something like a multi tenant model where we will buy a bus off the shelf, the bus is, what you can kind of think of as the core piece of the satellite, almost like a motherboard or something. Where it's providing the power, it has the solar panels, it has some radios attached to it, it handles the altitude control, basically steers the spacecraft in orbit. And then we build, also in house, what we call our payload hub, which is has all any customer payloads attached, and our own kind of edge processing sort of capabilities built into it. And so we integrate that, we launch it, and those things, because they're in low Earth orbit, they're orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes. That's seven kilometers per second, which is several times faster than a speeding bullet. So we've got, we have one of the unique challenges of operating spacecraft in lower Earth orbit is that generally you can't talk to them all the time. So we're managing these things through very brief windows of time. Where we get to talk to them through our ground sites, either in Antarctica or in the North Pole region. So we'll see them for 10 minutes, and then we won't see them for the next 90 minutes as they zip around the Earth collecting data. So one of the challenges that exists for a company like ours is, that's a lot of, you have to be able to make real time decisions operationally, in those short windows that can sometimes be critical to the health and safety of the spacecraft. And it could be possible that we put ourselves into a low power state in the previous orbit or something potentially dangerous to the satellite can occur. And so as an operator, you need to very quickly process that data coming in. And not just the the live data, but also the massive amounts of data that were collected in, what we call the back orbit, which is the time that we couldn't see the spacecraft. >> We got it. So talk more about how you use InfluxDB to make sense of this data from all those tech that you're launching into space. >> Yeah, so we basically, previously we started off, when I joined the company, storing all of that, as Angelo did, in a regular relational database. And we found that it was so slow, and the size of our data would balloon over the course of a couple of days to the point where we weren't able to even store all of the data that we were getting. So we migrated to InfluxDB to store our time series telemetry from the spacecraft. So that thing's like power level voltage, currents counts, whatever metadata we need to monitor about the spacecraft, we now store that in InfluxDB. And that has, you know, now we can actually easily store the entire volume of data for the mission life so far, without having to worry about the size bloating to an unmanageable amount. And we can also seamlessly query large chunks of data, like if I need to see, for example, as an operator, I might want to see how my battery state of charge is evolving over the course of the year, I can have a plot in an Influx that loads that in a fraction of a second for a year's worth of data, because it does, you know, intelligent. I can intelligently group the data by citing time interval. So it's been extremely powerful for us to access the data. And as time has gone on, we've gradually migrated more and more of our operating data into Influx. So not only do we store the basic telemetry about the bus and our payload hub, but we're also storing data for our customers, that our customers are generating on board about things like you know, one example of a customer that's doing something pretty cool. They have a computer on our satellite, which they can reprogram themselves to do some AI enabled edge compute type capability in space. And so they're sending us some metrics about the status of their workloads, in addition to the basics, like the temperature of their payload, their computer or whatever else. And we're delivering that data to them through Influx in a Grafana dashboard that they can plot where they can see, not only has this pipeline succeeded or failed, but also where was the spacecraft when this occurred? What was the voltage being supplied to their payload? Whatever they need to see, it's all right there for them. Because we're aggregating all that data in InfluxDB. >> That's awesome. You're measuring everything. Let's talk a little bit about, we throw this term around a lot, data driven. A lot of companies say, Oh, yes, we're data driven. But you guys really are. I mean, you got data at the core. Caleb, what does that what does that mean to you? >> Yeah, so you know, I think, the clearest example of when I saw this, be like totally game changing is, what I mentioned before it, at Astra, were our engineers feedback loop went from a lot of, kind of slow researching, digging into the data to like an instant, instantaneous, almost, Seeing the data, making decisions based on it immediately, rather than having to wait for some processing. And that's something that I've also seen echoed in my current role. But to give another practical example, as I said, we have a huge amount of data that comes down every orbit, and we need to be able to ingest all that data almost instantaneously and provide it to the operator in near real time. About a second worth of latency is all that's acceptable for us to react to. To see what is coming down from the spacecraft and building that pipeline is challenging, from a software engineering standpoint. Our primary language is Python, which isn't necessarily that fast. So what we've done is started, in the in the goal being data driven, is publish metrics on individual, how individual pieces of our data processing pipeline, are performing into Influx as well. And we do that in production as well as in dev. So we have kind of a production monitoring flow. And what that has done is, allow us to make intelligent decisions on our software development roadmap. Where it makes the most sense for us to focus our development efforts in terms of improving our software efficiency, just because we have that visibility into where the real problems are. At sometimes we've found ourselves, before we started doing this, kind of chasing rabbits that weren't necessarily the real root cause of issues that we were seeing. But now, that we're being a bit more data driven, there, we are being much more effective in where we're spending our resources and our time, which is especially critical to us as we scaled from supporting a couple of satellites to supporting many, many satellites at once. >> So you reduce those dead ends. Maybe Angela, you could talk about what sort of data driven means to you and your team? >> Yeah, I would say that having real time visibility, to the telemetry data and metrics is crucial for us. We need to make sure that the images that we collect, with the telescope have good quality and that they are within the specifications to meet our science goals. And so if they are not, we want to know that as soon as possible, and then start fixing problems. >> Yeah, so I mean, you think about these big science use cases, Angelo. They are extremely high precision, you have to have a lot of granularity, very tight tolerances. How does that play into your time series data strategy? >> Yeah, so one of the subsystems that produce the high volume and high rates is the structure that supports the telescope's primary mirror. So on that structure, we have hundreds of actuators that compensate the shape of the mirror for the formations. That's part of our active updated system. So that's really real time. And we have to record this high data rates, and we have requirements to handle data that are a few 100 hertz. So we can easily configure our database with milliseconds precision, that's for telemetry data. But for events, sometimes we have events that are very close to each other and then we need to configure database with higher precision. >> um hm For example, micro seconds. >> Yeah, so Caleb, what are your event intervals like? >> So I would say that, as of today on the spacecraft, the event, the level of timing that we deal with probably tops out at about 20 hertz, 20 measurements per second on things like our gyroscopes. But I think the core point here of the ability to have high precision data is extremely important for these kinds of scientific applications. And I'll give you an example, from when I worked on the rockets at Astra. There, our baseline data rate that we would ingest data during a test is 500 hertz, so 500 samples per second. And in some cases, we would actually need to ingest much higher rate data. Even up to like 1.5 kilohertz. So extremely, extremely high precision data there, where timing really matters a lot. And, I can, one of the really powerful things about Influx is the fact that it can handle this, that's one of the reasons we chose it. Because there's times when we're looking at the results of firing, where you're zooming in. I've talked earlier about how on my current job, we often zoom out to look at a year's worth of data. You're zooming in, to where your screen is preoccupied by a tiny fraction of a second. And you need to see, same thing, as Angelo just said, not just the actual telemetry, which is coming in at a high rate, but the events that are coming out of our controllers. So that can be something like, hey, I opened this valve at exactly this time. And that goes, we want to have that at micro or even nanosecond precision, so that we know, okay, we saw a spike in chamber pressure at this exact moment, was that before or after this valve open? That kind of visibility is critical in these kinds of scientific applications and absolutely game changing, to be able to see that in near real time. And with a really easy way for engineers to be able to visualize this data themselves without having to wait for us software engineers to go build it for them. >> Can the scientists do self serve? Or do you have to design and build all the analytics and queries for scientists? >> I think that's absolutely from my perspective, that's absolutely one of the best things about Influx, and what I've seen be game changing is that, generally, I'd say anyone can learn to use Influx. And honestly, most of our users might not even know they're using Influx. Because the interface that we expose to them is Grafana, which is generic graphing, open source graphing library that is very similar to Influx zone chronograph. >> Sure. >> And what it does is, it provides this, almost, it's a very intuitive UI for building your query. So you choose a measurement, and it shows a drop down of available measurements, and then you choose the particular field you want to look at. And again, that's a drop down. So it's really easy for our users to discover it. And there's kind of point and click options for doing math, aggregations. You can even do like, perfect kind of predictions all within Grafana. The Grafana user interface, which is really just a wrapper around the API's and functionality that Influx provides. So yes, absolutely, that's been the most powerful thing about it, is that it gets us out of the way, us software engineers, who may not know quite as much as the scientists and engineers that are closer to the interesting math. And they build these crazy dashboards that I'm just like, wow, I had no idea you could do that. I had no idea that, that is something that you would want to see. And absolutely, that's the most empowering piece. >> Yeah, putting data in the hands of those who have the context, the domain experts is key. Angelo is it the same situation for you? Is it self serve? >> Yeah, correct. As I mentioned before, we have the astronomers making their own dashboards, because they know exactly what they need to visualize. And I have an example just from last week. We had an engineer at the observatory that was building a dashboard to monitor the cooling system of the entire building. And he was familiar with InfluxQL, which was the primarily query language in version one of InfluxDB. And he had, that was really a challenge because he had all the data spread at multiple InfluxDB measurements. And he was like doing one query for each measurement and was not able to produce what he needed. And then, but that's the perfect use case for Flux, which is the new data scripting language that Influx data developed and introduced as the main language in version two. And so with Flux, he was able to combine data from multiple measurements and summarize this data in a nice table. So yeah, having more flexible and powerful language, also allows you to make better a visualization. >> So Angelo, where would you be without time series database, that technology generally, may be specifically InfluxDB, as one of the leading platforms. Would you be able to do this? >> Yeah, it's hard to imagine, doing what we are doing without InfluxDB. And I don't know, perhaps it would be just a matter of time to rediscover InfluxDB. >> Yeah. How about you Caleb? >> Yeah, I mean, it's all about using the right tool for the job. I think for us, when I joined the company, we weren't using InfluxDB and we were dealing with serious issues of the database growing to a an incredible size, extremely quickly. And being unable to, like even querying short periods of data, was taking on the order of seconds, which is just not possible for operations. So time series database is, if you're dealing with large volumes of time series data, Time series database is the right tool for the job and Influx is a great one for it. So, yeah, it's absolutely required to use for this kind of data, there is not really any other option. >> Guys, this has been really informative. It's pretty exciting to see, how the edge is mountain tops, lower Earth orbits. Space is the ultimate edge. Isn't it. I wonder if you could two questions to wrap here. What comes next for you guys? And is there something that you're really excited about? That you're working on. Caleb, may be you could go first and than Angelo you could bring us home. >> Yeah absolutely, So basically, what's next for Loft Orbital is more, more satellites a greater push towards infrastructure and really making, our mission is to make space simple for our customers and for everyone. And we're scaling the company like crazy now, making that happen. It's extremely exciting and extremely exciting time to be in this company and to be in this industry as a whole. Because there are so many interesting applications out there. So many cool ways of leveraging space that people are taking advantage of and with companies like SpaceX, now rapidly lowering cost of launch. It's just a really exciting place to be in. And we're launching more satellites. We're scaling up for some constellations and our ground system has to be improved to match. So there is a lot of improvements that we are working on to really scale up our control systems to be best in class and make it capable of handling such large workloads. So, yeah. What's next for us is just really 10X ing what we are doing. And that's extremely exciting. >> And anything else you are excited about? Maybe something personal? Maybe, you know, the titbit you want to share. Are you guys hiring? >> We're absolutely hiring. So, we've positions all over the company. So we need software engineers. We need people who do more aerospace specific stuff. So absolutely, I'd encourage anyone to check out the Loft Orbital website, if this is at all interesting. Personal wise, I don't have any interesting personal things that are data related. But my current hobby is sea kayaking, so I'm working on becoming a sea kayaking instructor. So if anyone likes to go sea kayaking out in the San Francisco Bay area, hopefully I'll see you out there. >> Love it. All right, Angelo, bring us home. >> Yeah. So what's next for us is, we're getting this telescope working and collecting data and when that's happened, it's going to be just a delish of data coming out of this camera. And handling all that data, is going to be a really challenging. Yeah, I wonder I might not be here for that I'm looking for it, like for next year we have an important milestone, which is our commissioning camera, which is a simplified version of the full camera, is going to be on sky and so most of the system has to be working by then. >> Any cool hobbies that you are working on or any side project? >> Yeah, actually, during the pandemic I started gardening. And I live here in Two Sun, Arizona. It gets really challenging during the summer because of the lack of water, right. And so, we have an automatic irrigation system at the farm and I'm trying to develop a small system to monitor the irrigation and make sure that our plants have enough water to survive. >> Nice. All right guys, with that we're going to end it. Thank you so much. Really fascinating and thanks to InfluxDB for making this possible. Really ground breaking stuff, enabling value at the edge, in the cloud and of course beyond, at the space. Really transformational work, that you guys are doing. So congratulations and I really appreciate the broader community. I can't wait to see what comes next from this entire eco system. Now in the moment, I'll be back to wrap up. This is Dave Vallante. And you are watching The cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (upbeat music)