Space Situated Blockchain
“Telstar” the record was named after Telstar the communications satellite, which was launched into orbit on 10 July 1962.
It was the satellite that allowed the first live broadcast of television images between the United States and Europe. The live images were shown on July 23, 1962 depicting workers at a blast furnace in Duisburg, Germany, the Statue of Liberty in New York City, a baseball game in Chicago, and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Its transatlantic signals were limited to 30 minutes in each 2.5 hour orbit when the satellite passed over the Atlantic Ocean. It’s first computer to computer data transmission happened on October 25, 1962 between two IBM 1401 computers — one based in Endicott, New York to La Gaude, France.
However, Telstar remained operational only for 7 months before it prematurely failed due to Starfish Prime.
Starfish Prime was a high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States, a joint effort of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Defense Atomic Support Agency. It was launched from Johnston Atoll on July 9, 1962, and was the largest nuclear test conducted in outer space.
The first Telstar satellite continues to still orbit Earth joining the more than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris or “space junk”.
Subsequent Telstar satellites have been launched into geosynchronous orbit and only share the name Telstar but little else.
One of these Telstar named satellites is Telstar 11N, a communications satellite intended for an orbital slot of 37.5° W longitude in geosynchronous orbit. It is part of the Telstar series of the Canadian satellite communications company Telesat. The satellite was launched on 26 February 2009 by Zenit-3SLB — a Ukrainian expendable carrier rocket, by mutual Russian-Ukrainian enterprise “International Spaces Services” (Mezhdunarodnye kosmicheskie uslugi).
Since March of this year, Telstar 11N has played a significant part in the information wars during Russian’s incursion into Ukraine. The irony is a satellite that was launched in collaboration between both countries, Ukraine and Russia is now being used as one of its pawns to win a war between them.
What if satellites like Telstar could be used to create an immutable digital exchange that encircles the globe?
In April 2022, NASA announced partnerships with six commercial satellite operators including SpaceX, U.K. company Inmarsat, American Viasat and Switzerland-based SES, to demonstrate how they could take care of NASA’s space communication needs in the future.
One of the needs that commercial satellite operators could provide is space situated blockchain to create an immutable digital exchange of data and communication available globally even if the internet goes offline. A service such as this would two byproducts: 1) it would only use green energy 2) profitable on day one.
First some caveats:
Geo stationary satellites (GEO) are 36000 kilometers / 22,369 miles away from Earth while lower earth orbit satellites (LEO) are around 2000 kilometers / 1242 miles away from Earth. The transmit power varies a lot to travel to these distances. For GEO satellites 50dBm is the power used at the broadcasting stations. 50dBm is 100W.
But more than power, in order for satellites either in LEO or GEO orbit to become a blockchain node, data transmissions must become quicker.
Transmission latency for satellites in geo orbit 240 milliseconds via radio frequency. Because of this delay, it means a reduced throughput of the TCP based satellite network due to large propagation delay, slow start, packet loss assumption due to congestion. The packet loss assumption due to congestion will unduly trigger, congestion control mechanisms resulting in further throughput degradation.
Now some positives:
Laser communications have much less latency and higher transmission speed and quality. Unfortunately, they employ much narrower beams than RF and it signifies that the precision of the pointing has to be much higher. Technology has to evolve towards precision pointing.
The first commercial laser intersatellite link, Airbus’s SpaceDataHighway, began operation in 2016, using Tesat laser communications terminals to transmit high-priority image data collected by four satellites in low-Earth orbit at rates to 1.8 Gbit/s to relays in geosynchronous orbit for radio transmission to the ground. The high-speed laser uplink in the low satellite tracks the geosynchronous satellite so it can relay images quickly, without having to wait to pass over a ground station. Then, the synchronous orbit can relay the images to cloud servers on the ground via its high-speed link.
Even SpaceX has tested intersatellite links on other Starlink satellites, although they are not in widespread use. During a September 2020 webcast of a Starlink launch, the company said it tested “space lasers” between two satellites, relaying hundreds of gigabytes of data.
Laser communications are currently proprietary communication protocols whereas radio frequency is standard and can be intercepted, jammed, or spoofed. Preventing radio frequency from being intercepted even if it’s encrypted is a lot harder than precise laser pointing.
Laser communications in conjunction with blockchain could make a digital exchange of information virtually tamper proof.
What is Green Blockchain?
A green blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that has an ecological mission instead of just being used for economic value like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Energy via solar panels is limitless as long as the satellite has undisturbed line of sight to the sun. This energy source could diminish the need for spikes in energy production on Earth to satisfy blockchain proof of work and transaction costs.
Also the need for thousands of nodes is not needed as long as space blockchain nodes contain all the blocks and Earth bound lite nodes contain only updates to the distributed ledgers.
Even using a green blockchain algorithm such as Algorand which uses a revolutionary algorithm called Pure Proof of Stake (PPoS), could maintain very low power usage with high transactions per second (TPS) for older satellites that can be retrofitted to become space situated blockchain nodes.
So either using a low power blockchain algorithm or combined with limitless solar panel and laser communications — this could represent immutable digital exchanges that are environmental friendly.
Uses of Space Situated Blockchain
Blockchain applications that lock land ownership and country boundaries interlinked with satellite imagery and GPS coordinates. It could offer deep space applications such as tracking space debris for space situational awareness. Later using satellite blockchain for digital supply chain and logistics around moon missions and asteroid mining.
Military uses include immutable communications and data transmissions between agencies including Space Force, Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy, and Coast Guard. The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is working on a Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3) to be sent to geostationary orbit as an add-on to the GPS satellites already present in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO). Combining blockchain nodes with GPS capabilities would allow for precision communications.
In case of a world war scenario and the World Wide Web went down and OneWeb, SpaceX’s Starlink cube sats were pushed into premature upper atmosphere re-entry, a space situated blockchain digital exchange would allow secure communications and collaboration between collaborating armies.
Revenue Generating Space Situated Blockchain
Within a blockchain digital exchange powered by satellites in orbit, costs can be offset by fixed, dynamic costing per transaction or quarterly subscription costs to pay upfront for credits that pay for transaction and “gas” fees. This means on day one, a space situated blockchain could pay for itself.
Generating revenue via retrofitted older satellites and new laser intersatellites would be music to everyone’s ears.
