Democratize the Galaxy: The Story of ConsenSys Space and TruSat
The latest on blockchain and space as ConsenSys Space launches TruSat, a platform for democratized satellite data.
When ConsenSys announced the acquisition of Planetary Resources in 2018 — a pioneer in the embryonic, but astronomically ambitious industry of asteroid mining — the move was met by surprise in both the space and blockchain sectors. After all, what do asteroid mining and blockchain have to do with one another? With the release of TruSat two weeks ago — on the opening day of the International Astronautical Congress no less — ConsenSys Space has begun to answer that question, and initiated a march towards a democratized, diversified, and decentralized future in space.
Amid projections of a ten-to-twenty-five-fold increase in the number of satellites in low Earth orbit, avoiding collisions between satellites is essential to the long-term sustainability of spaceflight. TruSat is an open source, citizen-powered space sustainability system that utilizes crowdsourced data from hobbyists and professionals all over the globe, to create an independent record of satellite orbits freely accessible to anyone, fostering transparency and accountability for adherence to sustainability standards. It is also just the incremental first step in ConsenSys Space’s vision of the space economy.
The levels of blockchain-integration into ConsenSys Space endeavors are multifold, from enabling TruSat’s open, permissionless architecture, and growing to include crowdfunding to fueling a tokenized economy.
“The core innovations of TruSat are best understood relative to existing sources of Space Situational Awareness (SSA) data,” explains Brian Israel, Co-Founder of ConsenSys Space and formerly the lead US State Department lawyer addressing emerging issues of space law at the United Nations. “These innovations are most relevant to independent assessment of the sustainability practices of satellite operators. Existing government sources of SSA provide a limited subset of the data they collect. Being primarily a national security mission, they don’t provide the underlying data that would allow consumers of SSA information to perform their own analysis. When you have a single entity controlling the whole process from the sensors to the output, your trust in the output is only as strong as your trust in that institution.”
“We have architected TruSat to improve on that for the specific application of independent assessment of performance against sustainability standards. What we’ve done is taken the institution out of the loop. ConsenSys Space won’t be able to control this. It’s permissionless. Anyone can put in data. To have a system that is open, decentralized, autonomous, and trusted is a difficult engineering challenge, but we are leveraging some core attributes of blockchain technology to achieve it,” says Israel.
Read the whole story at ConsenSys.net
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
