Meet the team: Jim Groot on the satellite industry
Green City Watch’s Digital Communications Intern, Anna Roberts, recently sat down (virtually) with CTO Jim Groot to discuss the satellite industry’s positive and negative environmental impacts. Curious about the people behind Green City Watch? Keep on reading! Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Anna: To start off, where are you from?
Jim: I’m from a little town called Enkhuizen, which is about 60 kilometers from here, north of Amsterdam.
A: What do you like to do in your spare time?
J: Anything in nature, pretty much. Surfing, music, and satellites in general. That’s about it.
A: That’s perfect. How did you first become interested in nature and satellites?
J: I think it started when I was traveling in Australia when I was 20 years old. And being there in the wilderness, like there’s nothing you’re used to. In the Netherlands, of course, everything is managed here and it’s not really, really wild. Satellites have always interested me because they give a bird’s-eye view.
A: And what is your role at Green City Watch?
J: I am the CTO and work with remote sensing analysis.
A: Before the interview, you also mentioned that the satellite industry could also be used to monitor or mitigate climate change in the long-run.
J: Definitely.
A: Could you go into that a little bit?
J: Of course. I mean earth observation as an industry in general, it originated from a military perspective of spying on people in a way. The first satellite-technology was used for military purposes and then in World War II. A lot of technology is created during war times, when people are in crisis, and can later be used for good. So I think with satellites, it’s kind of the same thing. We actually use these highly sophisticated, specialized machines to do some good in the world. And we can step out of the system. We’re all on this globe, and it’s sometimes very hard to step out of it and actually see the system as a whole. I think satellites and earth observation really help us to do so. You can see the global situation that we’re in and the impact that we’re having. Cause back in the day, we couldn’t imagine what kind of impact. Our species, we’re very small on this big globe. And the impact we’re having, we couldn’t imagine that it was actually like this. I think satellites have really helped to put it into perspective and paint a picture in general.
A: Do you think there are certain aspects of the satellite industry that could be improved upon?
J: I think there is definitely, like all this space junk is one of the main problems nowadays.
A: I had no clue about that.
J: There’s this whole problem of space junk and it’s moving at like 700 kilometers a second. And if it hits something, it’s just scattered into more space junk and it can cause this chain reaction. Some people even say that if that chain reaction starts happening, we can not even leave our planet anymore cause there are all these tiny, tiny bullets just racing around our Earth. And we wouldn’t be able to travel through space anymore because you’ll just be scattered, shot, practically by our own junk. SpaceX is actually doing really cool stuff because they have these modules or systems that can be reused. Which is really cool, of course.
A: How does that work?
J: Like the rockets that can re-land. Back in the day, these rockets were sent to space, and then they’d just end up as space junk and keep on circulating our Earth until they burn down into the atmosphere. But some of these parts never return to the atmosphere and they just keep on circling our Earth in orbit. And keeping this into the design of new satellites is very important. What happens with all this stuff you put into space?
A: That’s a very good point.
J: The industry does a lot of good, I think the Copernicus program in Europe has really helped a lot of scientists and a lot of companies doing great stuff. And solving a lot of problems and creating useful data for the government, for other companies, and stuff like that. But it’s also very important to be critical of what we’re using and what is happening in our own backyard.
A: And Copernicus is the program that kind of launched Green City Watch, right? At least where it got its funding from.
J: Well, the Copernicus Master is the accelerator that we’re in now, sponsored by the European Space Agency. That’s the one we entered last year, so it has really helped us accelerate our current progress that we’re making, definitely. Being in contact with the European Space Agency and having all these contacts through them, I think that really helps. They really have a good idea of what they want to use their data for. Green City Watch has been the lucky 1st-place winner of Maxar’s ‘GBDX for Sustainability Challenge’ (2018) and Planet’s ‘See Change, Change the World’ Challenge. Winning these challenges has been the driving force behind our progress and ultimate success.
A: And that would be for environmental protection or monitoring?
J: Anything. They put these satellites in the sky and it’s open data. Anyone can use it. And it has to be as cost-effective as possible. They have this data, and the more people that use it, the better it is.
A: True. How does Green City Watch specifically use their satellite imagery?
J: We mainly use the high-resolution satellite imagery, which comes from our partners at Maxar and Planet, and that’s from commercial satellites so they’re not open-source.
A: You mentioned some negative impacts of the satellite industry, and before you mentioned this was a topic you wanted to speak about, I had never really made the connection between the two. I was wondering if you think this is a problem of people not being more critical and not recognizing the negative impacts of the satellite industry because this is not something often spoken about.
J: It is not, definitely. I think these satellite businesses have a very good image of being a cool industry, highly technological, highly innovative. And that’s the image it has. So they’re doing great in that sense. They expect to have 400 launches this year of new satellites, which is a lot. And that’s unprecedented. We had this density of launches back in the 60s when we first started to go into space and the lunar landings and that was the start of space exploration. And then it dropped out for a little bit and we gave up on space for a little while. So it wasn’t a steadily growing problem. I think in the last decade, it has grown at a really high pace and they don’t really know that it is a problem yet. Because there are a lot of unknowns. I think that is the main problem, there’s not a lot of research on it because it’s relatively new that we have this many satellites in space. And also with the invention of these micro-satellites, these cube-sets, what are they going to do? There is also a lot of worry about astronomers. They think a lot of these satellites are going to block their telescopes, which is another problem. There are a lot of these tiny problems, but I think the image of the satellite business is still really good. But they should invest in keeping it that way, that’s my main concern. I’m not saying that the industry is bad yet or that they’re doing a bad job, it’s just good to be critical.
A: I agree. Well, Jim, I think you covered all the questions very nicely and thoroughly. Do you have any last comments you’d like to make on the subject?
J: Well, my main thing about this, is it’s great. I don’t have any negative feelings yet about the satellite industry and don’t want to put anybody into a bad position. We are striving for a better world in Green City Watch and we want to make our cities more liveable. But I think, in the same way, we banned landfills in the Netherlands for quite a while now. And we should also strive to not make space a big landfill for our space trash. I just hope that the space industry can also benefit and find themselves an environmentally-friendly way of expanding their business as well. And having a green image. Not also be cool, but also be green. I think that’s my main goal: How can we make space business green?
A: Green “Space” Watch, I love it.
J: Yeah, that is very cool. And there are a few companies who are actually working on collecting space garbage, which is really cool. But also legislation-wise, there is no legislation of space, so I think that should be a starting point.
A: For sure. Well, thank you so much for this interview.
J: No worries, my pleasure.
This interview is part of the “Meet the Team” project, aimed at showcasing the motivated team behind Green City Watch, while also spreading information about important topics. Each team member is asked to think of a subject that they find most interesting and is subsequently interviewed about their perspective and opinions.
