How Blockchain Will Revolutionize the Space Industry Supply Chain
Large projects in any industry are the sum of smaller projects. Respecting the importance of each is a good way to ensure overall success. Each is a link in a chain, and a big project involves thousands of such links. The signature links of the space industry supply chain may be the spectacular launches or gravity-defying placements of satellites into precision orbits. Those are the big links. But in every case, countless specialized and highly sensitive transactions that happen before and after these events are all critical links in the chain.
Blockchain is a technology that will set a new global standard for making all those links, and the whole chain, a lot stronger, more reliable, and more efficient than ever before.
In the Space industry, big agencies like NASA and ESA are already exploring new ways to leverage blockchain technologies for their missions.
Recently, NASA granted support for the development of the Resilient Networking and Computing Paradigm (RNCP), to create an autonomous spacecraft system built on top of a robust blockchain platform known as Ethereum. For unmanned deep space exploration missions, where remote human intervention is impractical or impossible, spacecrafts and their support systems can use blockchain technology to support the machine learning capabilities that help them reliably and independently respond to changing conditions and events. The project’s results could lead to practical terrestrial development, taking advantage of blockchain security and distributed reliability in mainstream terrestrial applications like autonomous driving and self-organising UAV swarms.
At the same time, the ESA is testing blockchain technologies to simplify administrative processes such as logistics, payments, data management, etc., by applying a functionality of blockchain analogous to the core function of a contract. It’s an “if-then” process somewhat breathlessly and confusingly known as “smart contracts” but it is indeed extremely powerful. Objectives within interdependent systems can be verified and achieved faster and more securely, such as payments to suppliers, improved data management, and immutable audit trails for greater transparency.
A persistent problem in any business or organization has always been that so many types of transactions are time-consuming, largely inefficient, and overly vulnerable to errors and misunderstandings. A great deal of effort goes into procedures for establishing trust. And all of this means a huge impact on time and cost.
At the heart of the issue is the way transactions are recorded. Transaction records are extremely critical but also extremely taken-for-granted, and there are many more systems for keeping such records than there are types of transactions. The vulnerabilities of these systems are also taken for granted, and elaborate procedures for establishing trust around them are in place as a matter of business as usual.
The journey of any product that makes its way from production to use is paved by a loose gravel of receipts, certifications, validations, etc., that are typically unique to that product. And all of it is painstakingly, if habitually, examined for authenticity before proceeding to subsequent transactions. Not only individual products, but the identities of buyers and sellers themselves are also very much wrapped up and summed up in each buyer or seller’s record of past transactions. This record is critical for establishing trust in pursuit of new business.
Again, the business of transactional facilitation and record-keeping is both massive and taken for granted. Dozens of different methods for transacting and record-keeping can follow a single product from factory to shelf, along with hundreds of actual records and transactions, and this has been the norm for quite some time, but now there is a way to make it much more efficient. Blockchain introduces common ledgers, owned by no one, and usable by everyone, that are fundamentally more secure than any other type of ledger in existence. What this means is often over-interpreted and over-hyped because it is somehow hard to recognize what is profound about this simple truth: a properly implemented blockchain ledger is — for all intents and purposes — indelible.
Confusion reigns because nobody stops to appreciate that amazing fact. Sensing profundity, but not understanding it, evangelical-types are climbing over each other to sell you the moon. You may walk away from a pitch or visionary pep-talk trying to believe that blockchain somehow proves a diamond is as innocent as a breakfast at Tiffany’s or your fish is fresh… Nope! It does not!
But the really amazing thing is that it does prove that at a specific point in time such a claim was made, and by whom, and that mere fact can get us significantly closer to the truth.
Before blockchain, any receipt or record for any transaction, no matter how mundane or important, was implicitly or explicitly dependent on the authority of intermediary parties and their proprietary, centralized systems, each with unique protocols, methods of verification, platforms, etc. In profound contrast, a blockchain ledger, deployed with open-source code, cannot be owned, centralized, or controlled by anyone. It runs as a “decentralized application,” never dependent on any single or discrete processor or local system, and it can be relied upon to confirm in perpetuity any data recorded to it — whether a grocery receipt or a multi-million dollar launch service agreement signed by multiple parties.
Still not ready to replace your lawyers with blockchain? Good! Blockchain does not replace lawyers. Never will. If you’re reading something that suggests otherwise, just stop reading.
But get ready for blockchain to make business in general more efficient, especially when transactions and records are complex — multi-staged, interdependent, cross-border — so typical of the space industry.
The leading example — or soon to be a leading example — would have to be online business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces. This manner of doing business exploded into existence, led by the juggernaut Alibaba.com, because it basically facilitated introductions between sellers and buyers who would otherwise never have met… a lot of sellers from China and a lot of buyers from everywhere else on the planet.
Alibaba became huge before any type of financial transaction was even possible within its system. Users were thrilled enough, and happy to pay handsome fees, just to be part of the new B2B dating scene. But like every online marketplace you can think of — Amazon, Etsy, Upwork, AirBnB, you-name-it — it would not have succeeded for long without the sophisticated systems it put in place for users to signal their verifiable trustworthiness to other users in a way that is directly tied to their online interactions and ultimately tied to their online financial transactions.
All those systems on their various platforms imitate each other in obvious ways, but they are proprietary, centralized, incompatible — and blockchain is going to replace them. You’ll be able to use it to instantly prove your record of successful transactions of any type, financial or otherwise. In fact, you could wear your bank account, or whatever portion of it you choose to, on your sleeve, as it were, and no one could possibly doubt the amount. This creates obvious potential to accelerate the creation of new business relationships between unfamiliar parties — which is now a major dynamic in the rapidly growing space industry.
Current trends project that some 6,000 satellites will be launched into orbit in the next ten years (though SpaceX alone already has plans to deploy nearly 12,000). Many of these satellites will involve owners and a wide range of other stakeholders who are engaging directly in the space business for their very first time, and they’ll be based in dozens of countries, not just the old handful.
To help all of these unfamiliar parties engage more readily, blockchain can be used as an escrow to confirm and reserve a potential buyer’s allocation of funds for any purpose, or guarantee automatic return of funds to buyers when a seller’s funding goal or other programmable conditions aren’t met. Independence from mediation in these processes would also translate to reduced transaction fees.
In order for a complex B2B transaction to succeed, say, for the purchase of a satellite component, or a rideshare on a rocket, a great deal of records must be assembled from various sources and authenticated by various means — test records, regulatory permissions, provenance, etc. As these types of records move to blockchain encoding, huge benefits in speed and efficiency will be realized because blockchain itself is the authenticator.
For these reasons and many more, Space Impulse is creating a blockchain powered B2B marketplace for the space industry. The mission is to lower costs and accelerate times to orbit by streamlining the industry’s supply chain. The platform is designed specifically to address the challenges of complex, high-stakes sourcing, procurement, and fulfilment processes that ensure the movement of people and cargo safely along the path connecting Earth and space. By taking advantage of blockchain, the platform solves key issues of security, verification, coordination, trust, and privacy that bind the highly interdependent exchanges of value along that path.
Space Impulse will be first in the industry to provide a robust marketplace for all roles in the extended network of companies and institutions that work along the Earth/space interface. This includes launchers, integrators, insurers, certifiers, engineers, shippers, legal, and more. It is being developed as an open-source project and is leading the way to offer the industry online tools such as RFP management and bidding, project management and integration, super low-cost blockchain-powered escrow, and more, in a unified platform.
Space Impulse transactions will be executed in an Ethereum-protocol “utility token” called Plasma that was developed specifically for the Space Impulse platform.
The Space Impulse vision is a thriving and expanding space industry ecosystem supported by an efficient, robust, and dedicated marketplace with industry-specific functions. By applying the revolutionary functions of blockchain technology to reduce costs and times to orbit, Space Impulse will help to clear and widen the pathway linking Earth and space.
This article was originally published in Space Talk, the ISU’s alumni magazine.
Find out more at:
- Website: https://www.spaceimpulse.com
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceImpulseCom
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/space-impulse
- Medium: https://medium.com/space-impulse
