Spaceq

My guest this week is Sara Spangelo, co-founder and CEO of Swarm Technologies. The company is noteworthy for its innovation in developing a communication satellite 1/4 the size of a traditional CubeSat, which is 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm. To put it another way, and as my guest put it, the size of a grilled cheese sandwich.The company wants to build and launch 150 of these pico satellites, called SpaceBees, to create a global network to allow Internet of Things devices such as sensors in a farmers field to send small amounts of data back to servers for processing. Currently the company has 7 experimental satellites in orbit.Swarm is less than two years old and it's gotten more attention than perhaps they would have wanted. Last year could have been a company killing year for a startup as they ran afoul of the Federal Communication Commission when they not only launched 4 of their satellites without an FCC license, they also performed unauthorized weather balloon-to-ground station tests and unauthorized tests of sa