Guy Schumann, CEO and Founder of RSS-Hydro, discusses the concept of dual-use space technologies and the opportunities and challenges that come with them.
In the space sector, dual-use technologies are technologies with both civilian and military applications. Designed for one purpose, these technologies have the potential to be adapted for another. Examples include satellite navigation systems, satellite imagery, and communication satellites. Whilst enabling technologies to be dual use opens up a number of opportunities, it also comes with various challenges that developers must consider.
Built on extensive research and development in the areas of Earth observation (EO) and climate modelling, RSS-Hydro develops satellite and modelling technology designed to help authorities and organisations mitigate and manage climate challenges such as flooding and fires. Whilst its applications are developed for civil use, the company is considering the future dual-use potential of some of its products and services. With more and more organisations and space agencies looking to open up missions for dual use, RSS-Hydro has built its recent civil-use services, CeDaRS and FloodPin, with dual use in mind as a possibility for the future.
To find out more about dual-use technologies and the benefits and challenges associated with them, The Innovation Platform spoke with Guy Schumann, CEO and Founder of RSS-Hydro.
Can you explain more about what dual-use space technologies are and the potential that RSS-Hydro’s products and services have for dual application?
I think ‘dual use’ can mean different things depending on perspective, but, generally, it refers to applications developed for civil use that also have the potential to be used for defence purposes.
Moving into the defence space brings additional considerations for the companies behind these technologies. They may have to sign strict contracts to align with defence rules, being mindful of such things as security, access to data, access to machines, their team members, and how far they can act with the projects that are for defence or dual use. As an example, there are some public satellite missions developed by the military for civil use, such as the Italian Space Agency’s COSMO-SkyMed, which is a co-development of the Italian military and the Government of Italy. These satellites are for civil use, but they are controlled under the military. The Canadian Space Agency has a similar satellite mission, RADARSAT-2, which is used for civil protection under military control. You can obtain these data for research and science, but there may be some location restrictions due to the military control aspect. With COSMO-SkyMed for instance, it’s very easy to access information on such things as a volcano, landslide, or flooding. However, the military always has the priority on deciding where the acquisitions are taken.
RSS-Hydro’s project, CeDaRS, and its accompanying FloodPin service sit in this arena of dual-use potential. Currently, these contracts are 100% civil but, with the European Space Agency (ESA) likely to move towards dual-use missions in the future, projects like CeDaRS become very appealing from that angle. CeDaRS is designed to provide a framework for very rapid detecting and alerting with an ‘all-in-space’ solution. All-in-space means that data no longer needs to be transferred down to Earth to be processed and sent as an alert – it can instead all be done from space. This will save a lot of time and will also significantly reduce the volume of information sent. Rather than a mass of data, we can instead send down a very lightweight piece of information to Earth to alert of a disaster.
RSS-Hydro focuses on flood detecting and alerting, and FloodPin is the service angle for the CeDaRS solution. Essentially, it is the pin of information for a given location that we send out. In future, we hope to be able to provide very fast detection and alerting of a flood to devices on the ground before it happens. Whilst the information doesn’t have to be super precise, it would serve as a warning to authorities that a flood was due to hit their location in the forthcoming hours.
For me, the biggest concern to make FloodPin work is that it is not just our solution that needs to work, it’s also the action that needs to be taken by the person receiving that data. We want to use our services and the projects that we have with the European Space Agency as a means to educate, to make people aware that we are building something but there also needs to be action after.
How important are dual-use technologies in the space sector for ensuring national security and economic competitiveness?
If you take our work as an example, we are predominantly focused on floods and fires or disasters that come from nature but are often exacerbated by humans. We live in places that are very economically important but that can be very vulnerable areas, given the current climate crisis and climate signals that we see. When there is a large flood that makes an area very vulnerable, such as the recent flooding in Texas, it becomes a question of national security. The risks that come from flooding, fires, earthquakes, and related disasters are as much of a threat to national security as conflict is. The aftereffects of a hurricane, for example, are very similar to what you would see following a conflict – communication breakdowns, people needing to be rescued, and even fatalities. Taking care of such a situation is very difficult because you need to evacuate a lot of people. In addition, technology needs to work when there’s no internet connection or when there’s very little connectivity.
It is also a question of economic viability. How fast can you recover? What’s the business disruption during a flood event? What’s your company doing? Is there enough economic stability during recovery? If we are able to better detect and alert, and build awareness of what needs to happen if there is a flood, we can minimise these economic impacts and ensure that national security is preserved.
What are the key opportunities that stem from dual-use technologies in the area of Earth observation?
Earth observation is a firehose of data right now. It is very difficult to build services out of a mission because you first need to know what satellite is acquiring what and where these data are stored on the ground before you can make applications from the data. If you do this using dual-use technology, you will realise that you need to use some of the technologies we typically see in defence. Most of the technologies that are now becoming widely available stem from defence. GPS, for example, was initially developed by the US military, and was one of the first technologies to be made available to the public. The internet was also first developed as a defence mechanism to have a highly reliable international network, and it was released to the public as a public protocol before it became the internet as we now know it.
Right now, you could argue that there are some very good technological advances in the civil sector that can compete with what is developed in defence and, therefore, defence is very interested in these technologies. Earth observation technology is one of these.
The fact that we can now process an application like our FloodPin service onboard a satellite becomes very appealing to defence as well. I believe that dual use is the new era in Earth observation. We now have to decide as a company whether we want to fully commit to dual use, but we do see dual use as a very important player in the Earth observation market.
What are the main challenges surrounding dual-use technologies and what can companies do to help address these?
A lot of challenges come from the notion of sovereignty. For defence, most nations like to have their own satellite missions with their own application that shouldn’t be viewed or necessarily obtained by anybody else.
At RSS-Hydro, we develop with sovereignty in mind. We Dockerize our application, developing an IT framework that can be decoupled from outside. This means that any country could have their own application of FloodPin, for example. They could feed in sensitive national data and use this to build on the service.
Sovereignty is one thing, but you also have to be careful as a company and may have to restructure slightly to accommodate for the added restrictions. As I explained before, not everybody can work on a project. You must ensure that privacy and intellectual property (IP) are respected. It becomes much stricter if you open an application up for dual use. For defence, you are developing for a very specific need for a very specific customer and that comes with a lot of restrictions. For example, if you have an open-source server or an open-source software, you may need to change that. This may not be easy for a small company, because it’s very costly.
How can RSS-Hydro ensure that its technologies can be used for both commercial and military purposes without compromising on security and defence?
Very often, this clear distinction is also dictated by the contracts. We will, for example, need to be very careful about the IP we put into something that is used for dual purposes, and we may not be able to make that so openly and freely available for everyone. However, we did develop some of our products and services with that in mind. If, for example, our FloodPin service became dual use, we could develop a specific version of that with a specific input and output that is compliant with the key performance indicators for the defence sector. At the same time, we could still have our commercial application of FloodPin, which would be more open to a large variety of commercial sectors.
When building for commercial, the advantage over military is that you can build one application and serve many and, if you are lucky, therefore make a lot of money on it. If you develop a military application, you need to develop it specific to one entity. A lot of funding is also now becoming available for dual-use technologies.
Natural disasters, such as flooding, are a major threat to national security. Therefore, I think that the fact we are developing applications for disaster mitigation means that we are already developing applications with a view to protect society and civil security. As a company, we remain firm in the fact that we protect the civil society. If we protect military infrastructure, it is to protect the people rather than military assets.
For me, I think the biggest question now in our company is ‘how sustainable is dual use?’ If we venture fully into dual use, maybe we should gear this towards having another means to develop better solutions. Completely pivoting may be harmful to the business. There is more funding available for dual-use technologies now, but this could stop in five years or so. We should still be ready to then sell our solutions more commercially.
Please note, this article will also appear in the 23rd edition of our quarterly publication.
