Sen is on a mission to democratize space through the use of high-quality video from space. The cameras it has launched into space so far include a free 4K video livestream from the International Space Station (ISS). NSF recently spoke with the company’s CEO, Charles Black, who hopes these views will be accessed by billions of people to inspire, educate, inform, and ultimately benefit humanity.
“If you look at Earth from space, you see things differently,” says Black, the founder of the London-based company. “I’m driven by this idea that there’s eight billion people on the planet, and everyone should see that reality of our existence, in the same way astronauts do if you were looking out of the window of the Space Station. Everyone should have that perspective.”
These high-quality views of our blue marble are freely accessible on the company’s website, YouTube channel, and companion app. Sen wants to broadcast images that empower us to see this different perspective and document humanity’s exploration of space as we explore the solar system. Ultimately, Sen’s goal is to tell amazing stories of space exploration.
“If you think of the Apollo landings, hundreds of millions of people watched those and wanted to see [them] happening,” Black says. “In today’s currency, in terms of the population and the availability of screens and internet, that is the equivalent of several billion people. I think telling the story of our exploration of the Moon and humans’ return there is absolutely essential. That’s something people want to watch, and we want to be part of that.”
As with any venture that treads new ground, the business model can be challenging for investors, but Sen is keen to stick to core principles. “We’re doing this for the people, to democratize space and to empower people to witness planetary change,” Black explains.
An astronaut’s view of the Himalayas, Sep. 2024. (Credit: Sen)
“We see ourselves as a video streaming company. We’re not trying to compete in the observation market because there are people doing a brilliant job there, taking really high-resolution pictures with radar and hyperspectral. We’re trying to do something different, which is about what the public wants.”
While targeting government and defense customers for its business model might have been easier, Sen’s focus on the public allows for a potential audience of more than three billion. With the increasing number of smartphones and high-speed internet constellations such as Starlink and Kuiper, Sen believes its audience could exceed four billion in the next decade. “As long as we get enough people watching it, we can make money through TV revenue,” Black adds. In addition to its YouTube channel, Sen’s streams will become available as a free advert-supported Connect TV channel in the coming months.
Broadcasting from the ISS
Sen’s first system, SpaceTV-1, launched in March 2024 as part of the CRS-30 cargo resupply mission to the ISS. The payload was mounted to the station’s exterior using the Canadarm-2 robotic arm.
Sen partnered with Airbus as the implementation partner, who had already built the Bartolomeo platform hosted on the European Space Agency’s Columbus module. The platform was designed to host payloads, and as an early adopter, SEN could choose a location for the cameras.
Hurricane Milton moves across the Gulf of Mexico towards Florida on Oct. 9, 2024. (Credit: Sen)
One of SpaceTV-1’s views shows the forward-facing docking port on the ISS’s Harmony module. “It was important that we did have views of the Space Station and the docking port because you want to connect humanity in space with people on the ground,” says Black. “So, to film them arriving and leaving [from the Station] is important. We then wanted to have the Earth’s horizon in view, looking at storms and hurricanes and just showing the reality that we do live on a planet. We also wanted to look right down at the ground so we can see large-scale events happening, like wildfires or flooding, and also see the beauty of the planet — the geology in mountain ranges and lakes, deserts and forests.”
Starting with these three main views, the team worked backward to determine the optics and principles needed to achieve them. “We work with a specialist company that manufactures those optics with glass that doesn’t brown with radiation over time. That was something we actually learned from our first mission when we flew with off-the-shelf lenses, and after about six months, you could see that they were going brown.”
The team wanted to include as much detail as possible for the view looking down at Earth. However, achieving high-resolution views of Earth brings its challenges. “You’re traveling at 27,000 km/h, so you can’t have one-meter resolution on the ground because it’s moving so fast and, without being able to point the camera there, it would just be blurred.”
London is seen from the ISS via Sen’s onboard 4k cameras. (Credit: Sen)
Each pixel on this Earth-facing view equates to roughly 60 m of the Earth’s surface. “The scene size is about 240 km by 180 km, and it moves at a speed which I feel has been successful. It’s quite hypnotic, and [Earth] moves slowly enough that you can see all the details, but it’s also of high quality in terms of optical and spatial resolution.”
Currently, the SpaceTV-1 cameras are not steerable, but this is a feature that is in the development pipeline. Having already flown a steerable camera developed for RSC Energia, Sen was keen to include steerable cameras on the SpaceTV-1 core system. However, development issues complicated adding them to SpaceTV-1. “We learned some lessons, particularly around cable management with pan and tilt, and we wanted more time to be able to redesign and improve that,” says Black.
Steerable cameras will be added as part of the SpaceTV-2 successor, which the company is working on. “I’ll be really excited to get those onboard because then you can point at things on Earth and be able to point at both docking ports, which will give us additional capabilities,” Black explains.
The software on SpaceTV-1 can be updated at any time, and the company is constantly learning and improving its viewing capabilities, such as night settings. “We have lookup tables onboard which we can change, for example, what the exposure setting should be every second. Although you can put it on auto-exposure, we don’t, and the only way to test these things is to get it into space and do it.”
Sen has been following Earth’s largest and oldest iceberg, “Iceberg A23a,” since Jan. 2024 as it drifts through the Southern Ocean along the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. (Credit: Sen)
Meeting NASA’s design requirements
Designing and assembling a payload to be hosted on the ISS requires passing some intense requirements, especially given its crewed nature. “Engineering for space is what really impresses me. [SpaceTV-1 had] to pass vibration testing, thermal vacuum testing, and electromagnetic interference (EMI) testing, with three NASA safety reviews for every mission. You have to really focus on the reliability of the components in the system because it does go through quite a rough ride to get into space, and when it’s there, it has a pretty tough time with thermal and radiation.”
“You have to spend quite a lot of time designing the thermal side — how the satellite is going to behave, how heat will radiate, and making the operating temperatures as big of a range as possible,” Black told NSF. “Radiation is less of a concern. New space companies are flying automotive-grade or even consumer-grade electronics with sufficient shielding around the payload structure.”
“Our satellite has been in orbit and operating successfully for three years, and our first mission is still operating. Some components we have are radiation tolerant for supervisor processors that are monitoring the health of the system, and these are components you never want to fail. We’ve tried to design components where there is potentially a path to a radiation-hardened version for when we put cameras into a geostationary orbit and around the Moon, where the radiation environment is a lot harsher than around LEO (low-Earth orbit).”
SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle seen docked to the ISS. (Credit: Sen)
The SpaceTV system has a “dual string” design in which there are essentially two of everything. “We’ve got three camera views, and there’s two cameras looking at each view for redundancy,” Black highlights. “It’s one way of de-risking the mission, but if you start doing that with satellites, they start getting more expensive.” Doubling up on radio downlinks, video computers, and even cameras all impact the mass, power requirements, and bandwidth.
Early developments
Going back to 2016, with no off-the-shelf solutions available for its streaming vision, Sen decided to develop its own technology rather than employ another company to build it for them. This allows control over the whole data chain, from capturing video in space to streaming it to the end user. Armed with sufficient processing power, the video is compressed onboard in real-time, which helps to limit the bandwidth required down to “just a few megabits per second.” It also reduces latency so that what you see on Sen’s stream is live.
Early tests included flying an off-the-shelf video camera under a high-altitude balloon to see how it would fare in space and test functionality such as remote zoom. “We realized that it didn’t work,” Black notes. “Being in the atmosphere, there was condensation on the lens, and the zoom didn’t work. It was a disaster.”
“After that, we set about focusing on the electronic side to capture data through a camera sensor, process that data, and then turn it into a stream. I thought one of the most effective ways to start would be with hosted cameras because the electronics, payload, and computer are going to be the same, whether it’s on our satellite or in a hosted system.”
SEN’s camera’s caught the launch plume from Starship’s sixth flight from space (Credit: SEN)
Sen’s first in-space testing opportunity came when RSC Energia wanted to put 4K video cameras on a satellite for self-inspection. With various deployables and moving parts on the satellite, RSC Energia wanted visual verification to support the telemetry being received. “They had spent two years trying to find someone to do it, so I went to Moscow, and after a long process, we managed to get that contract,” says Black.
The project, which launched in February 2019 on a Soyuz, also allowed for the development of steerable cameras. “They actually had the cameras on during the launch as well. We handed over the code so they could switch on the cameras and steer them through their interface. We had no control over it, but they were pleased with the results, and they shared some of the videos with us.”
Sen’s next project was to develop its own satellite. Launched in January 2022 atop a Falcon 9 on the Transporter 3 mission, ETV A1 is a 16U cubesat — one of the largest built at that time — containing two cameras that record video in 4K.
SpaceX Falcon 9 launches Transporter-3 mission in Jan. 2022 (Credit: SpaceX)
The satellite uses a simple X-band radio and requires packets of data to be sent in a certain way to ground stations. This downlink allows data to be transmitted at about 25 megabits per second. “It’s still operating in orbit, and it’s a tech demo,” Black says. “We can livestream when we go over ground stations, but there’s limited live video for one minute. We learned a number of lessons from that, [such as] how to improve the electronics, the cameras, and how you do livestreaming [from space].”
By contrast, the SpaceTV-1 cameras on the ISS take advantage of NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) communications network, which is how the Station downlinks all its data. Connecting to the Station via ethernet removes the limitation of waiting to pass over a ground station to transmit data. The livestreams are available for over 20 hours daily, with replays during the routine loss of signal periods. “They have plans to look at newer forms of relay data, and our system would be able to use any alternatives that are implemented over the next few years until the eventual end of the Space Station,” Black adds.
The Alps as seen from SEN’s 4K cameras in Nov. 2024 (Credit SEN)
Sen’s future plans
SpaceTV-1 has two different sensors onboard, and the forthcoming SpaceTV-2 mission will feature sensors from an outside company. The SpaceTV system is designed to be sensor-agnostic to utilize newer sensors when they are released, including those that will work in 8K.
“We will go beyond 4K, but, more importantly, we want a higher resolution of the ground,” Black points out. When future cameras are steerable, Sen will be able to point at the same place for up to 60 seconds. “It’s not enough for us to record and then livestream once in a while over a ground station. I want to be able to switch [the cameras] on at any time.” Black refers to the recent Los Angeles wildfires and the value that real-time observations would bring to the situation. “It’s all about getting as much real-time video as possible, from as many different places as possible.”
Sen is also in talks with other companies planning commercial space stations, such as Vast and Axiom. The arrangement would be a win-win, giving those operators external eyes on their stations and new camera views for Sen’s viewers. “The way it works is we pay a fee to have the camera hosted, but the result is that we own the data. The plan is to get a lot more video cameras and livestreams into space, both on the ISS and private space stations as they emerge, and into different orbits like geostationary and lunar orbit. We’d love to have a steerable camera on lunar rovers, and it would be great to have a camera on a helicopter on Mars.”
SpaceX Cargo Dragon C208 docked to the ISS in Nov. 2024 on the CRS-31 mission, with South Africa in the distance. (Credit: Sen)
Sen’s long-term ambitions include inter-satellite links on their satellites, which will become required for many future LEO satellites. For its next mission, SEN plans to host three cameras, each with a 55-degree field of view, which could be stitched together to create an 8K-style image of Earth’s horizon. “If there was, say, a hurricane you wanted to film. You could stream that in 4K or do a full horizon image at even greater quality. We’re continuing to come up with ways of trying to make it even better.”
The company is also working on augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences, which can be accessed through a subscription service. “The idea is ultimately augmented reality in VR services and being able to watch live views with steerable cameras of spacecraft docking. Imagine viewing that in a VR headset!”
Sen’s videos and livestream can be viewed via the Sen app, on the company’s YouTube channel, or by selecting from the many different clips on its website at Sen.com.
(Lead image: A of a tropical cyclone from one of Sen’s cameras. Credit: Sen)
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