Protocol Histories

Illuminating the hidden role of technical standards with oral histories.

Photo by Thuvt - Own

I sat down to read Ashlee Vance's new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale, with anticipation. 

Finally, I hoped, we were getting the type of technology story that the world could use: aspirational and pragmatic. The book sought to capture the recent evolution of small satellite designs and the industry changes that resulted. Vance told the story through the challenges and triumphs of three startup companies. I was paying attention because the trajectory of one of those companies, Planet Labs, had been a personal north star over the years, with their idealistic business approach overlayed onto an ambitious engineering challenge.

If any Silicon Valley company deserved to have a book written about them, it was Planet. And that’s not just my opinion. The technology writer Kevin Roose, in a profile of them for NYMag, titled the piece “A Tech Start-Up Just Restored My Faith in Humanity”.

They set an admirably high bar. 

Before the Vance book, I had seen the story up close. I've known Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler for more than a decade. My teammate and co-founder Eric Stackpole spent time living in the Rainbow Mansion depicted in the book. Stackpole built the first underwater robot prototypes (of what would become the OpenROV project and company we co-founded) in the same garage where they built the first satellites. Stackpole told me that he and Marshall would often joke, referring to parallel missions of space and ocean exploration: "Ok, you go up, and we'll go down." 

Beyond the garage, Stackpole and I visited them in their office in the days following the early images coming back from the first Dove satellite mission. They were thrilling moments. We met with them dozens of times over the years. The experience of watching a humble garage project grow into a public company—running a space program out of a San Francisco office building, no less—was pure inspiration. 

So I say this with a heavy bias towards the story's main characters: Vance left out a critical thread. 

Don't get me wrong. He told a great story. It was factful and thorough. And it’s good writing. The accounts of Pete Worden and his role in assembling a generation of doers at NASA Ames Research Center were especially riveting. Along with Lori Garver's book on the uphill battle she faced at NASA, we're finally getting a clearer picture of one of the great institutional transformations of the past century. Just like he did with his Musk biography, Vance captured the entrepreneurs in their element, with the risk-taking aspects of their personalities on full display. The arc of entrepreneurial zeal set against bureaucratic stagnation is irresistible storytelling. Do read it!

My only note: the story needs more CubeSat. 

It's there, but only briefly. He mentions it when discussing the PhoneSat project, a pre-Planet endeavor from the team to test whether smartphone components would work in space. 

With the launches behind them, the PhoneSat team shifted from putting a smartphone through its paces to producing an actual satellite. The engineers opted to mimic something called a CubeSat, which was a four-inch-by-four-inch-by-four-inch cube of metal scaffolding that could be packed full of electronics. The CubeSat concept had been pioneered by universities* looking for a way to simplify and standardize the construction of small satellites in the hope that more students would have a chance to work on and launch real spacecraft. By having a common satellite design to work from, students could trade information on which solar panels, electronics, sensors, and other components worked well in the device and not have to repeat the efforts from scratch at all their respective schools. 

The problem with the flyover is that it distorts the role of the CubeSat standard's democratizing effect on satellite development and deployment. The economics of launch were permanently altered by the simple design. It enabled hundreds of prototypes from new teams, the first large constellations, and countless innovations in remote sensing for scientific research. The design brought satellites out of the realm of nation-states and into the likes of Kickstarter projects.¹ 

The origin story of the CubeSat was just as unlikely—and just as heroic—as the efforts made by the entrepreneurs. It was two professors—Bob Twiggs of Stanford and Jordi Puig Suari of Cal Poly—on a mission to embolden their students. Amidst a graveyard of failed attempts to lower the cost of launch, they achieved real progress for their students and beyond. And their story belongs in the history books. 

One of the best CubeSat stories was written by Eric Hand in an issue of Science: 

Over lunch at a sandwich shop in San Luis Obispo, Twiggs and Puig-Suari sketched out options on a napkin. They thought hard about the potential capabilities of a 10-centimeter cube with a mass limit of 1-kilogram—the size and weight of a liter of water. Clad in solar cells, the cube would also eke out perhaps a watt of power, enough to power a small computer and a radio: “a Sputnik,” Puig-Suari says. Back at Stanford, Twiggs found the perfect life-size demonstration model: a plastic box used for storing the insanely popular stuffed animals known as Beanie Babies. A standard was born.”

The Beanie Babies box has become CubeSat lore, but it was another development that moved the standard from idea to reality: the P-Pod launcher. It’s one thing to design satellites to common spec, but far more important that they adhere to a common interface with the launch vehicle. P-Pod launchers were designed to hold three CubeSats and attach to any number of launch vehicles that were willing to let them piggyback a ride into space. 

Ridesharing wasn’t an easy sell. American companies like Lockheed Martin wouldn’t bother integrating, so the first CubeSat launches were with Russian providers. It wasn’t just the companies ignoring them, either. NASA and the relevant federal agencies were slow to recognize the potential, too.

The early CubeSat adopters were mostly student groups, thrilled that they could finally afford to send their creations into space. Once they showed it was possible, the cheaper launch economics drew early adopters, like the Planet Labs team and the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

The CubeSat effect is undeniable. Check the numbers. Check the science. Ask the entrepreneurs.

While there have been other innovations in the microsatellite class (CubeSats are considered nanosatellites), and new satellite designs like the ones used for the Starlink constellation are becoming more common, the CubeSat cracked a problem that had bottlenecked aerospace engineers for decades. It turned launch ridesharing from an afterthought to one of the main events. 

Source: X

Hand wrote a multi-page profile of Planet Labs in the same issue of Science, running just ahead of the CubeSat creation story—the heroic entrepreneurs and the enabling protocol.² That was published in 2015. A decade later, while the company legend continues to grow, the story of the standard is losing fidelity. 

I had a recurring thought while reading Vance’s book: This is where we lose them. At the threshold of history, the role of the enabling standards seems to get overshadowed, even forgotten. 

It’s bigger than Vance. I recently read another well-written and researched piece by one of my favorite technology writers, Anna-Sofia Lesiv, called The Satellite Renaissance, which made the same omission. Something has changed over the past few years. We're in a unique moment in space technology where the modern era—reusable rockets, small satellites, and the new government contracting mechanisms—is becoming modern folklore. 

This is not unique to satellites, either. It's a common occurrence in technology writing. The standards and protocols become, at best, footnotes in the entrepreneurial biographies, even though the protocols often create those new frontiers to begin with. 

The easy explanation for this discrepancy is an incentive problem. Entrepreneurs and companies have marketing budgets, PR teams, and obvious reasons to make themselves known. Protocols don't have the same resources or goals. In fact, to spur adoption, protocols aim for the opposite: fully-distributed heroism. Successful technical standards aim to cultivate a quiet respect amongst engineers, one that makes new contributors and adopters feel a sense of ownership and pride in collaboration. Good protocols avoid the pomp to maintain a shared sense of purpose. 

The longer explanation is that it’s hard to tell these stories. They don’t lend themselves to character arcs and storytelling tropes. They’re complicated and nuanced and involve too many people. Without the creative tension, it’s unlikely they would ever crack the best-seller lists. And so our protocol histories go (mostly) unwritten.

Narrative Oral Histories

Against this sad reality, I have found one hopeful antidote: oral history. 

Just ask the people who were there. Sit them down and make them explain the story from their biased perspective. Record it so the next generation of historians can make an honest go of it.

While researching Standards Make the World, oral histories became my preferred source of ground truth. Finding the specifications of any given standard was often straightforward with a quick Google search. Sussing out the standards-making process—the procedures and committees that went about creating (and eventually maintaining) the standard—was doable from there. The next layer down—the people, the politics, the honest challenges and disagreements—was often difficult to uncover. And that’s where all the action is.

Where I found oral histories, I found gold: MIDI, ROS, ARPANET. If you want to learn how the standards actually got implemented, you have to ask the people who did it.

In that process, I learned there’s another step that turns oral histories from archival dust collectors to culturally relevant artifacts: blend ‘em up. Interweave all those stories together in a way that gives an outline and an honest shape to the project. We could call this genre the narrative oral history.

Here are the origins of USB told in this style. It’s a unique and effective form of storytelling.

[Note: I hacked together a CubeSat narrative oral history by pulling quotes from various interviews to give a taste of that perspective. It lives further down at the end of this essay.]

The master of this art form is James Andrew Miller, the investigative journalist who has published books on ESPN, Saturday Night Live (SNL), and others using exactly this technique. They’re all compelling reads. And it translates seamlessly to podcast format, which Miller has done with Origins, so it easily fits into today’s media landscape.

It’s worth noting the tools for creating these types of oral history projects have never been better. You don’t need to travel to get the interviews—use Zoom. You don’t need an elaborate plan to host or organize the interviews—just put them on Youtube. The new AI tools make transcription cheap and easy (Descript is my preferred tool) and are enabling all sorts of interesting new possibilities, like creating a GPT fine-tuned with the wisdom of engineering and technology legends. 

All this to say: I wish we had more of these protocol histories. If you’re working on this flavor of project, please consider going the extra mile with documentation. Interview everyone while their memory is fresh.

We need these stories. The omission of protocol histories has consequences.

If we lose these stories, we don’t learn the right lessons. For example, in How Big Things Get Done, researcher Bent Flyvbjerg and his co-author Dan Gardner make a strong case for improving our capacity to do big infrastructure projects like high-speed rail or large bridges or freeway tunnels. (It’s a great book—I recommend it!) Building off their database of megaprojects and their corresponding costs and timelines, the authors lay out critical lessons for success. One of the major design considerations they suggest: start small and modularize. Planet’s network of Dove satellites is one of their cited examples:

Space has long been dominated by big, complex one-off projects, and priced accordingly, with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope—$8.8 billion, 450 percent over budget—just the latest example. But there are promising signs that the lessons of modularity are taking hold. To make satellites, a company called Planet (formerly Planet Labs, Inc.) uses commercial, off-the-shelf electronics, like those mass produced for cell phones and drones, made into 10 × 10 × 10 cm (4 × 4 × 4 inch) modules as cheaply and easily as possible. These are their Lego. They’re assembled into larger so-called CubeSat modules. Assemble three CubeSat modules and you have the electronics for one Planet Dove satellite. In sharp contrast to the large, complex, expensive satellites that have long been the norm, each Dove satellite takes only a few months to build, weighs eleven pounds, and costs less than $1 million—peanuts by the standards of satellites and cheap enough that failure will result in learning, not bankruptcy. Planet has put hundreds of these satellites into orbit, where they form “flocks” that monitor the climate, farm conditions, disaster response, and urban planning. Despite privacy concerns that need addressing by policy makers, Dove satellites are a powerful illustration of the adaptability and scalability of modular systems, especially when contrasted with NASA’s bespoke approach. 

Again, there is a brief mention of CubeSats, but not in a way that accurately conveys what the standard is or does. Nor is there any real attention to the standards-making process. Enabling standards and protocols beget modularity. If you want to apply the lessons of Planet to your own megaproject or plan, you’d do best studying how the CubeSat was made, not just the Dove. 

But it’s not just associative lessons, like building modular systems, that are lost. These missing stories make it hard for us to build better standards. Or get people excited about standards-making in the first place. As I wrote in Standards Make the World, when we started the Bristlemouth project we were at a loss for information. Our inspirational project, the CubeSat, was a miraculous anomaly. The standards model we sought to emulate seemed almost a secret.

Narrative oral histories help fix this problem. 

CubeSat Revisited

Let’s try the CubeSat story again, but only using pulled quotes from the creators:

Twiggs: It started in 1999 when I was at Stanford University. In 1995, I had went and started a small satellite program in the aeronautics and astronautics department. The satellites we had been building were microsatellite-class satellites and one of the things that was my objective was I wanted to try and get students through the process of actually building and launching a satellite when they were doing their master's degree in a period of about two years.

It turned out the students, if you have a larger satellite, they kept coming up with ideas of more things they want to add to it. I had a terrible time trying to get them to finish the satellite. I'd tell them I wanted it finished and they said, "Well, you get us a launch and we'll finish it." I said, "When you finish it, I'll get you a launch."

It ended up taking until after 2000 until we got our first launch. It wasn't something we could afford -- the launch -- so we had to depend on other people. We got this launch through some collaboration with some people that got DARPA funding. It was a launch on a satellite called OPAL and it actually launched some picosatellites, a mother satellite with some daughter satellites in it.

After we made that launch, I thought why don't we come up with something roughly the size of this picosatellite, and it was about the size of a Klondike ice cream bar. It was flat and long, and the thought of building a spacecraft was that if you're not going to have an attitude stabilization on it, you have to have solar cells on all sides. So what I did is I started looking for something to pattern after.

I went to a plastics shop and I found a 4-inch plastic tube that was used for storing Beanie Babies. There was a Beanie Baby craze at that time, so I bought this box and looked it over and thought about how do I hold the box to launch it, how many solar cells could I put on it, and I come to the conclusion that I could put enough solar cells on it to probably get about an average of a watt of power out of it.

So I designed this thing such that I wanted to put them in some sort of launcher tube and so I designed a tube with little rails on it that would hold the box along the corners. That's how the design of the launcher came along and we decided we could put about three of them in there. (Source: Spaceflight Now)

Puig-Suari: We knew that launch vehicle flexibility was important. It was hard to get onto a launch vehicle. We had all these custom boxes everybody was doing their own little size and that meant you need to find a nook and cranny on a launch vehicle for your specific spacecraft. And that was difficult. So we decided to try to use standards, and at the time there standards in spacecraft would come up and go away and come up and go away, and they really never went anywhere. The mission always took priority. But we decided to give it a try. (Source: Keck Institute for Space Studies Lecture)

Twiggs: It all started as a university education program satellite. It was kind of funny. I didn't think that people would criticize it as much as they did, but we got a lot of feedback, you know, "That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Nobody's going to use this toy." We said, "Who the heck cares. We'll go ahead and use it. We're using it for education." (Source: Spaceflight Now)

Puig-Suari: It was primarily a university project issue and we thought industry may be interested in paying for it so we put that thing about “it could be an industry testbed” but that was really not what we were trying to do. We were just trying to find some funding so that that's where that came from, so we came up with a standard. And it's a very simple standard and there's reasons for that. One, it's small. It's a Pico sat — one kilogram, basically just a dimension standard: if you fit in this box, you can go fly. We didn't really tell people what to do and what to do inside because that was too much work and we wanted a simple system that universities could manage. (Source: Keck Institute for Space Studies Lecture)

Twiggs: Another thing that was kind of funny is we had no interest from NASA or any of the military organizations. It just wasn't anything they were interested in, so it was all funded without any funding from those aerospace organizations. I'm kind of glad that NASA didn't help us, or we'd probably never got it done. It was developed for the education of students. If you make it small, they can't put much in it, so they get it done quicker, and hopefully you can get it launched for a lot less money. I don't think Jordi Puig-Suari at Cal Poly or myself had any idea that we'd see days like this. (Source: Spaceflight Now)

Puig-Suari: [The P-POD design is] extremely simple. It’s the world's most expensive jack-in-the-box. You have a pusher plate with a spring you put the satellites inside, and when the door opens they come up they come out. And it fits three cubesats and a lot of people have asked “why three? why not four or five?” … that was about the room we had on a Delta II secondary space, and we actually have never flown in that particular location. (Source: Keck Institute for Space Studies Lecture) 

Twiggs: We say that you have to build it with materials that meet space standards. You don't want to build it out of something that outgasses a lot after you get it into space, and that kind of dictates you build something out of metal. So aluminum is the easiest thing to do it with, and, of course, it has to fit that form factor to fit in what they call the P-POD launcher. We just said, "Rather than you build what you want and we'll try to fly it for you, we've got this launcher, it does some good things and you should use it."

First, it holds three CubeSats. The expendable launch vehicle guys like it because we don't have some student thing that can come off and run into the primary satellite, so that solved the problem with them. They were very cautious about putting something out in the open that parts could come off of, so we told them we've got this thing inside this metal container, and if a radio comes on, you're not going to hear it because it's inside of a Faraday cage. If parts come off it, the primary payload is going to get launched before we do, so when we launch, if it comes out in a whole bunch of pieces, it still won't affect you. It was really designed to help protect the primary satellite on the launch vehicle, and that loosens up the restrictions.

But, in fact, even with that, we went quite a few years where the only launches we could get were from the Russians. It wasn't until the Minotaur (rocket) came along that we were able to get any of our satellites launched in the United States. (Source: Spaceflight Now)

Puig-Suari: And it worked! It actually was successful… I've stopped counting [the number of launches] because it's a continuous barrage now. We launch from everywhere… We have launches in the US, in India, and Russia, Vega launched in South America but it's a European launch vehicle. And truly it's a regular launch scene. Every month or two or six months there's a launch somewhere, so it's very hard to keep up with it, but it's very nice to see that happen…

We have a very large developer community. We have universities and governments and industry and it’s worldwide. Everybody's doing Cubesats. We have dedicated workshops. And one thing that I'm very proud of is that we brought in a bunch of new players. And that's actually true from the beginning: new countries and new universities. People that have never thought about launching spacecraft were some of the early adopters of the standard.  (Source: Keck Institute for Space Studies Lecture) 

Twiggs: We figured out a way to do it, and somehow that became the standard. We built the launcher to launch it, and that required that the CubeSat be a certain size. We never told anybody what to put in them. All we said is you have to be a 10-centimeter cube, and we did that just so people would know the physical size. But there was never any rule, and there still isn't any rule, about what to put inside of them. (Source: Spaceflight Now)

Puig-Suari: To me, a few things are important. Some are obvious and some not so much. It is important for universities and people to be able to put a satellite up without the kind of risk NASA and commercial companies faced. They could try some crazy thing. Before cubesats, we were so conservative nobody was willing to try anything out of the ordinary. When we did, we discovered some of the things everybody said would not work, did work. The fundamental change was that there was a mechanism to go try to those things. Some will work and some will not, but it allows us to try them and that was very infrequent before cubesats arrived. That was really important. That was the big change. Commercial electronics were exploding at the same time. It was serendipitous, and we demonstrated that they did work fairly well in space, at least in low Earth orbit. That was a huge change in the capability of the small spacecraft. When Bob and I started, we really wanted a Sputnik. We didn’t feel like there was much more these things could do until students started pillaging cell phone technology and all kinds of other stuff. Next thing you know the National Science Foundation is interested in smallsats. (Source: SPACENEWS)

Twiggs: [Responding to the question: “So CubeSats are a more modern example of American innovation?”] Yes, exactly, which makes it ironic that the early launch providers were Russian. We did go to some of the American launch providers, Lockheed Martin comes to mind, and they said, "If you give us a half-million dollars, we'll study it, and then if it makes economic sense for us to launch it, we'll do it." We kept asking them to take some of the lead (ballast) off and fly some of these things as secondaries, but they just didn't go along with it. I was really disappointed that the aerospace industry couldn't see the benefit other than profits from it. They couldn't see the educational benefit from it, and the potential of the educational benefit turning into commercial applications. Now, you see the commercial applications coming along with Skybox Imaging, with Planet Labs. Oh my goodness, they look like they have a tremendous economic potential. (Source: Spaceflight Now)

If you liked this sampling of the story, I have good news: Aaron Zucherman is collecting more stories as part of a CubeSat History Project, with the goal of turning it into a book. I’m optimistic his efforts will fill this narrative gap.

More importantly, Zucherman is setting a good example for the rest of us. Don’t just hope for more protocol histories; go forth and write them.

1. And more nation-states. While traveling through Ireland last month and thinking about this essay, the local news proudly announced that the country had launched its first satellite. Of course, it was a CubeSat. 

2. In honor of Eric Hand’s balanced journalism, I think we should name this technique—giving equal measure to the entrepreneurial upstarts and the enabling protocol designers—after him. Call it the “hand & hand” treatment.