He Spent $100 Million On A Sky Computer - EP 96 Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen

This week’s guest is Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, the founder and CEO of Sceye. (It’s pronounced like “Sky.”)

Mikkel is a fascinating dude. His family started a sewing business in Denmark back in 1957. Over the years, Mikkel helped transform the company and parlayed its materials expertise into some very well-known humanitarian efforts, including the PermaNet for fighting mosquitoes and malaria and LifeStraw for potable water.

We talk about all this on the podcast, but, if you’re watching the episode, you’ll see that the focus is on the giant airship-looking thing in the background, which belongs to Sceye.

Sceye has created what it calls a High-Altitude Platform System. (It’s a mouthful, and we won’t fault you for calling it a blimp or an airship, although people in these fields will fault you.) This inflatable craft can travel for thousands of miles and then keep its position over a particular location for very long periods of time. It’s meant to beam down telecommunications and internet services to people who can’t be reached by other means, and/or to take photographs and video, and/or do whatever a machine dangling underneath it can do.

The aircraft can get closer to its targets than, say, a satellite and can also be present for much longer periods of time than, say, a drone.

The airship behind us in this episode ended up flying to Japan for a test run. SoftBank liked the results enough to order a fleet of HAPS for nationwide mobile broadband across Japan.

I’m into airships. Like, really into airships. As proof, I will link to this mini-documentary we made on them for Bloomberg instead of linking to something else on the Core Memory YouTube channel, which is really where you should go for all your science and technology video needs.

I’m also skeptical that these things can have a big enough market to justify all the cost and effort that go into making and flying them. Mikkel takes offense at my position and sees a future full of thousands upon thousands of HAPS in the sky. We’re into what Sceye is doing and hope Mikkel proves us wrong.

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Timestamps

0:00 Intro4:38 From Denmark to Lagos11:06 LifeStraw and Mosquito Nets19:54 The Leap Into Aerospace24:57 Airships, Balloons, and Staying Put32:12 What About Starlink?39:06 Watching Wildfires From Above42:51 A $100 Million Bet49:26 The Fabric That Holds Helium55:27 Broadband Straight to Your Phone59:18 Flying First, Talking Later

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