The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon. Welcome to everyone here in the auditorium and the audience that's watching us on Zoom. I'm Professor John Jackson and it's my pleasure to serve as the emcee for today's event. We're Admiral Chatfield is on international travel this week, but I'm pleased to welcome you on her behalf. The series was originally conceived as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. It has been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees and colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and via Zoom around the world. We'll be offering an additional 14 lectures between now and May of 2023, spaced about two weeks apart. An announcement detailing the dates, topics and speakers of each lecture will be posted by our public affairs office. Looking ahead on Tuesday, 25 October 2022, Professor Tim Hoyt will speak about the brutal conflict in Ukraine. This is a very timely discussion. I'm sure it will be of interest to all of our participants. So enough background and admin. Let's proceed with the main event. Today's topic is very timely considering all that is going on in the areas of space engineering and exploration. Were it not for the recent hurricane, we might have seen the launch of the huge NASA Artemis rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft on an uncrewed mission to the moon. We hope to see this launch sometime in November. NASA recently smashed a probe into a comet and SpaceX continues to launch rockets on a nearly weekly basis. And as a heads up on 15 November of this year, we will welcome NASA astronaut Sonny Williams to the college for an evening lecture about her upcoming flight to the International Space Station aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. Like I said, there's a lot going on. Today's lecture on space and national security will survey how space is factored into U.S. national security from the days of Sputnik to the emerging era of great power competition. The presentation will describe potential threats and policy responses facing American sea space power today. And we'll discuss future challenges and possibilities ahead. Our distinguished guest speaker, Dr. David Burbach, is an associate professor in the national security affairs department here at the Naval War College. He holds a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor of arts in government from Pomona College. He currently teaches U.S. foreign policy, international relations, and space security. His scholarly interest includes civil military relations, defense planning, and the relationship between international security and technology, particularly with regard to space and nuclear issues. Before joining the Naval War College faculty in 2007, Professor Burbach taught at the Army School of Advanced Military Studies and worked for several analysis and information technology organizations in astronomy and space education. As a reminder, during the formal presentation, please submit any questions you have using the Zoom chat function, and we'll get to as many as possible at the end of the remarks. And following the conclusion of the remarks, we will have a family discussion group meeting where we'll provide some information of interest to the military folks here in the community. So without further ado, Dr. Burbach, over to you, sir. Well, thank you, Professor Jack. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, Professor Jackson, for that kind introduction. And good afternoon to everyone, to those of you with us here in person in Spruance, to the audience on Zoom and LinkedIn, and to the future, to anyone who may be watching this recording on YouTube after the event. I'm very pleased to have a chance to talk to you about space, which is, as Professor Jackson described, there's a lot going on. And it's kind of interesting that we often think about space as representing the new thing. But actually, it's very appropriate that this lecture happens to be today, because today is the birthday of Sputnik. It was October 4, 1957, that humans first put something in orbit around the earth when the Soviet Union launched a small satellite that orbited for several months. It's now far enough in the past that if Sputnik were still in orbit, it would be able to retire, collect social security, move to Florida and relax. So we've had satellites almost as long as we've had helicopters or ballpoint pens. But there is still a lot of interesting new things going on in space. So what I'd like to do in this talk today is give you a sense of some of the ways we use space for national security purposes during the Cold War, kind of that classic period of space. Talk about some of the ways that space security issues have changed since then. And why, other than just, wow, cool new rockets, why some of our concerns about space on the military and security side have changed, what we're doing about those, from creating Space Force to some of the diplomatic responses we might have. And then talk just a little bit about some of the changes in the commercial sector and some of what we've observed about how space has mattered in the war with Ukraine. So like I said, 65 years ago, the world was shocked when Sputnik was launched and that kicked off the what is probably the more familiar part of how space mattered to us in those early days was the public space race. The belief that space was critical for national prestige, that space technology was a way of demonstrating which superpower truly was going to own the future, who had the leading technology, whose economic system could really produce revolutionary events. And it may be a little hard to read the cartoon on your upper right, but an editorial cartoon right after Sputnik shows, you know, Khrushchev trying to woo the lesser nations, we'd use a better phrase today, but Khrushchev trying to woo the lesser nations saying, who else can give you a moon while poor Uncle Sam stands there with a box of chocolates. That's how we looked at it, that we, it was critical to show the world that we could compete. The Soviets managed to put the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin in 1969. We countered with John Glenn not too long after just as an example of how this wasn't just about going into space, but part of this big, you know, we would now call it soft power or information operation. After Glenn's trip around the world, we sent, we sent Glenn's capsule around the world again, not in space, but on ships and trucks to demonstrate in many countries. This particular long line is in India, it stopped in 30 different countries around the world. So we wanted people to feel like it wasn't just America going into space, but that this was a grand adventure for the whole human race. And that culminated when we eventually landed on the moon. You see, I think that's Aldrin, I think Armstrong had the camera, so it's probably Aldrin's looking at the flag. Just as one example, you know, department store absolutely crowded with people at six in the morning in Sydney, Australia, people wanting to watch it, you know, in a time when television was really still pretty new. One in six people around the world found a way to watch it, you know, whether in a store, a big screen in a park, people, you know, some people at home. This was a big deal. You know, we're very familiar with this story. Somewhat less well known is, in some ways, the more important part of space back then, and throughout much of the Cold War, was not so public. We had a very important, very expensive secret space spy program. We still do a lot of surveillance from space. It was even more secretive back then. And it can be hard to put ourselves in that mindset, where today, we're so used to being able to see anything in the world anytime we want. This is an example that was in the news last year, where it turns out the Chinese have been building large mock-ups of American warships way out in their Western desert on railroad type tracks so they can move them at a missile test range. You know, pretty obvious what they're doing. They're practicing having missiles home in on moving US ships. We've, you know, we've done tests like that too. But traditionally, this would be the kind of thing that countries would really, really try to keep secret. They wouldn't want people to know that they were up to this. That's just not possible anymore. You know, this was in the newspapers, and this is not even from a government spy satellite. This image was taken by a commercial satellite. Any one of you with a credit card, I'm not sure how much, you know, probably, you know, decently high limit, any of you could go to the Maxar website and order images like this. You know, you could say, I want to pay for the satellite to take a photo of this spot and they'll do it for you. Governments have even better capabilities. But when Sputnik went up, the world was a very different place. The Soviet Union was an extremely closed and secretive society. You probably can't, you know, the map is a little dense here. But what this is, is an example of a captured German map that the Germans put together during their invasion of the Soviet Union, because captured maps from the Wehrmacht were actually better, the best we could do in many cases because the Soviets, I mean, they literally would put towns in the wrong places on the maps that they were able to willingly distribute publicly. We had no idea what was going on. So it became a critical priority to find out, you know, what sort of technology are they developing? How many bombers? How many missiles? Are there are their forces getting ready to launch a surprise attack? And the way that we were able to do that was from space. So even before Sputnik was launched, we were working on our own space programs, much of it extremely secret. And we had already identified that putting spy satellites in orbit was a top national priority, that we needed to be able to have satellites seeing what was going on inside the Soviet Union. Now, we also tried things like the, you may have heard of the U-2 spy plane, you know, we violated Soviet territory and flew those for some years. Earlier we even tried just putting cameras on balloons that we would let drift over the Soviet Union and they just take a picture of whatever happened to be below. Those were suboptimal. The balloons weren't very good. They shot down the U-2 spy plane. We realized space is going to be the way to do this. And within two years of Sputnik, we had functioning spy satellites in orbit. And this became a tremendously important thing. We figured out very, very quickly, the Soviets didn't have nearly as many missiles or bombers as we thought, you know, that's kind of a useful thing to know. You can be a little less afraid, maybe not spend so much money.  Well, of course, you know, they were reporters, so they quoted it. But Lyndon Johnson said, it'd be worth what we spent on space 10 times over because I know how many missiles the enemy has. I don't have to buy missiles that we don't need. I don't have to be afraid of a surprise attack. You know, I don't have to live in fear. I know what the other side is up to. And that's worth a tremendous amount of money. So during the Cold War, you know, this surveillance use of space was absolutely critical, just as it continues to be critical today. And very early, we developed other military, we had other military uses going on in space. We put a big priority in addition to the spy satellites to see what was going on. We developed satellites that could detect missile launches so that if the, you know, God forbid, if nuclear war were starting, we'd be able to see the missiles on their way as soon as possible to help avoid surprise attack. You know, and other applications that we're used to today, like weather satellites, the Navy had an early GPS, you know, forerunner of GPS, a lot more complicated to use, but they had Navy had a navigational system up by 1964, weather communications. So, you know, these, you know, going back to just the first decade of space, you know, we got a lot of military and national security utility out of it. One thing I thought I'd mentioned that, you know, some of you may wonder is, you know, what about putting weapons in space? You know, it's a standard thing in science fiction movies, you know, shoot down at the planets from space. That really wasn't something that was, that anybody was very seriously considered. We and the Soviets both thought about, well, we've put nuclear bombs everywhere else. Maybe we should put some nuclear bombs in space, too. As you think about that, though, it means launching a nuclear weapon on a fairly, you know, what we're then fairly unreliable rockets, you know, and that would be kind of an unfortunate launch accident.  So both countries figured out pretty quickly that there's just, there wasn't a really good reason to put nukes in space, given that we already had ballistic missiles that could reach anywhere on earth.  Theoretically possible, but it turns out it's not some kind of, you know, science fiction super weapon. You'll create a nice explosion, but, you know, it's not different enough from a conventional explosion. It's, you know, hard to steer this metal telephone pole on its way down. So, yeah, it turns out that that's really not a very attractive prospect. So there really hasn't been much effort to put weapons in space to shoot down at earth. There has, however, been a lot of interest going back to the very beginning of the space era to think about can we do something to shoot down satellites if we don't like what an adversary satellite is up to. And within just a couple of years after Sputnik, the US had a very rudimentary anti-satellite system that relied on setting off nuclear weapons in space.  You know, the photo in the lower left there is a test of an anti-satellite weapon in space about 800 miles away from Hawaii that's looking from Honolulu. Yeah, it turns out that that has some bad side effects. Radiation gets trapped in space and will affect other satellites. That test you see there destroyed AT&T's first television satellite. They put up the first television relay satellite just a few weeks earlier and we in AT&T tried not to talk about it too much at the time, but it turns out we fried that first television satellite with our nuclear test and a couple other of our satellites and a couple Soviet satellites. So that, you know, it's something you could do. Nobody was really eager to go that route because it would make space unusable for everybody pretty quickly. Likewise, and here I've got a frame from the movie Gravity that came out, that was probably getting towards 10 years ago now, with the Kessler syndrome. And if you destroy a satellite, it'll break into thousands of pieces that'll hit other satellites and so on and so on. So, you know, both the US and the Soviets realized you could build anti-satellite weapons, but if you actually use them, space may be big, but you can actually contaminate space with radiation and debris pretty quickly. So during the Cold War, we both developed the technology for anti-satellite weapons, but relative to how much money we might have put into them, how we might have deployed, you know, whole fleets of anti-satellite missiles, both countries were relatively restrained. We kind of realized we've got nuclear deterrence. In fact, having missile warning systems and other nuclear surveillance in space provides some stability. If you blow up the other side's missile warning satellites, they're probably going to assume you're about to launch a first strike at them. Why else would you blow up the missile warning satellites? So there was a relative amount of restraint. You know, we certainly competed to be better at spying, you know, than the other side or, you know, figuring out, you know, try to figure out what the other side was up to, but, you know, space didn't become as much of a battleground as many people feared it might. Well, what's different today? And, you know, what has changed over the years is how much space has become integrated in everything. You know, if in the 1970s, space was absolutely critical for nuclear deterrence, you know, knowing where targets were, communicating, missile warning, you know, but for the, you know, even for the military, the average service member and their daily job, you know, probably wasn't interacting with space technology very much. The average citizen, you know, they do see some fairly low quality satellite weather photos on the, you know, when you tuned into the local news at six o'clock. That's all different. Everybody in this room probably has a smartphone and that relies on GPS signals from space. Your phone probably can use, you know, the probably can also use the Russian Galileo system, might use the Chinese Baidau system. You know, there are now several different of these navigational systems that not only are critical, so you know where you are, a little more, you know, a little more down in the nerdy weeds, but timing signals from GPS are critical that cell stations can keep track of, hey, when did this bit of data arrive? When did that bit of data arrive? Timing from GPS and similar systems turns out to be critical.  We use space for everything. Now, we have used, you know, satellites in space to track terrorist cell phone signals to direct GPS-guided munitions onto them. So with space and absolutely everything, it means that everything is dependent on space. And taking away space capabilities has the potential to have huge military implications, you know, or civilian implications. Take away GPS and the civilian economy takes a big hit. So you combine that space dependence with return, return to great power competition. And with the case of Russia and China, unlike adversaries like the Taliban or even Serbia or Iraq, Russia and China are space-faring powers. They've got space technology. They also have systems like ours.  And there's a fear that we're probably even more vulnerable than they are. Given that the U.S. and our allies tend to be so technologically dependent, you know, we have more of this built in. Our economies depend more on the kind of capabilities, you know, that space enables. Geography also matters. If we were to be involved in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Straits, you know, think about what a relatively short distance that is for China. They can use fiber optic cables to their coast and then, you know, might be as little as 100 miles to where they're operating. Whereas we're on literally the opposite side of the planet from U.S. headquarters or even from Pearl Harbor, we would absolutely be depending on space-based communication, space-based ISR, space-based navigation. So if you take space away from everybody, that's probably a relative advantage to China. You know, Russia not entirely, you know, less so but not entirely. So there's a lot of concern about these countries might feel like there would be an advantage. There'd be value in attacking U.S. systems. And there are a couple of ways they might do that today. You know, just as in the early Cold War, we had some very rudimentary anti-satellite weapons, technology's gotten better. And both China and Russia have anti-satellite weapons that will intercept and destroy a satellite without a nuclear weapon, smashing into it, creating a lot of debris, but pretty effective. The Russians tested one of these systems about two, almost three years ago now, caused a lot of debris, in fact debris that threatened their own astronauts on the International Space Station, but the system clearly works. So if Russia or China wanted to start shooting down U.S. satellites, they'd have the ability to do that. Even more attractive these days are the possibilities of electronic or cyber warfare. If you can blind the satellite, you know, by overpowering its radio receivers, and the U.S., oh, actually, I, sorry, I probably, let me, I should have advanced the slide, but I realized I skipped, I skipped actually one of the more cool points on this slide was, you know, not before we do EW and jamming. We have the technology now to rendezvous when space, you know, just like how the space shuttle would pull up to the Hubble Space Telescope, but we can now do that robotically.  Well, your satellite doesn't work, and there isn't much to breathe. Or I have, I mean, as ludicrous as it sounds, this would work. I just spray paint the lens of your giant spy satellite. Can't see anything now.   Yeah, you could, there are ways you could shoot microwaves from a short distance that would be able to destroy a satellite, render it inoperable without creating debris clouds, or even more so in that direction, radio jamming, laser blinding, or cyber attacks. The U.S. acknowledges that we do have a radio jamming capability. You know, we've admitted this in public that we'd be able to overload an adversary communication satellite and render it inoperable while we're jamming it. We're quite sure the Russians and the Chinese have similar systems. We say the Russians and the Chinese both have systems that can shoot lasers to temporarily blind spy satellites as they're passing overhead. And nobody admits, of course, to any cyber capabilities, but we know they're out there. So as I'll talk about in a minute, Russia actually used a cyber attack against a space system in the Ukraine war, but, you know, one assumes that, you know, the Russians, the Chinese, us, anybody else is working on cyber capabilities, which again, you know, could be used without creating all of this debris without making space unusable as we worry about. So what could the U.S. do about this? I'm not going to go through these in detail. If you, for those of you who are NWC students, if you want to take my space elective, you know, we'll talk more about strategy and diplomacy. But there are a number of things that the U.S. is thinking about how, you know, could we do this? One is simply make ourselves our space systems more difficult to attack, make our satellites less fragile. You could even potentially put defensive systems. So if you see, you know, if that, you know, the spacecraft with the giant pruning shears is coming at you, maybe you've got a short range, you know, interceptor that you could fire at it as it approaches. You know, you could kind of have a cool James Bond arms race and that kind of stuff with the satellites. Even easier, just put up a lot more satellites. You know, instead of having 10 or 20 satellites that provide a given capability, if you have thousands that provide that capability together, that's a lot of targets that need to be hit. And so that kind of redundancy is something we're thinking about. We can also rely on deterrents.   You know, we could, you know, back in the in the heady days after the Cold War when, you know, we had the unipolar moment, some people said, hey, the US has an opportunity now to race ahead, weaponize space, and basically to shoot down anything any other country ever launches if they don't agree to do it by our rules. That day has probably passed and that that really wasn't kind of how we were thinking about international relations. But, you know, there's still a possibility that we could really kind of move into a more of an offensive counter space orientation, or going the other direction. Maybe we could pursue some space arms control. And we certainly, we have been trying to at least get other countries to stop doing destructive weapons tests. We have pledged we will not test an anti-satellite weapon that causes debris in space the way Russia and China have done. And we've done in the past too, you know, a pretty distant past. But, you know, we've said unilaterally, we're just not going to do it even if they keep testing. And we would like to get other countries to stop that as well. So there are a variety of things that, you know, that of strategic responses that we might have. We have also had a major organizational response. Because of these concerns that we had these space vulnerabilities that weren't being adequately addressed, we created the Space Force. Those of you who are students, well, you will have a lesson on the creation of Space Force in the National Security Affairs Department, when either when you get to that part of the course. And it's easy to say us, we have Space Force because Donald Trump thought Space Force was cool. Yeah, that's actually part of the reason. But even without Donald Trump, there actually was even in the late Obama administration, talk about how we needed to reorganize to put more focus on space and deal with these rising challenges. You know, I won't go into too much more detail there. If any of you are familiar enough with Space Force, you know, the current Chief of Space Operations is John Raymond. And that's not his photo. The Senate just confirmed the second Chief of Space Operations hasn't had the change of command yet. But General Salzman will be will be coming in to take command, you know, sometime in the next several weeks. What is Space Force going to do? They're not going to be flying X-Wing fighters. They're not going to be shooting lasers at anyone. They're not going to have space marines. I don't doubt the marines will at some point insist we need an independent space capability, because that's kind of how the Marine Corps thinks. But Space Force is not going to have space marines. They won't even have astronauts. What Space Force is going to be about is defending and operating satellites mostly. They're going to be in charge of keeping these of operating our space capabilities, protecting our space capabilities. And if we choose to develop offensive counter space capabilities of our own, they would be the ones who would use that. So they're going to be in charge of knowing what's going on in space. They're going to be in charge of, you know, of figuring out how to protect our satellites. And more at kind of more of the program management and acquisition level, Space Force is supposed to figure out, how do we build this stuff faster, better, cheaper? Because one of the, you know, those of you who are students, this is actually where some of the meat of the lesson will go. Space had been, you know, we are used to delays and cost overruns in military procurement. Space systems had been especially bad with some very long delays and lack of coordination. We had new GPS satellites up several years before the ground terminals had been built and distributed because the Air Force and Army got out of sync on that. So we literally had signals that nobody had the capability to use because we hadn't distributed the ground equipment yet. Space Force is supposed to pull this together and figure that stuff out. We don't know if that's going to work yet. It's still too new, but what Congress really hopes is that Space Force is able to get us more innovation, lower cost, more synergy between, with everything we're doing in space. Now at the same time, as, as Professor Jackson alluded to, there's a lot of cool new stuff going on commercially. Rockets may not be new, but having competition among multiple private companies for who's got the best rocket, that actually is pretty new. Even if companies like Boeing and Lockheed used to build, you know, build rockets, they were on government contracts, you now have companies not only like SpaceX, the, the rocket you see in the top left there is from a company called Rocket Lab that has launched out of New Zealand. Just this weekend, a company called Firefly got its first rocket into orbit. SpaceX will have the next commercial flight to the International Space Station tomorrow. So there's a lot going on in the launch field, but there's also a lot going on with satellites and software. And in some ways, that's actually where the even more interesting action is. You now have commercial capabilities like that photo of the warship mock-up in the Chinese desert. You tremendous ISR capabilities from commercial constellations. Not only optical sensing, there are networks of what's called synthetic aperture radar, radar imaging that'll work at night and through clouds that provides absolutely militarily useful level capabilities in, you know, available. I'm not sure exactly how long it is from like when, when they would provide, take an image to when you'd have it, but short enough time to be tactically useful at a commercial level, even commercial elint and sigan type satellites. Like, you know, there are now commercial firms that have, you know, elint systems to triangulate, you know, to like help keep track of where ships are on the ocean. So commercial companies are developing capabilities that used to be almost exclusively government and developing them sometimes in very large numbers. Like, if for, for any of you who have kids, please in the next couple of years, take your kids outside, look at the stars, enjoy the night sky. Because in another 10 years, it's going to look like you live right off the runway at LAX. The number of satellites in orbit is set to possibly, at least by 10, maybe 100. I like to do, try doing a strong photography at night, astrophotography as it's called. In some of my images just a couple of weeks ago, there were as many as a dozen satellites visible in every single frame that I took near sunrise or sunset. That's kind of, I'll admit, that's kind of a weird niche interest. So, you know, don't let me stand in the way of progress. What this means is that you're going to be able to get, it's going to be like Wi-Fi from space, broadband from space, constellations of many, many thousands of satellites from different providers. SpaceX is out in the lead, but they're not the only one. And so there's a lot happening with, with commercial players here in the US, in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, you know, all over the Middle East, UAE has allies very interested in developing commercial space. So there's a lot going on in that sector. And you can see this come together. Some of these security concerns and the commercial revolution in Ukraine, you know, and I think this is from India today, you know, headline to kind of capture it there from early in the war, you know, Ukraine sends SOS to Elon Musk. And the, you know, say, well, let me, let me move on and say where, where this came from. I'll go backwards there. One of the very first shots that Russia fired in this war was a space, a cyber attack on a space system. The Ukrainian military had made heavy use of a satellite communication system called Viasat for voice communication. They have a pretty cool artillery system. It's almost, you know, they, people have called it Uber for artillery, you know, a very distributed, we're kind of people identify targets and then artillery units kind of say, I can serve that target, cell phone based, they need to move data for that. And, you know, a lot of that moved over a network called Viasat. First hour of the war, Russia launched a cyber attack, not against the satellites, but against the ground terminals. It essentially told the Viasat servers, here's some new, the new software update for the terminals, push it out to the terminals and it rendered the terminals dead, unusable, unfixable. For both the Ukrainians and for thousands of commercial users in Europe, in NATO countries. So NATO countries actually suffered millions of dollars worth of property damage out of this attack. It was kind of interesting. Pretty, and that's what led to Ukraine calling on SpaceX. Hey, can you help us out? And SpaceX with funding from the U.S. government has provided a lot of terminals, satellite capability. And because they have so many satellites, they don't have 100,000 yet, but they do have 2,500 in orbit. Russia probably has a few dozen at most anti-satellite interceptors. So you reduce 2,500 to say 2,450 and you really haven't slowed SpaceX down that much. They launched 50 satellites every week. It's not worth it to try and shoot it. They've tried cyber attacks and so far have failed. Maybe they'll figure something out. This is where that revolution and this massive commercial capability has enabled Ukraine to survive that loss of capability. Or on the commercial side too, this is from just before the war began, a commercial radar satellite showing vehicle columns forming up. This is at almost midnight local time. The Ukrainians have been getting imagery, radar imagery. The U.S. has provided assistance in how to analyze and interpret and make use of satellite data. So this commercial capability has been pretty helpful to Ukraine. And so just a few thoughts on what I think we've seen from the war so far. There were, if you'd gone back before the war, many analysts said probably cyber or jamming is going to be a lot more attractive than blowing up satellites. And that's exactly what we've seen. And in fact, had it not been for Starlink, the Russian cyber attack on the commercial space systems that Ukraine used might have made a real difference in the way that might have been a pretty big hit. It absolutely shows the value of redundancy. Russia hasn't bothered to try and do anything against the SpaceX satellites. They're 2,500 of them. What are you going to do? Nobody has that many anti-satellite missiles. That sharing intelligence and communication data can be very valuable, that commercial companies, as I've said, can provide militarily useful equipment. It also raises a question that I don't think policymakers have really thought through fully yet. It makes the commercial sector a target. In fact, the head of the Russian Space Agency implied that Elon Musk personally could be considered a military target, given how involved he'd become. But certainly, by international law, if whether it's via SAT or SpaceX, if they're providing tactical direct military relevant service, legitimate targets. So what would the US do if the Russians or the Chinese did start blowing up commercial satellites that belong to a US company? Or what if they belong to a country that doesn't have a NATO member that doesn't have space capabilities of its own other than owning a satellite company? I don't know that we've fully thought that through yet of what level of protection are we willing to provide. Should our military cyber people be talking to these space companies about potential threats and how to fix them? Maving are the other direction. Apparently, our cyber people have been really impressed at what SpaceX has been able to do to fend off Russian attacks. But it does suggest that there's more connection between the commercial and the military than either side had really thought through. So we'll see what comes out of the policy there. I did want to end on a happier note before we move to Q&A, though, the other cool thing that's happening that hopefully doesn't have a lot of military connection yet is the rise of commercial space travel. Jeff Bezos' blue origin spacecraft is a suborbital rocket similar to what Alan Shepard, the first man to ride an American rocket on a suborbital flight, graduated of the Naval War College. In fact, the number of people who've walked on the moon, Navy is definitely ahead of Air Force on that. We've done pretty well. Similar to Alan Shepard's flight to William Shatner, TV's Captain Perk, a fully private mission of civilians into orbit on a SpaceX capsule. And as John described, what you should keep an eye on in the news in the next few weeks, if you weren't aware of it, we want to go back to the moon. It's been more than 50 years, seems like it's reasonable to visit again. But in the next couple of weeks, NASA hopes to launch the first test flight of this new rocket. Those of you who are interested in space may notice it has some similar kind of same color, same side rockets as a space shuttle. That's exactly right. It reuses some space shuttle technology. We hope to do a first uncrewed test flight to the moon in the next few weeks, and then probably in about three to four years to actually land on the moon using this gigantic lander that SpaceX is developing for NASA. But there's a security connection here too, where for Apollo, when we went to the moon the first time, it was all about the U.S. demonstrating what the U.S. could do. We want to do that again. We'd really like to get to the moon before the Chinese get to the moon for the first time. But we're doing it in a way that really emphasizes partnerships. We've already made agreements with a number of countries. The Canadians will include a... Canadians specialize in building robot arms, like they first did for the space shuttle. There's going to be a Canadian robot arm included as part of one of the missions. Japan is going to contribute a rover built by Toyota for one of the missions. The European Space Agency is contributing a small space station that'll be in lunar orbit. We're really... What we're doing in Artemis is really trying to bind out, saying, come join us. Do this really cool thing with us. Your cynical view, your voters back home will think it's really cool when a Canadian or a Japanese astronaut sets foot on the moon. You're joining with us in our view of an open... Our vision of a liberal rules-based order in space. We're trying to leverage this to get... And countries that are not as close an ally as, say, Canada or Japan. The United Arab Emirates is participating at some level. So we're trying to... In a slightly different way than Apollo, there's definitely some diplomatic goals that we have that we're trying to build a coalition that's working together with us in the same way that China is now taking on Russia as a junior partner for their lunar exploration plans. Well, let me... I want to allow time for Q&A and for the family discussion group. So let me bring it to a close there. I'd be happy to take questions here in the room, or I assume the booth can pass on questions from Zoom or however we're going to work that. Would you like... That is just way cool stuff. Does anyone here in the auditorium have a question?  Any questions here internally? Okay, Gary, do we have anything from the Zoom audience? We do. And thank you for the remarks, Professor Burbach. The first question that came in was about Elon Musk's Starlink system and just putting up a lot of numbers. So is that really the solution to counter China and Russia? But is there also the backside that we increase the congestion up in space with the number of operational satellites? Yes, to both parts of that. I think if you went back 10, 20 years, the thinking would be nobody can make satellites cheap enough that you could put up thousands of them. So we aired on the side of building a very small number of incredibly capable super expensive satellites. SpaceX, they figured out how to do some amazing stuff. I actually just a few weeks ago was at an event and talked to a woman who she was the manager for the solar panels on the Starlink satellites. First of all, one way that it's different than how we do things in DoD or Boeing, she was in charge of the solar panels on the satellite. And I think she was 26 years old, mid-20s. And there wasn't a whole lot of management between her and Elon. Really Glenn Shotwell, the CEO of SpaceX. And they tried things like instead of using space-qualified solar panels, they said, well, if we're launching a lot of them, they don't have to be perfect. They literally went to Home Depot or REI or something and bought the same kind of solar panels that you would take camping and found that they were almost as good as the space-qualified and 99% cheaper. So they went with that. And if a couple of satellites don't work, well, launch 50 a week, you can afford to lose a few. You imagine traditional aerospace program people, their heads exploding at that. So now that we've just figured out, you actually can make satellites small and cheap in an assembly line way. Yeah, the thinking that we've long had that satellites are these very fragile, very small in number items. So if anybody starts attacking them, your space capability goes away fast. Large constellations really seem to help with that problem. The Russians, they kind of say, yeah, we're kind of confounded. You wouldn't be worth it to attack these satellites. The questioner is exactly right though, my little graph with the 100,000 satellites, it raises the possibility that these satellites are going to collide with each other. I only came to realize this a couple of years ago, they're private companies that have giant tracking radars just to help companies not have their satellites smash into other satellites. This is going to become a more and more difficult problem. Again, selfishly, I focus on the night sky is going to be full of these things when you look up. But more seriously, yeah, we need some rules on traffic management. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission just announced they're making stricter rules on how you have to plan to de-orbit and get rid of a satellite when it has stopped working. Worldwide, those rules aren't really in place. You may have seen a couple of times in the last few years, China has launched one of their largest rockets, the booster stage from that. Most countries at this point, they have little thrusters. They can do a controlled entry of the big booster into the ocean somewhere. China does not. They let it fall wherever it's going to fall. There was debris that came down close to some West African villages about four or five years ago. On that particular one, it's orbit actually passed right over Rhode Island before it got to five minutes earlier. We would have had to think about it. There's a lot of room for global regulation here. At the very least, I'd hope to see the US impose more. But yeah, that's from the standpoint of, if anybody, for the, I know I've got one of my faculty colleagues is in the rooms, I know he's worried about space being very offense dominant. Whoever shot first would win. When you've got 100,000 satellites, it's a little harder to pull that off. It does change some of that thinking about how delicate the military balance might be in space. Thank you, Professor Burbach. The second question that came in, now that there's interest in going to the moon, is there then the follow-up interest in putting up satellites around the moon? Yes. In fact, NASA, the NASA plan, and it's a, let me back up one. What I don't show here, this is the big, on the left, the orange rocket is what's going to carry the astronauts to the moon in a tiny little capsule on top. On the right is the SpaceX Starship Lander that will meet it near the moon and then land on the moon. What you don't see here is we plan, and there's an intermediate step, we're actually planning, and I think the Europeans are building most of it, a small space station that'll orbit the moon. So we'll actually have the astronauts go into lunar orbit in this small space station, go down to the moon from there, come back. There are people who think it's kind of a little convoluted and it's kind of an excuse to have more stuff to build, to have more contractors involved. It gets me on my kind of systems engineering knowledge to know if it's a good idea or not, but it also means we probably will put little relay satellites. In fact, the Chinese currently have, they have a rover on the far side of the moon that can't communicate with Earth because the whole moon is blocking its radio signals. The Chinese have a relay satellite in a distant orbit over the moon that can relay its communications back to Earth. And one thing with that kind of a common problem with space when countries don't trust each other, so many technologies are dual use. SpaceX uses the same rockets for the astronauts or to launch military satellites. We have raised concerns that that Chinese relay satellite, at the very least, that same maybe the Chinese want to put a spy satellite in way out past the moon or they could as a backup for their Earth-based communication satellites, they could have a nuclear command and control satellite past the moon. I've seen even a few anonymous quotes from some Air Force intelligence offices saying, oh, maybe the whole rover is kind of a covert weapons test and the science mission is just a cover story. I don't buy that. I mean, I know scientists who have been involved with the Chinese on it.  But when countries don't trust each other and when it's hard to know what's going on in space, anything, you know, like, I am slightly surprised the Chinese didn't raise the concern with the asteroid smashing test we just did. The technology to have the NASA spacecraft hit that tiny asteroid is very similar to the technology that an interceptor would use to home in on a ballistic missile. You know, the Chinese might have said, this is just an excuse to practice that technology. If the Chinese had done that mission, we might have said that about them. And, you know, in some cases, we're right to be suspicious like that.  Is that really just because they're interested in moon science, or do they see some potential strategic uses of being able to operate satellites out there? You know, so geopolitical tension spills into space. Gary, let me throw a question out. How SpaceX has really revolutionized rocketry by being able to use those spacecraft, those rockets over and over again. The Artemis will be used once and it'll fall in the ocean and it's done. The SpaceX model is totally different. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that reusability? Yeah, the SpaceX, the rocket they're using now, the Falcon 9 is the one you've probably seen video footage of this, you know, like the science fiction movies used to show this, you know, thing comes down and lands vertically on its rocket plume. They, I think on their most recent launch, the booster that they used had flown 13 times. And one thing that's changing in a paradigm is in space, we tended to think, well, geez, you know, rockets are so fragile, like, okay, maybe it made it up once and came back. But yeah, I don't want my valuable satellite because, you know, what, what if that weld that's going to go goes on flight number two? They've actually developed such a reliability record that people are starting to look at it the other way around. And the NASA's top science guy actually said, I now want my missions to launch on a previously flown booster, because I think the probability of discovering a defect when it blows up on the first flight is higher than the probability that something is fatigued and breaks on the second or third or fourth flight. That's a very different way of looking at things. So that, and this, you know, this has been the holy grail for a long time, we thought the space shuttle was going to provide cheap access to space because you, you wouldn't throw everything away. Turned out we actually, you throw away most of it down every launch, actually, we made a lot of compromises in the space shuttle design. And it turned out simply that it's so difficult to keep people alive in space. And the other thing in here, here, you know, I'm kind of riffing in a slightly different direction, but the importance of things like kind of culture and, you know, who dominates an agency, the big problem with the space shuttle is that it had wings and landed at a runway and making something that'll both fly in space and be able to maneuver and fly like an airplane, you know, supersonic subsonic flight on earth, like it's a lot of weight to lift landing gear up to space and back that, you know, you really only need in those last few seconds.  You see, talk about how undignified it was to come down in a capsule and splash down in the ocean.  This will be a real spacecraft, not a capsule. Well, it turns out the capsule, if all you want to do is get people up and back, the capsule approach is a lot more efficient than an airplane that also goes in space. And, you know, space shuttle could do a lot of things we didn't really need it to do. So by and kind of the thing that SpaceX did, we also thought, well, landing a rocket on its tail on its engine, nobody could, you know, no pilot could handle that. Well, it turns out computers are not good enough to do that.   But it turns out that computers, machine vision, GPS guidance, we can do that now. We, there were some early tests in the 1990s. People still thought winged airplane-like vehicles were the way to go for the future. To Musk's credit, he kind of, he was one of the people who saw those 1990s demonstrations, but nah, this is the way to go. This is how we're going to do it.  Harry, do you have any other questions for us? Just one other question. Can you talk a little bit about the success or not so with hacking the Starlink system? I think that there's been reports perhaps like in Ukraine that this has happened, as well as like, is China interested in doing that for low-earth orbit satellite networks? I'll take the second part first. Yes, in fact, China has, you know, Chinese military, there was, I don't know the journal, but, you know, Chinese military newspaper, you know, in fact had an article saying, hey, given what we're seeing in Russia, yeah, we need to develop ways specifically to take out Starlink if we get in a conflict with the Americans or some other, an ally who's using it. So the Chinese have definitely said, hey, this is an issue. We need to be ready to just because it's commercial and not military, you know, no, it's a legitimate target if it's being used by a military. On hacking, I don't, you know, I have no doubt there are a lot of attempts to hack it. My from what I've understood so far, SpaceX has at least mostly been winning that fight. In fact, even again, early on in the spring, I know our cyber command people were saying they were amazed at how the cycle, the rapidity of the cycle, which they could develop and get a patch up was very impressive compared to what we were able to do. I don't doubt that there's hacking. I don't have a, yeah, here was this hack and it was successful story. I'm also not going to claim that I've seen every possible claim about that. It hasn't been, you know, it's still working. So there hasn't been a hack that's like taking the system down. But, but I, it's, I mean, if I were the Russians, it would certainly be a huge target far as I'm concerned. One more question, a final question here, Leo. Good evening, left and go modern Indian. I've got two questions. First is regarding asset capability against geosynchronous satellites, geosynchronous or geostationary. We have evidence suggesting that against Leo and Leo, the kinetic asset capability has been proven. But for a geosynchronous satellite, there is nothing concrete, which says that yes, there has been an attempt and it has been successful. So the question is, are there ASAC capabilities against geosynchronous satellites? Okay. Yes. We've seen the maneuverable satellites, which are approaching and other things, but kinetic asset capability against geosynchronous satellites. Is there a likelihood of its development or is it already in place? Second, second one is about Moon Earth exploration zone. So the Chinese doctrine says about Moon Earth exploration zone. How do you see it, whether it will be a commercial activity or will it be a government activity? And what is the way US is thinking about similar thing? Okay. On the first part, get the most of the anti satellite weapons that have been tested are against satellites in relatively low Earth orbit, not all the way out at geosynchronous orbit, 23,000 miles, where you need more velocity to get out there. I don't know of these direct ascent weapons. I don't believe any country has done a test all the way out to Geo. I know China has done that they have not done a test where they've destroyed a satellite at higher altitudes. They've done some tests that we're pretty sure are tests where they know what point they're aiming for in space. So it's kind of a simulated test. We're pretty sure that they have worked on, and I don't know if any have been all the way to Geo particularly. So I know the Chinese have been interested. I don't know of a Russian system that reaches Geo, but somewhat and getting there kind of direct from Earth is tough. There have also been systems that I think you mentioned where you would put a satellite in geosynchronous orbit and then gradually approach. In fact, even the possibility of essentially a space mine, you could put it there and just let it sit for months or years and maneuver it. That's actually something I know we worry about because, you know, if it's small and doesn't do anything to draw attention to itself, you might lose track of it until it actually matters. So that's one of the reasons Space Force is putting a lot of emphasis on what we call space domain awareness, knowing what's going on. And, you know, even all the way out to the Moon for the Moon question. Yet, you know, the Moon, by international law, anybody's free to go anywhere on the Moon. Nobody can claim the Moon as territory that they own. But we also agree, and everyone agrees in the outer space treaty, to not harmfully interfere with other country's actions. What if China says, and this actually came up in the Comedy Show Space Force on Netflix, there was one of the few things where like, that actually, you know, that they hit on a real issue there. What if China lands at like the most, you know, there are a few craters near the South Pole that probably have ice in craters where it's shadowed permanently because it's at the pole. What if China lands at the most interesting crater and says, you will interfere with our science mission if you visit anywhere near this crater. And it's where we wanted to explore to. And the Chinese say, you got to stay 100 miles away from us. Do we have to listen to them? Nobody knows, you know, when the outer space treaty was written 50 years ago, the prospect of what if two countries want to explore the same crater, that was a dis, well, that distant future is arriving. One of the things that we're doing with the Artemis diplomacy is we actually have something called the Artemis Accords, which about two dozen countries have signed now that goes into a little more detail about creating safety zones. It doesn't have like numbers like you can't claim more than this many miles. But it does say you need to provide real data that shows why do you need that? And it should be for specific time.  The Chinese, of course, haven't signed that. So if they land and say you need to stay away or you will disturb our experiment, or another question, what if a country decides to land a mission right next to the Apollo 11 landing site to like take video of it? Or, I mean, a question I've actually thrown out to my students in a, you know, kind of humorous essay question. Some country says we're going to go to the moon and grab one of the American flags and take it home and show it in our national museum. That would actually be illegal. But what do we, what do you actually do about that? I had a Jagu act like my God, he actually knew the federal laws and international law to talk about what you would do about that. But right now, if China wants to land near one of the Apollo sites and drive their rover back and forth over the footprints, it's not clear what the law says about that. I don't think they want to do that. But we're getting to the point where we need to think about some of these issues of how do we share the moon, you know, what, how do you protect, you know, what, and the Soviets have landers too that probably they wouldn't want somebody messing with their old landers. So we, we don't have a good answer to that question yet, but we're going to have to start thinking about it. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, what we'll do is we'll take about a five minute break here and we'll come back at five 40 for the family discussion group meeting. Thank you very much and we hope to see you on the 25th for the next session.


time here for more systems and we're going to talk about Synology versus True NAS and I've been wanting to do this video But it's not easy to articulate because it's not an easy decision because it's not like one or the other One has advantages over the other we're going to talk about that But it's not like there's an easy, you know all this way you're all that way it depends I know that's the part people hate the answer They want just a definitive answer tell me what to buy what I want to do is go over the scenarios And the solution you're looking for and help that steer you into what may make you happy And what may be the right fit for you and of course because we sell both these products and we deploy both of these products We're going to talk about our decision-making process that leads to that before we jump all into that if you could click that like button and first If you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to Lawrence systems calm If you'd like to hire short project there's a hires button right at the top If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has There is a join button here for YouTube and a patreon page your support is greatly Appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below They're in the description of all of our videos Including a link to our shirt store We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out well randomly So check back frequently and finally our forums forums. Lawrence systems comm is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video And other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content now Don't make the assumption that because I stuck the Synology on top of the Freenast that I think it stacks up better Just so happens the feet fit exactly this size, but the opposite isn't true So if you were to buy both of these this fits on top Not ideal though. It's not Stable. Anyways, this is a Synology DS 1520 plus and this is a Freenast or TrueNAS core I mini IX plus now both of these were sent to me by the respective companies for review IX systems sent me this and of course Synology sent me this and I haven't both turned on and running because the first thing I want to talk about is are they quiet that's one of those debates that come up a lot and Synology's done a great job across their product line of making relatively quiet products that are in this form factor And I did review the Synology rack mount stuff. It's a little bit louder, but rack mount stuff generally Noise is less of a concern. We want it to be quieter But we also want it to be cool and it's going to be running a long time in a rack So the fans usually you know push a little more air create a little bit of noise These are designed possibly to sit next to you and with Freenast TrueNAS because you can build your own or Get a turnkey product the one that they make these mini series, which I really like Offer turnkey and quiet solutions and like I said the Distation series these smaller ones like this are also quiet and it's a kind of across their product line now The nice thing about TrueNAS though is because you can build it yourself and that would be a very distinct difference between Synology I'm not going to address Exponology it is essentially a Kind of a fork, but it's not officially supported It's 100% community supported great if you're a home user and want to tinker with it So you can build on your own hardware We're going to stick specifically with the supported DSM because I'm assuming a little bit more maybe small business and other use cases Homeland people well, that's just having fun and not something I would you know deploy commercially So I'm not going to address that and we're going to keep this focused on Synology and TrueNAS because they're both solutions we deploy they're both solutions we use and I think that's a very important aspect to think About because a lot of people just regurgitate information off of spec sheets. I'm going to talk about real-world deployments I have not used many of the other ones out there So if you have your favorite NAS system, which seems to come up all the time. Hey, Tom, please review this Well, I don't use it unless I actually plan to deploy it. I'm not as likely to do a review on it So my experience is a lot of what this is going to be calling from we've sold a lot of the IX systems And we've done everything from the high-end enterprise as in $50,000 plus servers with high availability that we have sold to large companies in the enterprise market You know, of course, you've seen some of the reviews if you've spent some time this channel But you can find them for the TrueNAS, you know built purpose built hardware for the enterprise Which is awesome But this is the same software you can download and build yourself a small NAS box or if you're going I don't feel like building something. I want something that I know works That's what TrueNAS mini IX sells is this right here now same with Synology We've put a lot of these in small businesses. We've used a lot of them for the surveillance station We've had these out in the field for a while. We've been selling deploying using so all of my experience on both of these is at different levels of usage and of course internally we use Free NAS for well this video is being edited on a free NAS server So I have a lot of experience using these so that's where my reviews going to come from now Let's break down the comparison. I'll leave a link to this Google sheet. I put together, but this is a one-to-one kind of Objective comparison. I want to start there. There's always a subjective I just like something better and I try to keep that bias out at least here in the beginning There is of course some importance to that bias because maybe you like how much easier it is to set up something But even easy to set up as a real subjective easy to you, but maybe not easy someone else So let's start right here and start with the file system I think this is really important when you talk about NAS you're talking about the security and integrity of your files and Synology is taking the approach of building it on the MDADM RAID system because it's a linux based system With butterfs. Now, there's some contention You'll find if you read about butterfs handling hard drives and some issues This is why Synology has went with MDADM RAID butterfs and ext4 So they have a combination of things that they can do to take advantage of and keep it efficient and keep it good They also have bit rot protection, etc. etc So they've put this together and it's you know, we find it very stable I haven't really had problems with their file system or losses on there But NAS is not a backup just because you have a bunch of drives You should always be backing this up and that's even true with ZFS But ZFS is next level and I've heard it referred to many times as the billion dollar file system That is because of the amount of time research and development over the years that has gone into ZFS And it is an outstanding file system for absolutely massive scalable storage. So ZFS Hands down one of the you know Really advanced file systems out there when it comes to what they refer to as copy and write now butterfs bt RFS is Misspelled right here, but also copy on right. So that is Also a feature of it, but ZFS much more advanced does it really really well And also with the upcoming true NAS 12 release. They've added features such as the fusion pools and it's a really interesting enhancement that they've brought to the table with ZFS So it's it's a lot of power in ZFS and I can't say enough good things about it And it's one of the reasons it's so popular and a lot of people sing praises about it Now open source is a big factor. So if you're into the open source Ecosystem like I am and essentially an open source enthusiast like I refer to myself I'm Even though Synology is built on Linux. It's not a fully open source system And this is common a lot of companies use the Linux space and add some of their own code to it So you don't you can't just go grab the Synology with the exception of what I said about XPenology But that's still a fork and not fully supported etc. But yeah, it's not fully open source True NAS core on the other hand fully open source And this is why true NAS and IA system say well free NAS and true NAS are the largest open source project when it comes to storage Because they aren't kind of sort of open source. They are open source And it's fully open source with BSD based with true NAS And I will mention because I've done a video on it But it's you know future release is going to be true NAS scale, which is going to be Linux based Still all the great ZFS features, but a lot of people, you know, really like the Options you may get an enhancements that may come with a Linux based system So true NAS scale same thing open source and going to be based on Linux But we're going to talk today about true NAS core because it's available today on these systems even though it's in beta depending on when you're watching this with level of beta and That's going to be all BSD based Expandable raid now this is one of those Yes, but type answers. So yes for models that support SHR Synology hybrid rates So you can grab your pile of drives and throw them in there and have expansion going on And it will any intelligent way handle it. You can expand True NAS, but the vdevs have to match So I've got a separate video where I get more in depth than that So no, you can't just grab random drives There is a methodology where you have to pair up the vdevs in a similar way They don't have to be exactly the same drives. They can be different sizes But the pools themselves have to be containing the vdevs and it'll get complicated if I keep going on So I'll leave a link to that video. So yes, but is the answer on there Which is you know, I think it's important and if you want something that is a little bit easier Well, it sees from a Back to that subjective versus objective. Yeah, we're going to say it's just easier to do it in Synology But part of the thing was zfs is a little bit more rigid and the way it works But that's also what gives it some of that resilience it has for protecting your data plugins Synology and community supported ix systems and community So we do have the Synology based plugins on there and that comes down to if you have a plugin That is really specific to what you're looking for And it's only available on one of these platforms that may be one of those deciding factors that you've made your decision on and We'll get to that a little bit more at the bottom But that is obviously a factor But the fact is you have a lot of flexibility with both of these because you can run some other things on them So see if it has docker support, which we'll talk about later Virtual machine storage support as a target So nfs nice because they are supported on both of these So you can configure that and set that up Snapshot replication yes via butter fs and yes via zfs Now this is a feature of both of these file systems where you can create You know essentially snapshots to protect yourself against Maybe something that catastrophically destroys data because you have a share and you know ransomware being popular here in 2020 If something happens you can just roll back to that snapshot or Because you want to replicate it now snapshots create points in time Which you can replicate essentially a block level zfs replication. I've done videos on this extremely powerful extremely fast And it's based off of those snapshots that can be replicated to duplicate your data somewhere else and that feature Based on butter fs is available in synology s3 target support Maybe not everyone's looking for this, but I think it's interesting that it's natively built into the journey system Which essentially means it can act as an s3 server. I did a little searching I didn't find natively a way to do it on synology. I did find people who had write-ups on Doing it, but I didn't see native support for s3. It's kind of an edge case It may not be a deciding factor, but at least I'll mention it that it's built in there rsync now they both support rsync I find the rsync in synology to be a little bit trickier to use And I say that because it was easy to take two synologies and have them rsync to each other that part really simple I'll having it talk to other devices less simple True NAS core implements standard rsync So whether you're pushing or pulling data from rsync or want to set up an rsync port or rsync over ssh they just made it really simple to do in The true NAS system free NAS system. Have you want to look at it? It's been in there for a long time and it's standards based rsync Over standard ports and also standard ways to do it So I've used this quite a bit on true NAS when we have people who want to synchronize with different devices As long as those other devices whether they be a standalone device or another NAS as long as standards Implemented rsync support is there and neither the NAS or of course easy from the command line No problem syncing with this and a lot of people have a lot of custom solutions based on rsync So having that just as a built-in support is really nice to the web interface Containerization Docker is on supported models of Synology True NAS core uses bsd and iokage jails now when true NAS scale comes out that's going to be Docker based Once again, that's a future release, but hey, it's something that is out there that's available So I thought I'd mentioned that you know in the future that'll be something else And I also bring up true NAS scale every now and then because it runs essentially on the same hardware So if you ever wanted to switch between them your zfs pools should import fine And you'd be able to switch between them But your if you have built things on containerization because it's a different platform. Well, you'll have to rebuild all your plugins Windows file sharing seems obvious, but yes, they fully support it Manage users and permissions to the interface. Yes, there's a user manager in both of these So I'm not talking about active director bid just generally installing this and saying let's add some users Let's build some permissions They both have acl access control list management so you can assign users and permissions That is fully supported on both of these devices So if you just want to use a windows file server or in a windows network, it works And if you're in a small business office, I mean you go, hey, I like active directory integration Yes, we have that in both devices where we can tie to active directory So active directory can just understand this device and can control the permissions on it 80 server replacement now while this is supported in Synology It's not like a drop-in automatically every feature in 80 is there But it does have basic 80 support so it can kind of act as an active directory server Inside your network that is not a feature currently supported in churnass I don't know if it'll come in there or not But I've always had mixed feelings about this because it's not full 80 And sometimes you can have some quirkiness with it But for, you know, small officer or home user, it probably will work fine It all depends on what use cases you have for it Surveillance software is something I've talked a lot about with Synology We have Surveillance Station, it requires licenses And you get the first two for free or if you buy the NVR models, they come up with a couple more But I've done a whole videos on this, I really like it People ask me a lot about doing this on churnass There is a community supported plugin, I don't feel it's very well developed It's not something I've ever used in the enterprise, I've looked at it, it seems Well, I can only say kind of basic and not well developed It's the only way I can really describe that It's not something that I would say is turnkey Oh yeah, it's an awesome drop in replacement They have it, it's there, so I'm not going to dwell on that much It's not something I would recommend or recommend it for business Backup software, Active Backup is really cool I got to admit that's a great Synology supported tool I've done videos on how this integrates for backing up Windows computers, Windows servers How it can back up things like Office 365 and G Suite There's like a whole suite of software supported by Synology that comes with these devices And it doesn't have any licenses with it It's part of when you buy Synologies that support the Active Backup Back to, it has to be a device that supports it As of right now, it seems like a lot of them do But once again, when you're choosing your NAS, that's something you have to think about Community and third party support Yes, there's actually a lot of different plugins you can get And some of our community or third party plugins that are on there That may have other advanced features But there's nothing native supported by IAC systems It's like an automatic turnkey management tool That's like Active Backup So if you came here looking for Active Backup and that's what you want And these are all those times when we're going to go back to why we deploy Synology That Active Backup is a big one Now back to that open source conversation Now because, you know, just because we chose these IAC systems Many explosives because of what I have But I can really load free NAS to your NAS anywhere I want I can grab the code, I can do it And if IAC systems decided, seems unlikely To stop releasing the code or anything like that Someone would just fork it and move on Matter of fact, there are forks already of that particular software and deviations But I don't see that ever changing It's 100% your software open source That you do what you want with And that's a big factor I really like Synology, the device talks to Synology To get all the plugins to get the software set up If Synology says, you know what? I don't want to support it Like I said, I'm not saying this is likely But this is a factor If Synology says, you were going to expire and stop supporting And stop having updates for these models That's their choice to do so And that's it That's where the support will end If they decide to drop something out of their plugins And the way they deliver them through their system and locked in Then that's it That's Synology's choice to do so Because some of this is closed source There's not an easy way to update this Not that it's a real likely factor But it's something that may play into it Doesn't stop us from deploying these Because it just, you know Synology makes a good product Especially when you're using things like the Office 365 backup If that's one of the solutions This one of the times you're going to deploy it If they want that active backup of small office contacts us And say, hey, we need something to back up our workstations We don't want to buy some other type of service Well, then this is something that they're absolutely going to love Where they can drop this in It's pretty turnkey It gives you a nice management web interface And a lot of internal IT departments do like these Synology's They can set a couple of these up And have easy local backups Now Cloud backups are awesome And both of these do support once you get the data here Putting it in the cloud Synology goes a step further And offers some of their own storage solutions And, you know, kind of a nice feature That they do that versus And they have not locking Because you can use other ones But, you know, it's a nice turnkey system And versus IX system, still really nice We use Backplace to back these up And that's how our solution works Now, let's talk a little bit about the interfaces The Synology DSM interface Very much has a desktop UI look and feel With the control panel And just these simple things Oh look, here's my users I can create And click this little button at the top here There's my iSCSI manager I can go to the file station We can look at shares we have Package center And we can load things like Plex And all these different plugins They have nice plugins Lot of support Lot of different stuff that's supported in here I really like the extensiveness of the plugins The ease of use, so to speak Of just plugging them in there and away you go Now you still have to do some mapping And drop some permissions in there And connect to your Plex server To where your every year storage is And I, you know, I gotta admit I really like this interface It's pretty intuitive, easy to use This, though, is something I feel very at home in As well And this is where things get more subjective I like the interface a lot for TrueDAS I find it very robust It gives me deep levels of access To tuning and setting things up So when you talk about something like iSCSI You have some advanced options in here But you get a lot of very fine tuning options That may be very daunting And this may be the first problem you have Going this is a bit much This is not my space I want something very simple and turnkey Synology goes a little bit more on the simple side FreeNAS I think it's relatively easy to use Especially, you know, after you take a little time And dump plenty of tutorials on this But, yeah, it's going to be a little bit more complex They do have plug-in support here So you can still look up plug-ins From IAC systems or community They haven't broke down here You can click the install We have Plex server already loaded in here Just as a quick test To test something on here And not a problem to install But it's a little bit different Same with the ACLs and permissions The, when you design the pools Go to storage pools And if we look at Go here Edit ACLs This may seem a little bit more complicated Than the way you do that Over in Synology with the file station And the way you do the permissions So there's, like I said If you figure it out It seems easy But if their first time Or, yeah, Synology might be a little bit easier I at least wanted to give them a fair shake on that So I don't know if this really helps you In which one to choose But I've now laid out a few of these use cases Like I said, we deployed both The nice thing that amazes me About the TrueNAS is You can download for free Something that I've deployed And set up in large-scale enterprise Devirements on rack servers That cost 50 plus thousand dollars And that's your still Your systems right here The same software that's scalable Now, Synology, we've played With some of the larger Synologies We've never deployed them Our use cases mostly have been targeted At the small businesses and small offices And especially love the surveillance station So hopefully this kind of gives you Some ideas of which one to get I think the TrueNAS line Being fully open source Fits well with my open source enthusiasm And, of course, my love to tinker with things Because I can just create all the jails I want and very custom Create all kinds of different software on there Set this up as different targets For things versus the Synology For your small business going You know what, I just need something Simple turnkey I need some backups I'd like it to run a couple of cameras In my office and some files Can you do that? Yes, Synology's kind of turnkey for that Makes it really simple So if you're the more enthusiast type And love all the knobs being available To you to twist and turn And really customize with a very flexible And big community support FreeNAS If you're going, I just want turnkey And I like that UI That kind of feels like a desktop interface Synology's got you covered there And the surveillance station Granted, it does take licenses But hey, that's kind of a cool feature Along with some basic file permissions For some sharing And maybe you want to replicate this To another Synology Or use that active backup Or you want to back up your Office 365 And G Suite I've done a video on that And that's a cool feature That comes with a lot of these models of Synology You're kind of locked in To the way they design things But they do a reliable job But I will mention that Like hardware wise If you build it yourself Synology kind of gets ruled out So if you are a tinker or a homelab You want to really dive deep into it The nuts and bolts of building it Well, then you're going to go back over to your FreeNAS again And go, I want to build it myself With the FreeNAS TrueNAS line Fully open source Because I like to customize everything I don't want something talking to some proprietary servers I'm going to lock it down and do that You can do that There's no license or activation On these servers at all Some of the Synology software Does require levels of activation To get it set up Not that that's the same as a license But that's a way they have control over it So just some thoughts And throwing them out there On final thoughts on this But they're both good products They're both very reliable That much I will say for them And whichever one you choose I think you'll be happy with it Just, you know, look at the choices Look at the options And decide which one works for you Thanks And thank you for making it to the end of the video If you like this video Please give it a thumbs up If you'd like to see more content from the channel Hit the subscribe button And hit the bell icon If you'd like YouTube to notify you When new videos come out If you'd like to hire us Head over to LawrenceSystems.com Fill out our contact page And let us know what we can help you with And what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion Head over to Forums.LauranceSystems.com Where we can carry on the discussion About this video, other videos Or other tech topics in general Even suggestions for new videos They're accepted right there on our forums Which are free Also, if you'd like to help the channel Out in other ways Head over to our affiliate page We have a lot of great tech offers for you And once again, thanks for watching And see you next time