PYXARIS

The problem

Every device built to summon help is sold to someone who expected to need it.

A satellite messenger costs several hundred dollars and carries a subscription. A personal locator beacon costs about the same. Both are bought in advance, by someone who anticipated danger and could afford to prepare for it.

That is a real business, and it serves prepared people well. It also describes almost nobody in genuine distress.

The people who most need to be found are the least able to buy a device in advance.

Changing that is not a matter of discounting an existing product. A device cheap enough to be given away rather than sold is a different object, built to a different constraint, on a network that does not yet exist. That is what we are building.

The network

A constellation of deliberately simple satellites.

Very low data rate connectivity to extremely inexpensive ground devices, anywhere on the planet. This is not satellite broadband. The link is narrow on purpose, and the constraint is the entire design.

A device sends one short, infrequent check-in carrying its identity and enough for us to place it. Almost nothing else. Sending almost nothing is what makes the device inexpensive enough to give away, long lived enough to sit unused for years, and independent of any terrestrial network at all.

First product

A distress beacon that does nothing until the person carrying it decides otherwise.

It is inert until activated, and only the person holding it can activate it. There is no enrollment step that a third party can perform on someone else's behalf, which means there is no way to use one to track a person without their knowledge.

That is a design decision, not a policy. Policies change with ownership. Architecture does not.