Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate As it turns out, beaming high-speed internet to the remote corners of Alaska from thousands of miles away in space starts with a brick of titanium in a San Francisco warehouse.In a vast complex where the U.S. once churned out World War II-era Liberty Ships, Astranis is building satellites that it plans to send to orbit more than 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface, with the first one slated to be borne skyward aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral next year.“It’s one of the largest problems that humanity has to solve today.” So, in its more than 150,000 square foot warehouse at Pier 70, where the old ceiling cranes and rail tracks that helped win humanity’s largest war are still on display, engineers in lab coats bustle about a massive white room pressurized for cleanliness.Each of the six rows of workstations corresponds to a side of a cube-shaped satellite now in production, as engineers assemble and test the circuits and chips that will withstand years of punishing radiation, far from the Earth’s protective magnetic field.But futuristic tech like ion thrusters for propulsion and advances in lithium ion battery storage mean his company has been able to pack much of the same functions into a 1,000 pound box about the size of a washing machine with solar panels for wings."