On Episode 54 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast, we spoke with Jaume Sanpera, the CEO and Co-Founder of Sateliot, about how he’s bringing his vision of global  IoT connectivity to life. With 30 years of experience, Juame is an entrepreneurial leader in the telecommunications industry. He’s founded several companies, including the first telecom satellite operator in Europe, giving him some fascinating insights into the space. Read on to find out more about how he and the rest of the Sateliot team are transforming the satellite industry. 

“When we started saying that the same device could be used in satellites and telecommunications, almost everybody looked at it in a very sceptical way. When they first did the first demonstration, everything started changing. We got a huge amount of help from the chip manufacturers when we told them that the chip that they were selling to 20% of the world could be sold to the other 80% as well. That’s when everything changed. 

Next, I had to go in and convince some of the brightest minds in the telecommunication sector that this was good for them, and that the fusion of the telecommunications and satellite sectors was a positive thing. The rest was easy because it’s just technicalities. 

We launched our first satellite in 2021. We made some contributions to the standard wake-up procedure of the devices. You don’t have continuous coverage with just one satellite, so the device has to know when the satellite is in the right place and wake up at the right moment. We had to calculate the orbit to know when the satellite was ready, which we figured out following the launch of that first satellite. 

Everything has been a bet. We bet that the standard wasn’t going to change until 2022, and things were a little bit up in the air because you have to have time to develop your technology. We had limited time to change the standard. We had to push hard in order to get approval for our devices, but we succeeded, and the reward is that we are the first ones that have a satellite that works in this way. It’s a base station on a satellite that connects directly with a 5G IoT device.”

To find out more about Sateliot’s developments in the 5G space, tune into Episode 54 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Discover the challenges of building a NewSpace company in Europe with insights from Kammy Brun, the Managing Director of Simera Sense and Founder of Kalaxie. With over 15 years of experience in the industry, Kammy has plenty of advice for other founders and entrepreneurs in the sector, which she shared on Episode 53 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast. Here are some of the highlights of our conversation. 

What do you think a startup needs to be successful within the European NewSpace sector? 

In Europe, startups are encouraged by the very healthy financing environment. However, sometimes we can easily get funding, but we don’t have customers, which is dangerous for any company. We really need to pay attention to that. From a global point of view, the tricky things about getting from startup to scale-up are the market expectation of your product, how you manage your cash flow, and how you get your funding. 

When it comes to market expectations, as a startup, you can launch a product before you’ve found your product or market fit. The early adopter of your product won’t expect you to be perfect because you’re a startup. You’re still figuring things out. However, when you become a scale-up, you need to have a good product/market fit, and you need to know exactly what you’re selling. 

Simera is a very good example. The company was launched six or seven years ago, and we have already delivered more than 60 optical payloads, around 20 of which are now in orbit. Our portal is a standardised, commercial, off-the-shelf optical payload that didn’t exist in the market before. The challenge for Simera Sense, and for all startups, is ensuring that the quality of your product can meet the expectations of your customers before you start to grow. 

How you manage your cash flow will dictate how fast you can scale. How can you scale up your productions? You need to better manage your supply chain. You need to manage your stock, get better control of your lead time, or buy parts in advance. You may need to invest in your production line or human resource team. Everything is financial. 

That leads me to fundraising. Fundraising in the US and Europe have different mindsets. They take much more risk in America, and the financing does not come from the same background as in Europe. In Europe, you can sell the idea to get fundraising. When you prove the idea, you prove the business, and you prove your technology works, you are viable. Europe has a very healthy ecosystem that includes private venture capitalists and institutional funding. That helps European startups to scale up. 

Do you think the new space industry in Europe is too saturated, or do you think there is room for new players?

Well, I do believe that it’s true. There are a lot of European startups in all the different areas of NewSpace. I won’t say that it’s saturated because it’s good to have different options and market offerings that drive competition. If we come back to the user’s point of view, sometimes it’s good for them to have more choices. I won’t say that we’re democratising space today because we’re not yet there, but I do believe that we could have some market consolidation soon. It could come in the form of a partnership between different operators. If we think about the users, they do not have democratised offers that they can reach. I do believe that in the future, more partnerships will take place because there is a market need for independent technical offerings.

To hear more from Kammy, tune into Episode 53 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast here.  

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

As companies continue to drive the satellite industry forward, new opportunities are developing in areas like SmallSat manufacturing. We dove deeper into this phenomenon on Episode 52 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast, when we spoke with Aleksander Fiuk, the Co-Founder and COO of Revolv Space. Revolv is a NewSpace company on a mission to fully monetise space assets by building the next generation of critical components for payload systems onboard small satellites. Here’s how they’re doing it. 

What are the current limitations of SmallSat manufacturing?

The limitations come from the fact that over the course of the past 20-25 years, payloads have been miniaturised and developed to the extent that they can be extremely effective and high-performing. However, there are continuously increasing demands for data transmission, thermal and power system capabilities. We’re focusing on offering a full ecosystem of products and hopefully solving that problem in the near future for our manufacturers. 

But the problem doesn’t stop there. The technology is available, but we also need a supply chain to satisfy the needs of the NewSpace market. We often hear from our customers and other stakeholders that the need is there. They’ve identified the need for improving the power budget or the data transmission rates, or whatever their technical problems are, but what they are lacking is a reliable partner in the industry. They need a supplier for those components and solutions.

One of the key aspects that is not being satisfied by suppliers in the industry is the customer’s need for much higher flexibility than what was the standard in the industry until quite recently. As a customer, we expect a supplier to adapt to the fact that we don’t know what we need. We don’t expect a supplier to line up a plan of five years of development with every single day broken down to detail for us, but we expect suppliers to be there for us and be able to adapt to a changing schedule or changing requirements. We expect suppliers to be very agile and adaptive themselves, otherwise, they wouldn’t cope with the changing dynamics of the market. Somehow, though, that hasn’t always translated. 

How does your approach differ from traditional ways of working with manufacturers, and what impact do you see it having on NewSpace customers?

There are two things that I think are really making a difference. One is our transparency. What we saw already before founding Revolv is that the space industry is extremely secretive. To a certain extent, it’s justified, because you cannot fully share certain information with your customers as a supplier, like the full information about your developments. It just doesn’t make sense though, because your customer is your closest partner for the development of your product or project. Therefore, being transparent was what got us those first contracts. Whenever there’s a problem, we signal it right away. Whenever there is an obstacle with the supply chain, logistics, or contracts, we are always very vocal about what is happening and how we want to deal with it. 

The other difference is approachability. Prior to founding Revolv, we saw that the space industry is extremely slow, and that’s something we’ve heard from customers too. That’s quite often what is pushing them away from other suppliers or partners because it takes an extremely long time to get a response on basically anything, from talking about contractual matters to technical details. We adapt to the customer, meaning that whenever required or desired by the customer, we will set up a separate communication channel, like Slack, for example, to discuss an issue. 

To hear more about Aleksander, tune into Episode 52 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Meet Felix Motzki, the CTO of Reflex Aerospace, a German NewSpace startup and satellite manufacturer. Felix oversees the development and delivery of Reflex’s innovative customer satellites, but before Reflex, Felix spent the majority of his career in engineering. He joined us on Episode 51 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast to discuss his transition into a C-level leadership role and what attracted him to Reflex Aerospace. 

Why reflex aerospace? What are you doing differently to bring value to this crowded space?

When they first approached me, I thought they were just another satellite company. But our interesting approach, and what’s really specific to us, is that we want to approach the mass or lower-cost market. When I say lower-cost, it’s still expensive stuff, but you’re not shooting for the 20-30-ton satellites that cost hundreds of millions. Now, we want to attack that segment of 50-500 kilograms, which is a segment that can’t be covered with a CubeSat. We want to do everything that you can’t do with the CubeSat at around 500 kilograms. 

There are a lot of companies, but they usually offer a standard bus or a modular system that can be put together to offer something similar. That’s explicitly not what we do. We actually build a satellite for that customer. It will always be a custom bus, whether the customer wants 1, 2, 3 or 30. We still want to do it fast. We were launching our first satellite in 2 months, which is quite a short timeframe. We do that by not focusing so much on developing a standard platform but on developing standard processes. We are working on innovating the design process to streamline it and make customised designs as fast as possible. 

How did you find that transition from being an engineer to leadership?

I’ve taken the decision the transition really well. It was a learning experience, and I’m still learning after many years as a manager. I’ll probably never stop. I probably should never stop. It was a very hard decision for me to take because I was very happy developing electronics and software. There, if there’s a problem, if you just work longer, you either find a solution or figure out there is no solution. This is quite a thankful job, and it’s paid very well. And it’s exciting and interesting. I could disconnect from it when I went home in the evening or during the weekend. I knew managing people was going to be different, but it took me several months after I was offered the leadership position to get used to it. I do not regret it. I would have been a good engineer amongst millions of other good engineers. My talent is probably more managerial, which is where I can stand out.

What has been the biggest lesson you’ve learned from a management perspective?

I’m not sure if I could name one biggest lesson because I’ve learned a million lessons. I’m learning every day. There are some key experiences which I will always remember and which will always make me think more deeply. For example, the first time I had to fire somebody was the hardest day in my professional career. It was somebody I had not hired myself, and the person was really not helping the team at all. They were holding back the team, and it was clear that we had to let him go. Still, I remember that day very well, which taught me a very important lesson. You have to invest in and hire the right people. It pays off for sure. You cannot invest too much time in finding the right people. You don’t want to put just anybody in that position, so it’s important to find the right fit. 

To hear more from Felix about his talent attraction philosophy, tune into Episode 51 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast here.

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.