Category: Satellite & NewSpace

With growing concerns over the human side of the space industry, ethics are becoming a pivotal part of conversations in the sector. On Episode 30 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast, we spoke to Sita Sonty, the CEO of Space Tango, about her thoughts on the topic. Sita has an impressive career history in space, including leading space industry practices at the Boston Consulting Group and working as the Head of Human Spaceflight Sales at SpaceX. She also led an interesting career in government, with over 17 years of experience as a US diplomat. Combining these two areas has given her a wealth of insights into the legal and ethical implications of space. Read on to hear her thoughts. 

“A lot of the decisions that are made by sovereign governments impact where you can launch a launch vehicle from, how much payload it can carry, the purpose of its payload, whether it is designed to have a civil, commercial or national security purpose, how many of those technological pieces can be made in your nation as opposed to manufactured elsewhere… There are also questions like ‘To what extent is technology transfer either problematic from a sovereignty perspective, or highly beneficial from a bilateral negotiations perspective?’ These are the things that have generally been decided upon by senior government officials. 

At the same time, ethical concerns are not only limited to complex foreign policy and national security decisions. Every government has to make those decisions on an increasingly frequent basis, given the amount of activity that’s happening in space, and the number of countries that are getting involved in the space economy. That being said, those decisions are not only made by those senior policymakers – they’re also increasingly made and shaped by the technologists themselves. There is a natural tension between wanting to continue at the pace of innovation so that we’re launching as quickly as we can and meeting those ethical limits. 

We’re providing frequent opportunities to launch, and we’re bringing down the unit economics so that launch capability is at today’s level of affordability. However, it’s not just being provided by one provider – there’s a multitude of launch providers out there that can enable access to space. Let’s say we achieve that, we’re still in a world where there’s one major launch provider, but there’s a number of other newcomers who are increasingly catching up, but are not quite there yet. As that dynamic grows or evolves over time, let’s say there’s increasing access to various orbital planes, the big ethical question is, ‘How do you reasonably allocate access to orbit?’, because it’s not an infinite resource. 

There’s a great study that’s been done by Professor Richard Lunars at MIT, on how to appropriately calculate orbital access if it’s not an infinite resource. How do you appropriately calculate it using just data? On top of that data, you overlay the filter of ethics and say, ‘Well, in a perfect world, there should be equitable access to orbital slots or orbital bins in various orbits, and the proliferation of LEO is the one that is of greatest concern’.

So from an ethical perspective, who gets to decide, and what is the fair outcome? How do you measure the fairness of that decision-making process, as well as mapping as much actual data as possible? You have to consider whether that data is the economic contribution or the percentage of GDP of a given country to its space programme. Is that the proportion by which they’ll be granted access to an orbital slot or set of slots? There’s the international telecom union that has performed something similar in geosynchronous orbit for the telecom industry, but what about LEO? And what about if we’re going beyond one industry and trying to encourage as much industrial growth in low Earth orbit as possible? Is there a new agency that can provide that function? These are the kinds of things that folks in industry think about constantly because there’s this big laudable goal of democratising space, but that is a lot harder to achieve when you think through not just the economics of it, but also the ethics of it.

So how have the ethics questions evolved during my time in the industry? I’d say in a few ways. There’s the ethics of access to performing what you want to perform in the orbital location where you want to perform it because you can’t perform the same functions everywhere. Access is, in effect, controlled by the launch providers. You could set policy to say, ‘Here’s an international organisation, various countries are going to fund it, it’s going to be similar to ICAO, which governs commercial aviation.’ There’s some precedent for the policy segment to say, ‘We’re going to start up agencies at the national and then the international level and those agencies will resource governance structures and technologies that will enable us to have things like air traffic control in space.’ That is a highly evolving segment which provides access to various orbital locations through various launch providers. 

It’s attracted a lot of attention because at the end of the day, do government agencies have enough resources to keep up with the pace of innovation, and continue to provide that access to orbital locations in a reasonable timeframe? That requires resources, judgement, knowledge, skills and abilities. That’s the phase of evolution that we’re in right now. When it comes down to microgravity research (which is what space will do in the value chain), there are other governing bodies that we partner with, such as the FAA and NASA, for certification of our hardware and facilities. We also partner with the FDA to provide us with what’s called the Current Good Manufacturing Practice licence, so that the artefacts that we bring back down from microgravity can be utilised on humans. Whether it’s for stem cell tissues, organs on chips, or drug compounds, to be able to bring substances back down, you still need to have the approval and certification to put that into a human body. There is a thought-through process and set of ethics around it. 

There have been structures that we at Space Tangle have been able to leverage, historically in a pretty short timeframe, so that we’re keeping up with not only the pace of innovation and trying to move the needle on it, but at the same time making sure that we’re thinking through the most ethical and equitable outcomes. We aim not only to preserve the lives of the humans who are going to be beneficiaries of the payload that we bring down but also to do no harm in the process.”

To hear more from Sita about the human element and governmental impact of the space industry, tune into Episode 30 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.     

Orbital debris and mitigation are pressing issues in today’s Satellite and NewSpace industry. On Episode 29 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast, we spoke with Andrew Faiola, the Commercial Vice President at Astroscale, who is leading the charge in tackling them. 

Why has it taken so long for the industry to do something about debris and future mitigation? 

The proliferation of spacecraft in orbit has accelerated the realization that something needs to be done. Most people are familiar with the Kessler effect, which identified space debris as an issue a long time ago. But now, things are accelerating very quickly. 

The other part of it is technology, and its ability to deal with the issue is starting to catch up. 10 years ago, when Astroscale was founded, our founder had identified that there was going to be an issue, but there wasn’t then the technology to deal with it in a cost-effective way. Because of this burgeoning space economy and the number of companies that are operating in this space, the pace of technology and innovation is accelerating as well. It’s enabling us to start addressing an issue that wasn’t even able to be addressed just a couple of years ago.

What do you think is the viability of the long-term market for these missions beyond the next decade or so? 

The environment is going to get more and more crowded. What we want to do is both mitigate risk by removing large, dangerous objects and ensure that we’re not creating more small debris. In the long term, there is going to be a view towards technology helping remove the smaller pieces of debris as well. I look at all of these things as stepping stones to the in-orbit space economy that everybody talks about. 

Astroscale today is focusing on removing debris from orbit, but what we’re really good at is rendezvous and proximity operations. 10 or 20 years from now, we’re looking at more and more private industries in space, whether it’s human spaceflight, manufacturing, etc; those vehicles are all going to have to coexist together. They’re going to have to be flying, viewing and being serviced in space. Nobody wants to launch tonnes and tonnes of stuff from the ground because no matter how cheap a starship gets, you still have to start on Earth. Can’t we start to repurpose things that are already in orbit? How do we get to a circular economy in orbit rather than just deorbiting? That has to start somewhere. 

On a national scale, what more needs to be done? And more importantly, by whom? 

It needs to come from a number of places, all at the same time. Public awareness is key to putting pressure on legislators to actually enact laws. The industry can only do so much, it needs to come from both ends. Astroscale and others have done an extremely good job of influencing policy over the past years to the point where it is now recognised that the orbital environment has a pollution problem that needs to be sorted out, preferably before we have another tragedy of the commons. 

But what’s the next step to actual legislation or regulation? Historically, I would have come from the standpoint of ‘more regulation is bad’, right? Let the market sort itself out. But in the time that I’ve been here, I’ve actually realised that having the right regulatory framework in place that places the right incentives for behaviour rather than penalties is actually going to catalyse investment and innovation. We need that foundation in order to make a success of it, because this is a brand new market that we’re trying to develop. 

Without having public awareness and the right regulatory and legislative framework in place, it’s hard to make it work. We’ve seen this before in other areas, whether it’s cod fisheries in the North Atlantic, or the Amazon rainforest, everyone knows that they should behave better or things will go bad, but until the right frameworks are in place that incentivise the right behaviour, people will act in their own self-interest. 

To your point about who is responsible, is it national governments or international governmental organisations, I think everybody has a part to play in this. My background in communications for mobility, in-flight connectivity and maritime has shown me that there are organisations like the IMO that put rules of the road in place that people have to adhere to, but there’s national legislation as well. It is probably going to be a combination of all of those that help us move the industry forward. 

To hear more from Andrew, tune into Episode 29 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 the satellite industry develops, there are increasing numbers of potential applications for the technology. On The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast we were joined by Kevin Fielder, who is the VP of Sales for the global cruise and ferries market at Anuvu. Kevin shared the work that Anuvu are doing to bring satellite connectivity to the luxury travel market. Here are his insights: 

You work in a very interesting niche in the SATCOM world with a focus on the cruise and ferry market. What seems to be the most interesting aspect of the market right now?

The pandemic – which really disrupted the industry from a force majeure perspective, and squeezed disposable income so that people were not able to travel as much – obviously had a detrimental impact on any kind of disposable spending market. It really hamstrung the industry. Coming out of it, however, there was a new technology from our friends at SpaceX that completely disrupted the market. When I say disrupted, it’s not a bad connotation, I just mean that it has changed the market. 

As people came out of their homes after COVID they were attached to a very fast, high speed internet connection with low latency. Coming back aboard cruise lines, the expectation was that they would have the same experience. It just so happened that at the same point in time we gained the technology that gave them the ability to do that. That situation meant that something that might have had a slow adoption process got ramped up really fast, based upon people’s appetite for that type of technology. This is the experience that people have wanted to have in the cruise environment for years, and now we’ve given them the best of the best available connectivity out on open water. 

Those two things – one being a bad experience for everybody from a health perspective, and the other being a transformative technology that came into play quickly at the same time – have really changed the cruise market for the better. 

What are you most excited or concerned about in relation to this industry?

The markets have been clamouring for LEO (low earth orbit) connectivity options. Starlink jumped to the forefront of delivery on that, and OneWeb is out in the market as well. Amazon is doing their groundwork to get their first satellites up at the moment too. There are plenty of smaller companies who aren’t publicising the fact that they’re launching LEO satellite capabilities for things like IOT and cell service, but they’re in the market too. I think you’re going to see more and more of that in the very near future, because it can reach so many more people than the traditional model. 

There’s a tendency to think that once LEO comes about, the geostationary satellite service will go away, but there’s still a need for it, and maybe a different way of consuming it. That may mean configuring it as a failsafe, because it has much higher latency, but it’s still a good quality product available just about anywhere globally. In addition, there are some models that are consumption based. If you don’t want to consume as much data, you may put some non latency tolerant traffic over those. If you’re going to be paying for it anyway, you might as well utilise it. If I sent you an email, you really don’t care if it arrives now or 30 seconds from now, so why would I use a low latency service at a higher price? Save that capability for a passenger who needs it for streaming.

To learn more about using satellite infrastructure for innovative solutions, tune into episode 28 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.     

On Episode 27 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast we were joined by Tobias Reinicke, the CTO and Co-Founder at Satellite Vu. Tobias has an extensive background in geography and computing with a career spanning over two decades in the aerospace industry. His main focus has been creating advanced solutions for global mapping. Satellite Vu is on a mission to build high resolution thermal data through the launch of their first satellite, the HOTSAT-1 in June, and the recent release of the first light imageries. Tobias explained the importance of using these images to protect our planet, and how companies can plan for the future using the same technology. Read on for his insights. 

How can organisations use thermal imaging data to change their behaviours?

As a company we can detect heat loss at a very high level. Any industry or activity that is based on heat production, we can infer activity levels of. So you can imagine that companies that run large equipment, factories, refineries, or that sort of infrastructure, would request data for their own sites and connected sites that they may not have easy access to, to assess where they are losing heat. Because we’re a global service, we can give them a holistic view of all their assets and sites, and provide a benchmark for their site, showing if they are running at a certain level of capacity. 

Companies have a mandate according to their emissions and wastage of heat that they need to abide by. We can show you whether your sites are achieving that or not. At the same time, if you’ve made some changes, we can show you what the before and after looks like so that you can validate that your changes have made an effect. As legislation and policies come into place in many countries, we are going to be able to help companies assess the situation and help them make the decision with our datasets. We hope to play a key part in monitoring assets that are coming online, are supposed to be coming offline, or are being retrofitted to be more efficient.

What are some of the benefits of infrared imaging sensors compared to other types of sensors?

There’s a bunch of other sensors, such as optical, where you’d see what the sun reflects, but that precludes you from collecting data at night. Again, you can derive activity by looking at cars or trucks being in place, etc, but you can’t see any actual heat losses or infer anything else. You have synthetic aperture radar, which can look at nighttime as well, which is the closest you can get to thermal on that sort of capability. But again, it doesn’t give you any colour because it’s a radar bounce, so it’s a bit tricky to interpret sometimes. Otherwise you can see actual activity by looking at the hyperspectral multispectral solar solutions, which look at gas emissions. Companies like GHGSat are looking at anything to do with emissions, which our bandwidth does not allow us to do. But on the other side, GHGSat can’t derive heat loss. A combination of sensors are going to create the best picture.

What can we learn from this data from the initial images?

The first image we got from the satellite was at Rome, it was a nighttime image, and you can very clearly see some heat around the place. Looking in the northwest of the image was the Vatican, which showed up as really hot. The reason for this was most probably because it is made up of large slabs of concrete. When we get into this city analysis and city planning, materials like concrete, stone, brick and tarmac retain heat really well, and emit it at night, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s fine in the winter, but not too great in the summer when you’re creating urban heat islands. Otherwise, in Rome, we can see a nice river flowing through and you can see that the water is very cool. You can see the green areas are much cooler. You can infer a lot from this and play with it on the urban planning front. 

How can satellite imaging help mitigate the effects of climate change? 

We will be a monitoring service. We will be able to monitor what’s going on; there’s not much else we can do other than that. But I think that if you don’t know where your biggest heat losses and emissions are, you’re not going to be able to do anything about it. That’s very much what we’re there for – to give it a global, holistic and uniform view of the sites that are emitting the most heat and therefore producing the most waste. Asset owners and policymakers want to know about that, and then when they’ve made the changes they want to know how they’ve actually improved the situation. That’s how satellite imaging will help. 

To learn more about satellite imaging and the work that Satellite Vu are doing in the area, tune into Episode 17 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 satellite technology develops, we are seeing a huge change in the way that we use the data and intelligence it provides. On Episode 26 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast we spoke to Kateryna Aheieva, the Head of Business Development at LuxSpace, about how these applications are being developed and the impact they could have on the wider world. Here are her insights: 

Satellite intelligence is becoming a hot topic. Every single day I see more and more companies discussing it. In my previous jobs, the main business was taking pictures from space and selling that data and value-added information to customers from that. Talking to clients and partners, we realised that the requirements on data are actually quite high. It’s not only about the resolution or the quality, but also about the amount of data that can be provided from the space system to the end user that is important. If you want to create a value added service, you have to utilise a lot of data points and have a powerful source of information. So the satellite or the space system itself should be very powerful. 

Constellations were having to get much bigger in order to perform. At LuxSpace, we’re building satellite platforms in the 50-250 kilogramme class, which is a completely different system. It’s a very capable platform for certain applications with very high resolution imagery for agriculture, thermal imagery, etc, which results in high density and very good quality data. Because the space world is occupied by engineers, we are often building systems that there isn’t currently demand for, just because we can push that boundary. So we have a lot of systems built, but not all of them are utilised in the proper way or maybe at the maximum capacity. So I truly believe that space systems could have a better use when they get more intelligent. 

There is a huge opportunity to utilise this intelligence from satellites. When multiple systems or subsystems are taking pictures and sending them to the ground station, when the space system has a diverse list of tasks, when you need less operational capability on the ground to perform that task, and when the space system itself is capable of making some decisions, and analysis to decrease the amount of work that needs to be done on the ground, it will be huge. The system itself is becoming more capable too. Intelligence is coming. 

And a couple of companies around the world are working in that direction. They have onboard computing capabilities, not only for close Earth spaces like low earth orbit, but even higher orbit and also interplanetary missions which could satisfy the needs of the system that is flying far away from Earth and has to be independent and tasking itself. We also see the potential in this market, and the contributions we can make to society by moving the direction of space intelligence instead of bringing the capacity of objects up to a certain level, because applications like communication from space or the internet from space still require certain coverage, but some applications, especially institutional technology demonstration, can be made more smart. 

To hear more from Kateryna, tune into Episode 26 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.     

The satellite industry is a rapidly developing space, with new technology and applications emerging at a steady pace. On Episode 25 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast we spoke to Benoît Deper, the CEO and founder of Aerospacelab, about how he sees the future of the industry unfolding. Aerospacelab was founded in 2018, with the aim of making geospatial intelligence both actionable and affordable, with its fully vertically integrated approach. Just last month, they launched their second satellite on a falcon nine rocket. Following these advancements, we asked Benoît about what we can expect to see from the company next. 

What’s the most exciting recent development that you’re working on now?

What we’re building is quite interesting. We are trying to find the right balance between custom and standardised satellite buses, and we are iterating on that. What we discovered so far is that fully standardised buses are not what the customer wants, because they want to feel special and have their particular needs and requirements met. But, at the same time, they like the standard price. The real challenge is to find something that looks like a customised product, but has a price tag that is more in line with the standardised product. It is quite exciting to oscillate between the two sides and find a path where we believe we can converge to create something that is exciting for our customers. 

What are you most excited to see Aerospacelab achieve in the next 3-5 years? 

Now it’s a matter of scaling and being profitable. So again, it’s quite interesting to see what our technology will look like after the first couple of years. We have started to see some territory that would allow us to do that. Not everything is going according to plan, because as Napoleon said, ‘the plan is only valid until the first shot is fired’. However, we’re on track to meet our KPIs. Not that far in the future we hope to be profitable. For a NewSpace company that is huge, because it’s a small world where we have many brands, and we talk to each other quite often. Not that many NewSpace companies are actually profitable out there, so we’re excited to reach that goal. 

To hear more from Benoît about the future of the industry, tune into 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.     

Earth Observation has been a hot topic in the NewSpace industry for several months now. On Episode 23 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast we were joined by Kammy Brun, an expert in strategy and business development in aerospace and AI based analytics applications, to discuss the forces driving the growth of Earth Observation. Kammy has held several roles in the space industry, including Airbus and SkyFi. She has also completed multiple degrees, and is currently finalising her MBA. Read on for her insights. 

What are the main applications of the NewSpace industry, and what’s really driving demand for them? 

Defence security has always been the first market for geospatial solutions. Today, we can work together with remote sensing geospatial with the IoT and AIS. That is definitely one of the markets where I can see lots of synergy between different technologies. I believe that we should have some applications which merge geospatial and navigational capabilities and make them more integrated, because the end users don’t really care which technology it is. 

Maritime is another one of the markets that is going quite well. There’s a future there. I’m pretty sure that with the growing numbers of AI-based analytics companies globally, we will be able to offer some solutions which are more tailor made for the end user. We’ll be able to  give end users a solution, but we currently can’t, because they did not know what geospatial was. We can have a bigger market, the reason we don’t is because we do not yet have a perfect solution for the end user. 

For our users, it’s relative. They want to have something easy to use – they don’t care about what it does or image resolution or the AI behind it. It’s very difficult to offer a service that is simple and easy to use and gives you the answer that you need, but those private markets will be able to grow in the next few years as the technology develops. For today, those geospatial companies are offering better and better solutions that will draw people into the industry. 

How is the industry currently leveraging these technologies to enhance data analysis and decision making processes?

AI and machine learning has always been used in geospatial markets. We use it for object or change detection. It’s also been used to classify different objects in a set of images. Today we are using it even more than we did five years ago. It is a good market driver for companies who manage more data, because today’s AI and machine learning will be able to help them manipulate or ingest more data. 

In the remote sensing markets, we’re expecting a baby boom of hyperspectral constellations. Hyperspectral is not new, but we have not always used it from space – it was originally used from planes or drones. With NewSpace hyperspectral images and geospatial expertise, I’m pretty sure that a lot of applications will open up as we increase the data supply. We will have a better usage of AI and new applications. Currently we know some of the use cases with hyperspectral, but we are not yet fully exploiting the potential. I expect significant growth in the next few years.

To learn more about Kammy’s work and experiences in the NewSpace industry, tune into 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.     

The younger generations are facing a range of challenges on a global scale. On Episode 22 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast we were joined by Jim Keravala, the Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer & Chief Architect at OffWorld, to talk about the innovative solutions that the space industry is creating to tackle these issues. Jim has extensive experience in a range of space sectors, and currently sits on several advisory boards such as the National Space Society, International Moonbased Alliance and the Moon Village Association. He co-founded OffWorld to extract critical minerals, minerals and materials on Earth and in space using swarms of smart industrial robots. Read on to how space is set to save the world.

“The challenges that we’re facing today are, in part, born out of our own successes as a species. The other part is our systemic, steady state of ongoing risks that are always in the background – and to some extent, the intersection of the two is another challenge in itself. I think the manifestation of all of these challenges is not the uncertainties of big environmental cataclysms or other single impact changes. The more concerning risks are those that are subject to cascading sequencing. 

There’s always the asteroid impact issue. Stars could go supernova and create an untenable environment for life on this planet. There’s always the big issues like that, and those issues are real, but the probability of those occurring in the next 100s or 1000s of years are very, very small. The things that seem small and innocuous, such as the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, are cascading triggers. Greenhouse gases lead to atmospheric temperature rises, leading to loss of biodiversity, leading to changes in weather patterns, climate, ocean current path patterns, which can then lead to reduction of polar ice caps, which can add to the lack of reflectance of Sun’s energy, which can then start increasing those cycles. I’m more concerned by these dynamic instabilities which start running towards catastrophe. 

It’s my personal opinion that it’s a combination of natural cycles and small catalytic inputs into that environmental system that is the biggest threat. There’s a lot of debate around climate change and the origin of it; ‘Is it human generated or is it natural?’ That’s a less important question than ‘What are we going to do about it?’ For everything else we do we tend to take out insurance, whether it’s our car, our home, our pets – whatever is important to us, we insure it. We should take out some form of insurance for our planet as well. That form of insurance is not about creating an escape valve, it’s about opening up a closed system. 

If we can open up the system and use the resources of space, we can genuinely help solve some of these challenges. I believe we are in the midst of these changes already. I personally don’t believe that as a species we’re really that well equipped to deal collectively and sensibly and proactively with challenges that we rationally are aware of. As a species, we tend to wait for things to happen and then deal with the consequences afterwards, despite being able to afford what’s needed to address it now. We just don’t act proactively. To some extent, that’s the nature of our global economic structures as well. The economic structures respond to value in real time, and those same rules for creating long term visions of entrepreneurial change are unfortunately the same rules that applied to long term visions of environmental mitigation. So understanding that, what can we do to break down the problem and solve it once and for all?

I personally believe there are several different classes of mitigation work that can be done. The first is assuming that the consequences of the changes we’re undergoing now are going to happen. If we were going to address climate change, we should have started acting 50 years ago when it became obvious, because it’s too big of a needle to move now. The question that needs more urgent attention is what happens to coastal regions in deprived areas? What do we do for those communities? What are the risks of micro weather pattern changes that are emerging? Whether it’s more hurricanes, greater heat domes, etc, what does that do for agriculture? What does that do for the availability of fresh water? 

The most vulnerable will be the most affected, so coastal regions in emerging nations whose economies and infrastructure are less organised will suffer the most. So what can we do to get ahead of solving that problem? With a focussed enough set of challenges, there can be economic solutions to address them. They have to be economically viable solutions in order for us to help our fellow human beings. The end to end system will not mobilise unless people are making money off it, which sounds a little brutal, but evidence has shown that it tends to be the norm. We can provide humanitarian aid on a momentary basis for extreme isolated events because it’s part of our nature to try and help, but that nature becomes increasingly subject to economic pressure, and that’s the reality of humanity. 

That first class of problems is focussed on how we can help those who are affected by the changes that are emerging. The second class is how to mitigate the effects of it on this generation. The third class is, assuming those changes are coming, what can we do to truly turn that around by the 22nd century? The solution is to build space infrastructure which allows us to access the energy and material resources of the inner solar system. We can harvest it by building heavy industrial energy generating infrastructure in space, outside of Earth’s atmosphere. If we can do that in space and bring it down to Earth, we can provide clean, safe energy for our planet without generating heat. It’ll take at least two generations to mature that into an operating infrastructure, but I do believe that by staging economically viable revenue generating milestones from today to the end of the century, we have everything going for us to build these architectures in space. 

Transitioning many of our polluting technologies and industrial processes off the surface of the Earth will protect our local environments. If we build a beautiful cottage in a meadow, the last thing you want to do is put a chemical plant next to it. That’s what we’re doing on our planet though. We have an oasis in the universe, this perfect ball that has allowed life to flourish. Earth is the centre of the Anthropocene universe, and we need to do everything we can to care for it and look after it. 

The challenge is that we need a firm sense of reality on what is happening today. What can we really do about it? What are the changes we’re prepared to accept and tolerate? And what’s the big picture that we really have to focus on? Whilst those changes happen? There are going to be trillions of dollars of economic disruption in the next decades. There will be a lot of suffering, but there will also be a lot of opportunities to help and solve those problems. If we think ahead on those smaller scale problems like ‘how we can help the local communities that are going to be affected?’ There are addressable solutions for that class of problem. Questions like ‘how do we help the next generation or two of families and communities that are going to be in trouble?’ is where we should place our focus, as well as trying to solve the big picture terrestrially and addressing the big solution system. 

To hear more about Jim’s work in the space sector, tune into 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.     

The Satellite & NewSpace industry is constantly evolving. On Episode 21 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast we sat down with Lindsey Kemp, who is the Director of Global Markets at Communications & Power Industries (CPI), to discuss her perspectives on these evolutions. Lindsey has been in the SATCOM industry for 15 years, and is currently responsible for global business development of CPI’s antenna and power electronics unit, which plays a key role in shaping innovation and exploring future technologies for the company. Read on to find out what she had to say. 

The satellite space industry has been continuously evolving evidence creation. How is the ground sat market adapting to those new pressures? 

We’re doing some new developments in terms of both amplifiers and antenna systems. It’s critical that we develop the design for manufacturing in a repeatable way, because we have to meet really aggressive timelines at the factory. We’re currently seeing some of these new product launches being very successful. It’s hard, because while we’re incorporating those manufacturing improvements, there are a lot of new things that we didn’t have to accommodate before, but we’re going to have to accommodate for now. It’s to our benefit that we have so much experience, both in terms of where we started and how we’ve been evolving along the way, because that’s prepared us for these complicated considerations and higher volume demands. 

Where do you think some of these developments could have come from?

We’ve been bringing people in from other industries. We have a new operations manager who is from the automobile industry – there’s quite a few people that we have brought in from there. That’s critical because we need to challenge what we’ve been traditionally used to, and be open to new things that we never thought could potentially be possible to get out of our comfort zone. Bringing things in from outside of industry, such as people who have experienced business elsewhere, is going to bring a totally different perspective to our company. What we’re doing is trying to push everything forward. 

What is the biggest development that we still need to successfully cater to new NDSI platforms?

There’s a lot of offerings at K band for LEO and MEO trackers and amplifiers. The ground infrastructure is there already. I think the big one in the future is going to be supporting the V band. There are some challenges that we need to face, but the great thing is that our company is building both travelling wave tube amplifiers and solid state amplifiers. We have the ability to be agnostic when we go into these situations and see that this one makes sense for this application. One of the big drivers for that scalability is the need for solid state amplifiers to support those deployments. That’s something that is going to be really important for us to stay on top of and make sure that we’re looking to the future to be able to support that when that’s ready, because that’s a whole new ballgame in terms of that technology.

To learn more about evolving technology in the industry, tune into 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.