Welcome – Downlink Issue 2

Thinking About Satellites Can Make You Feel Young Again (A Case Study)

The SATELLITE show team typically spends the first half of each summer getting as much of the busywork done so that we can spend as much of the second half of each summer as we can reading the hundreds of proposals that come in for SATELLITE speaking opportunities. Throughout the process of conquering my summer SATELLITE reading, I noticed that a majority of the topic proposals seemed strangely familiar to me, to the extent that I was getting a strange sense of nostalgia for my early career as a journalist in Philadelphia.

Some of you might remember me as an associate editor of Via Satellite, covering daily aerospace industry news since 2008 under the expert watch of Mark Holmes and Jason Bates. Before that, I was a web editor for a Philadelphia urban planning magazine (now called Next City), researching the impact of sprawl and LEED building design and employment migration on the modern-day economy. I know what you’re thinking – how on Earth did I get into space? These two worlds actually do connect in many ways. For example, the last feature story I worked on before coming to Via Satellite was about the digital divide and how access to broadband Internet service could revive rural economies. Satellites were a major part of that discussion, and we’re still having that very same discussion today in various underserved regions around the world.

There’s one thing about my pre-space industry career that I keep thinking about these days – that the urban planners and architects I interviewed back then would have killed for the capabilities and applications that modern satellites provide. Remote sensing and imagery would have been a game changer in studying why young professionals were leaving cities like Pittsburgh in droves (as well as why they ended up coming back in the early 2010s). The Internet-of-Things would have been a fantastic tool to map out how tech-savvy professionals were exploring their environments, or how commuters react to new traffic patterns. If the cost to launch a small satellite back in 2007 had been as low as it is today, the city of Las Vegas would have certainly invested in a spacecraft that could have helped it solve its water supply crisis.

In the commercial satellite industry, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about pieces of hardware orbiting the Earth in space. We’ve talked about building them and launching them. We’ve talked about their beams hitting large and small segments of the Earth. What excites me about my new gig at SATELLITE is that I get to bring a bunch of very talented executives, engineers, innovators and investors together for a discussion about what satellites do for society – the applications. Satellite executives are getting to know their individual end-users beyond their roof-mounted DTH dish or ISP and are starting to think like investors of innovation. I truly believe that we’re all on the verge of a major, positive change for everyone involved in the industry. The SATELLITE show is a time for all of us to come together and figure out how to lead the way through a time of change, instead of reacting to what other industries are doing.

I hope you’re all excited as I am to be a part of it all this March in Washington D.C.