As an industry we are facing a growing problem: more than almost any other industry, we are focused on service delivery—providing the communications backbone for the entire human race 24/7/365, supporting every person and every economy in so many vital ways. Yet we are often so busy doing the work that we forget to take time out to reflect upon its impact upon the world.
With some mild irony, as the satellite communications industry, we are sometimes not so good at communicating.
We make the impossible look easy on a daily basis. We make amazing technical feats look commonplace. Our work is increasingly taken for granted. It’s easy to see the smart phone in your hand and to miss the vital service connection to the satellite 22,600 miles above your head.
Out of sight, out of mind. This is a problem when it comes to decision makers appreciating and understanding our role as we increasingly fight for the spectrum, the very ‘life’s blood’ of our industry, as it is under threat and more.
The Better Satellite Awards are a reflection of this, as we pause from our work to allow us to step aside for a moment to recognize those leading a new age for our industry and us all.
Their role is to highlight the importance of our work and its vital necessity for the world’s economy and more. As an industry, as we have learned, after all, if we don’t speak for ourselves then no one else will.
Also, we are the Society of Satellite Professionals International. It is only fitting that the Better Satellite World Awards find their home in London, the world’s great global city, increasingly home not only to a resurgent UK space industry, but more as the home to the largest gathering of satellite companies and interests in the world today.
From finance and insurance to spectrum and manufacturing, more satellite companies are now choosing to work from the British Space Sphere (the UK, Isle of Man, Jersey, Bermuda, Gibraltar, and Cayman) than anywhere else in the world.
London is home to the world’s satellite companies, and it is now home to the Better Satellite World Awards.
It is also only fitting that we hold this first event at the world renowned Reform Club in Pall Mall.
Most will associate the Reform with Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, and rightly so. That great novel alone would make the Reform a worthy venue. You’ve also most likely seen the Club many times without knowing it: M’s Office is currently at the Club, and it has hosted every Bond from Connery to Craig. Sherlock Holmes has even been known to smile at the camera there once or twice. As a Club it has been home to such giants of industry as Rockefeller and Carnegie, such leaders and Prime Ministers as Churchill, Lloyd George, Gladstone, and Disraeli, such revolutionaries as O’Connell and Garibaldi, and more. Again, all fun reasons to hold such a major event here surrounded by such history.
Yet there is far more to the Reform than meets the eye, an even greater reason to do the right thing and to hold the SSPI’s Better Satellite World awards there. Without the Reform Club, there would be no satellite industry. Literally, not figuratively. It is here that our very industry was born as a result of the meeting of three remarkable men one evening at the Club.
The three were Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyens of fiction today, but at the time not so much. H. G. Wells and Conan Doyle were both members of the Club, close friends, and journalists writing their ‘fantastic fiction’ together…and struggling to find a publisher. Both Wells and Doyle would write at the Club and swap manuscripts with each other for helpful editing. Indeed, Sherlock Holmes’ adventures were penned at the Club.
Jules Verne came that evening as an honored guest from his reciprocal Club in Paris, visiting the Reform for his first time as he took one of his rare voyages outside of France to visit his publisher in London. Verne was paradoxically not a great traveller and only visited the Reform Club many years after writing Around The World in 80 Days.
Lore has it that a mutual friend brought the three together,they met at the Reform, struck up a friendship, and Verne then kindly helped both Wells and Doyle to get published. We know the place in the Club where the three sat down to talk. Imagine the two young nervous writers meeting their idol and mentor…and the changes this one meeting brought to the world. Imagine if it had not happened. I shudder. Without them, there would be no satellite industry today.
Why? Many years later, when biographers and historians spoke with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Wernher Von Braun, Sergei Korolev, Robert Goddard, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and asked them, ‘Why? What was it that got you interested in satellites and rockets and space? What was it that gave you the passion to dedicate your whole lives to this endeavor? To create these new technologies?’, they ALL replied with the same answer, the exact same answer: ’Why? It was because I read the works of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle.’
Verne, Wells, and Conan Doyle were the first in the world to write about the possibility of engineering, designing and building machines to change the world. No one had ever done this before.
From rockets to satellites to the scientific method, all three spoke of a new future made better by man, made better by science, made better through the application of fantastic feats of engineering.
It was a rocket that flew to the Moon, a machine that traversed time (I forgot to mention Einstein citing all three as his inspiration too).
It was the purity and logic of the scientific method that guided them all. Just as we do today, they made the impossible possible, their work inspired those who conceived and built our industry from the literal ground up.
The impact of their writing is possible to calculate…just look to our modern world and see its gleaming towers and rockets and satellites in their work, and see our satellite industry as a shining twinkle in their eyes.
2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Verne’s From the Earth To the Moon, the 129th Anniversary of the publication of A Study in Scarlet by Conan Doyle, and the 120th anniversary of the publication of Wells’ Time Machine.
So, beginnings are rare and there really is something in a time and a place…which is why we’re at the Reform Club in London on the evening of December 4th, 2015 for the first Better Satellite World Awards. A great time and place, so why don’t you join us?