Each year’s SATELLITE show contains a moment of major importance to me.   It takes place in one of the meeting rooms at the Convention Center on Wednesday morning.  That’s the morning after the Gala, which has been lighting up opening night at this show for 26 years.  The morning after the night of meeting-and-greeting, drinking-and-eating, more drinking-and-eating and meeting-and-greeting until way too late.  Especially with our new After-Party this year. 

The next morning, at 7:30 sharp, SSPI holds its Chapter Leaders breakfast.  We bring together leaders of our chapters from around the world and members of our international Board.  I have to tell you, it is one rugged morning.  Waking up is hard, shuffling to the Convention Center is hard, and doing more meeting-and-greeting is hard.   

But somewhere after the eggs, bacon and first cup of coffee, magic happens.  It happens every year.  We hear from volunteer leaders of chapters in New York, Washington, Sao Paulo, Atlanta, London, Los Angeles, The Hague, Lagos and Tokyo.  We hear from one of the educational groups that SSPI partners with.  (This year, it is the Challenger Centers for Space Science Education, which excites middle-school students about science and math with simulated space missions.)  The chapter leaders talk about what worked and what didn’t at the local level in the past year.   

And we get inspired.  Members of the Board come to the breakfast bleary-eyed and exit smiling and walking tall.  Chapter leaders leave knowing that they are not alone in their cities and regions but are part of something bigger that labors to expand our industry and attract the best and brightest to work in it.  Inspiration is something you can’t post to the P&L or boast about to the shareholders.  But it is one of the things we do at SSPI, and it is by no means the least valuable.  

See you at SATELLITE.

I live in fear of running out of things.  Ask my wife: I’m the guy who leaves a quarter-inch (that’s 6mm to the rest of the world) in the bottom of the bottle I put back in the refrigerator.  I’m not aware of being concerned but something about pouring out the last of anything bothers me.

And let’s face it, we run out of stuff.  We keep thinking we’re running out of oil or minerals or water – but we do manage to keep finding more, because we get better at looking.  When our body’s ability to heal itself gets exhausted, we become old and ill and start shuffling off this mortal coil.  But then, we are getting better every decade at putting off that day.  

Maybe it’s not such a big problem after all.  I know of at least one natural resource that will never run out.  Innovation.  It is a natural product because it is sparked in the human brain and enabled by the courage of the human heart.   It is as natural to us, in fact, as breathing.  

At this year’s Gala, we will celebrate the innovation of an amazing industry.  But I am not talking about the past.  Sure, we have fifty years of achievements to be proud of, but the industry’s best days lie ahead.  We were cool back in the Space Age when no competing technology could hold a candle to us – and we will be just as cool tomorrow after going mano a mano with Google, Twitter and Pinterest.  

We are at the beginning of a season of breaking through expectations, known limits and established business models.  We will see satellites being designed and launched at many times today’s pace, and we will repair and refuel spacecraft in orbit.  We will see a wave of entrepreneurship rising up to exploit cheaper access to space. We will witness satellites providing hundreds of gigabits of transmission capacity.  We may even be able to stop fighting so hard to keep our spectrum, because our applications will no longer be considered minor niches in a mobile world.

 Challenging?  Certainly.  Frightening?  You bet – even more than pouring out the last of something into a glass or bowl.  But when the wave of innovation starts, it is hard to stop. Breaking through is the way to a brighter tomorrow. 

In October, SpaceX hit a major milestone by sending its Dragon reusable module aboard a Falcon 9 rocket to re-supply the International Space Station.  It was the first cargo-carrying launch under a US$1.6 billion, 12-launch contract with NASA to keep ISS supplied at a lower cost than other alternatives.  

Aside from the fact that Dragon succeeded in its basic mission of getting stuff to ISS, the launch was notable for two things.  One of the nine engines failed, losing internal pressure and imploding under the external pressure of Max Q.  With 8 working engines, however, Falcon was able to burn longer and achieve its primary mission of orbital rendezvous with ISS anyway.  That’s an impressive vindication for these first-time rocket scientists.  

But SpaceX was not able to achieve its secondary mission, which was to place Orbcomm’s OG2 prototype satellite into a high elliptical orbit, where it would be the first of an 18-satellite constellation providing global machine-to-machine communications.  The satellite was deployed but the engine failure forced SpaceX to make a choice between reaching ISS safely and putting that satellite where it was supposed to be.  The primary mission came first, and OG2 was deployed into an orbit that was lower than intended.  On October 22, it fell to Earth and was declared a total loss.      

Coming Back Strong  

Failure and resilience – those are the two notable things. Launch companies have failures.  The biggest and most successful of them, Arianespace, experienced failures with each new generation of launcher it introduced.  CEO Jean-Yves Le Gall was inducted in SSPI’s Hall of Fame in large part for his role in bringing the company back from a series of early Ariane 5 launch failures, after which it achieved a record 40 successful launches over the next five years.   

It takes more than rocket science to win in this business. For SpaceX, this is the moment to demonstrate that it can have its technology break, assess the damage, make good to its customers and come back stronger than ever.   

What It Takes to Succeed  

A similar moment awaits us on November 13.  That is the evening, at the Future Leaders Dinner, when SSPI presents its Promise and Mentor Awards to deserving under 35’s and a veteran mentor of young talent.   

The Awards are usually a playground for the "hard” side of our business.  Since we began presenting the Awards in 2006, two-third of honorees have been engineers, program managers or real live rocket scientists.  This year, we honor Nicole Robinson of SES Government Solutions and Karen Yasumura of Intelsat General for their communications skills in helping the US government to become a smarter buyer of satellite capacity.  Our sole engineer, Brian Mengwasser, made his mark by contributing in essential ways to SES’s communications with its customers over the Galaxy 15 crisis.  And our Mentor of the Year may be an operations guy, but Richard Wolf of ABC is known throughout the business as the ultimate people person, who truly believes that relationships are the core of our industry.  

Failure and resilience.  On November 13, we will be celebrating the lessons that our young Promise Award winners and our Mentor of the Year can teach us about what it really takes to succeed. 

On July 11, British billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson announced that his company, Virgin Galactic, will develop a rocket to launch small satellites.  It was the sensation of the Farnborough International Air Show.  "I believe this new vehicle will create a long overdue shake-up of the entire satellite industry," Branson modestly predicted.  

Virgin Galactic said that it already had deposits for four launches of LauncherOne, as the rocket is imaginatively named, beginning in 2016.  LauncherOne will ride up to 50,000 feet (15,000 meters) aboard a carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, then blast off from there to low Earth orbit.   

Unfortunately, Mr. Branson's forecast of a shake-up is about 20 years too late.  Orbital Sciences has been launching small satellites in exactly the same way aboard its Pegasus rocket since 1990.  To date, Pegasus has had 40 launches, 35 of them successful, of Orbital's own satellites as well as dozens of scientific, government and military spacecraft.  The most recent was in June 2012, when Pegasus placed the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array into orbit for NASA.   

This news story left me shaking my head.  Not at Mr. Branson, whose bravado is part of a successful and truly visionary approach to business.  Not at all the journalists who, apparently, ran the story without doing a 2-minute Google search to see if LauncherOne really was news.  

No, I shook my head at us.  The satellite industry.  All the bright, energetic, innovative people who get technology to do near-impossible things every day.  Pegasus – which has a way better name than LauncherOne, by the way – is one of a hundred examples of mind-bending technical innovation by our business.  But hardly anybody knows: not business and technology journalists, not investors, not citizens, and not the policymakers who routinely forget that satellite exists when considering the network needs of the world.  And certainly not all the IT and telecom decision-makers who are not yet our customers and could not imagine using satellite, no, not in a million years.  

Why don't they know?  Because we don't tell them.  We tell each other, and we tell the customers we already have.  But beyond that, a Cone of Silence seems to cover our industry.     

And for a long time, that made good sense.  Why bother spreading the word when video is just about distributing TV signals?  When data is about point-of-sale and only telephone companies handled voice?  The customer segment was clear and finite.   

But today – as the Internet/social/mobile revolution rolls onward – video data and voice have become part of everything at almost unimaginable speed.  Which gives our industry a shot at being part of everything as well – if our ambitions are big enough.   

Having started with one legendary Brit, I will finish with words from another.  "The fault, dear Brutus," wrote William Shakespeare 400 years ago, "is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

How crazy do you have to be to think that, one day, "sunsats” in GEO orbit will transform sunlight into electricity and beam it as microwaves to our planet's surface, providing a source of unlimited power that does not contribute to climate change?   

If "pretty crazy” is your answer, congratulations, you are in the majority.     

As for me, I am happily in the minority.  Not that I am qualified to have an engineering or economic opinion on the viability of sunsats.  But calling a new space application idea "crazy" is a little like calling a cheetah "spotted."  It may be true but it is not very informative.  For every space-based application delivering value today, whether as profit or social good, there were perfectly respectable reasons to call it crazy at some point in time.  

Rockets?  Ridiculous.  Space stations in GEO orbit beaming communications to the world?  Absurd.  Broadband via satellite?  Give me a break.  Affordable, inexhaustible power from infrastructure in orbit?  Laughable.  But then, if you go down the list of our Industry Innovators since 1993, you will find plenty of ideas that probably gave somebody a good laugh, until unreasonable people decided to make them happen.   

The English author and playwright George Bernard Shaw put it best: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."  

So it is my pleasure to introduce you to an unreasonable man.  He is Don Flournoy, a professor of telecommunications at the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, USA. A former member of our Board and founding editor of the Online Journal of Space Communications,  Don has made up his mind that space solar power is an ambitious but feasible development.  And he believes that it presents the satellite industry with one of those disruptive innovation moments: to develop the technology ourselves or watch somebody else walk away with the opportunity.   

The unknown Haloid Photographic Company became Xerox because it figured out how to market a printing technology that used dry toner and heat, first in copiers and then in laser printers.  It should have been pioneered by the printing technology companies of the day, who worked wonders with wet inks and printing plates.  But they never took it seriously.  

Don has written a book, Space Solar Power, published this year by Springer Media.  He is organizing an international academic Sunsat Design Competition to help visualize the engineering, financial, regulatory and competitive challenges. And he wants the space and satellite industry to help him develop a multi-nation mission by 2020 that will use the International Space Station to test atmospheric transmission of millimeter wave frequency windows for beamed power delivery.   

I would like more of my colleagues – particularly those of an age to be considered for our Promise Award in November – to read Don's book and discuss his ideas.  Poke holes in them.  Challenge the assumptions.  Number the obstacles and wring hands over the investment required.  But don't ignore the topic.  

Inside the engineering, behind the business plans and under the operations, our industry has always been built on a gossamer foundation called inspiration.  When enough unreasonable people develop it, there is little that can get in their way.  Crazy?  Sure.  But what difference does that make?