I had the pleasure of moderating a discussion at a recent Northeast Chapter meeting with Max Haot, co-founder and CEO of Livestream.  This innovative business is becoming the YouTube of live video, carrying over 40 million feeds a month, mostly for consumers but with a growing and profitable professional services business.  And guess what: when video transport needs to be bulletproof rather than "best effort,” Livestream turns to satellite.  He recognized that evening that he is one of us.   

Max is one very bright guy, but rockets?  Not so much.  And sitting in the audience were people in sales, people in marketing, people in operations and management, capacity planning and personnel, public relations and customer service.  In my role as executive director of SSPI, I have been privileged to meet brilliant rocket scientists, software engineers and spacecraft designers, but the array of talent required by this business is breathtakingly broad.  

That’s what we found out in 2009, when we published our first Workforce Report.  Nearly 400 satellite professionals responded to our survey, and they produced a breakdown of occupations in our industry shown below.

You can get even deeper insight from the career guide we published called Liftoff: Careers in Satellite, the World’s First and Most Successful Space Industry.  Written for young people and educators, it is available from Amazon.com in print and Kindle editions.   

So the next time a colleague says "I’m not rocket scientist, but…,” you can assure him or her that it’s perfectly all right.  Most of us aren’t, either.

We are now seeing a blossoming of new thinking and new doing.  Farthest advanced is SpaceX, with its Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 medium-class launchers and launch manifest of nearly 50 government and commercial missions worth US$4 billion.  SpaceX has a highly ambitious goal: putting payload into GEO insertion orbit for one-tenth of the current cost.  The company is working toward a 2013 demonstration flight of Falcon Heavy, for which it will strap together 3 Falcon 9 first-stage cores to create a heavy-lift vehicle.   

Last year, Richard Branson announced that Virgin Galactic would begin lofting small satellites in 2016 aboard LauncherOne, which rides into the upper atmosphere aboard a Burt Rutan-designed plane before rocketing higher.   It would have been bigger news if Orbital Sciences had not been doing the same thing with its Pegasus booster since 1990.  

Speaking of Orbital, it is now in negotiations with Stratolaunch over development of a massive new air-launched rocket, according to SpaceNews.  Stratolaunch announced in 2011 that it would develop a new launch system consisting of a twin-fuselage mothership and rocket, for which SpaceX was the original contractor.      

We will ignore space elevators and other Larry Lightbulb concepts that have yet to see daylight.  Even without them, the business of launch seems destined for major change over coming decades.  The question is what shape the new industry will take.   

I read a lot of history, which teaches three reassuring lessons.   First, even radical change tends to happen slowly, because of natural human resistance to it.  Second, the surest way to be wrong about the future is to extrapolate in a straight line from today’s trends. And third, things have always and forever been the same horrible mess they are now, with the occasional exception to brighten our lives.   

If I had to guess, I would predict that the launch business will evolve into an increasingly tiered model, in which customers will be able to make more trade-offs involving vehicle, schedule and cost to meet their business plans.  Heavy-lift vehicles with strong track records will be able to command premium prices, while customers with different needs will have a broader range of other choices.  This has been the technology evolution story of the past few decades: not either-or but both-and.  And it is good news for the established players from Arianespace to ILS, who will have time to evolve their businesses in response to market demand.   

However things evolve, price pressure will rise, and launch companies charging higher prices will find ways to bring the price-per-kilogram down in response.  The customer will win, and the overall satellite business will enjoy the volume growth that lower costs promote.  It’s going to be a wild ride but to a desirable destination. 

For more on Launch Service challenges, read the interview in this month's Orbiter with Kjell Karlsen, President of Sea Launch AG. 

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.

A month ago, we began asking SSPI members – online, by email, by phone and in conversation – which developments of the past few years signal a breakthrough, with the potential to transform our industry in the next decade.     

Bandwidth, as you might imagine, is high on the list.  "With satellite services today, you have to work hard to deliver what you promise with limited bandwidth.  Now imagine that you have lots and lots of bandwidth to make customers happy.  You are no longer trying to squeeze high performance out of a small amount of resource, and you are suddenly in a whole new world.”  That, in a nutshell, is the promise of high-throughput technologies from Ka-band GEO to 03B MEO and Intelsat’s EPIC.  Not to mention the leading-edge modems that are driving higher throughput in conventional bands.  As our colleagues and competitors in the fiber business can tell us, a plunge in the cost per bit transmitted can have almost unimaginable consequences.   

Getting satellites to GEO is also changing.  "All-electric propulsion is going to extend the life of satellites and let us put smaller, cheaper spacecraft into orbit that deliver the same punch as today’s bigger birds,” said one senior executive.  He was talking about new satellite designs that Boeing and Space Systems/Loral are building for customers, in which electric thrusters will not only do station-keeping but also initial orbit-raising maneuvers, with 10 times the efficiency of chemical thrusters.  Combine that with lower-cost launch services – if SpaceX continues its successful run – and the fundamental economics of the business could shift in seismic ways.   

A more subtle but compelling breakthrough is taking place in the minds of customers.  Back when the cancellation of the US TSAT program led then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to dismiss the "Battlestar Gallactica” approach to military satellites, hosted payloads seemed a new and strange thing in government circles.  But as a US Army colonel now says, "why would we concentrate the risks of a program in 2 or 3 massive, expensive satellites that are also massive targets?  How about spreading out our assets as payloads in 50 or more orbital slots?  Isn’t that ultimately more robust and survivable?”   

In a time of military downsizing, the hosted payload concept is really taking off.  A story in Satellite Today reports on a startup that is even applying it to weather satellites.  Like military birds, the world’s weather satellites have always been purpose-built spacecraft lofted for no other purpose than scanning Earth’s skies.  But GeoMetWatch is deploying meteorological payloads on GEO communications satellites as a cheaper, faster way to meet the world’s need for weather information.   Think of a city of tall buildings compared with a suburb of single-family homes.  They may occupy the same number of square kilometers but the city makes much more intensive use of them.  With the help of our customers, we are finding that the limited real estate of the orbital arc can have much greater capacity than we ever imagined. 

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. 

The satellite industry tends to be slow to change.  That’s a good thing – when your core business is building, launching and flying a really expensive asset to an inaccessible place where it has to work reliably for 10-15 years.  "Failing fast” may be great in Silicon Valley but not so desirable in GEO orbit.        

Yet the times they are a’changing, a whole lot faster than they used to.  Just look at the financial deals announced in 2012.  DigitalGlobe purchased GeoEye, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates acquired Space Systems/Loral, and Cobham bought Thrane & Thrane – not to mention Intelsat’s announcement of an initial public offering.   

More profound for the industry’s future have been breakthroughs in bandwidth.  This year saw the full-scale commercial roll-out of Ka-band in multiple regions, Intelsat’s announcement of its EPIC high-throughput satellites, and battles among modem manufacturers to jam ever more megabits through transponders.  It puts one in mind of the automobile before Henry Ford created the modern assembly line.  Cars were for the "carriage trade,” as it was still called in the waning days of horse-drawn transport.  Then Ford’s manufacturing genius made the automobile affordable for working people.  Volume exploded.  The same thing happened with computers, mobile phones, long-distance rates and just about every other technology that was very expensive until we found ways to scale it up for mass consumption.     

We’ve done extraordinarily well with a carriage-trade model of satellite communications.  The next chapter of our story, however, will be about doing even better from applications that deliver the unique value of satellite at a much lower price per user.   

And that is why ‘Breaking Through’ will be the theme of SSPI’s annual Gala in 2013.      

Today’s business is the enemy of tomorrow’s.  Those wise words come from the late Peter Drucker, probably the most famous management consultant in history.  Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, makes the same point.  Excellence in serving today’s customer is great – it is how we stay in business today.  But it is also a barrier to developing the service and products that will serve tomorrow’s customers, who will probably want very different things than today’s end users.   

It takes a lot of ingenuity, determination and courage to break through that barrier – to conceive tomorrow’s opportunities and seize them without destroying today’s business.  And, whether we know it or not, those are the challenges that our industry has signed up for.    On the evening of March 19, at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington DC, more than a thousand of us will celebrate our early victories and embrace the bigger challenges ahead, at Gala 2013. 

We are grateful to Intelsat for once again stepping up to be our Gala Theme Sponsor, and I look forward to joining them in welcoming you there.   

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. 

Specifically the Maritime Center preserves the legacy of the Chatham Radio WCC Operations Building.  It was built and run by Marconi’s company before it was rolled up by a fledgling venture called the Radio Corporation of America.  Yes, that one: RCA.   

Before there were Inmarsat, Thuraya and Iridium satellites in the sky, this was the satellite ground segment that really counted.  From 1914, when it was completed, until it was decommissioned in the 1990s, WCC Chatham provided short-wave links to ships across all of the seven seas, thanks to the unique properties of short-wave radio.   Communications was by code, originally Morse and then higher-order coding that could pack more information into the binary pattern of long-short or off-on transmission.  The station operated 24x7 and, in its heyday, transmitted thousands of messages a week.  It doubtless saved thousands of lives as well.   

I spent time with a retired coding technician who showed me how the last generation of these mechanical systems encoded a message into a paper tape, which was then run through a reader at high speed.   For this demo, the encoder drove a printer, which produced the "Mariconigram” you see here.  

So, why am I writing about a short-wave radio station to an audience of satellite professionals?  Three reasons.  The first is sentimental.  SSPI’s first big undertaking was to produce a Celebration of 30 Years of Satellites in Space, just two years after our founding, to mark the third decade since the 1957 launch of Sputnik.  That celebration began the tradition of the SSPI Gala Dinner, which we will hold for the 26th time on the March 19 in Washington DC.  And the keynote speaker at the Celebration was none other than Elettra Marconi, daughter of the famous inventor.

The second reason is more practical.  We may be transmitting to and from space these days, using digital technologies and advanced coding schemes unimaginable to the operators at WCC Chatham.  But we are still relying on the fundamental miracle that Marconi wrought: making radio waves spring from a piece of metal.  Seeing that ingenious mechanical encoder with its electric motor, belts and precision metal parts flying was to gain a profound glimpse into the depth and height and pace of innovation.   

And lastly, it is because this particular innovator, Marconi, is well worth remembering – especially in this industry, where we must continually break through yesterday’s impossibilities to achieve a bright future.      

 Born to a wealthy Italian family in 1874, Marconi was only 21 when he succeeded in sending the first wireless signals over a distance of a mile and a half.  By age 28, he had patented his invention, founded what became the Marconi Company in the UK and proved that radio signals could cross the Atlantic.  Before he died, he had developed the first microwave technology, created a practical demonstration of radar and won the Nobel Prize for Physics.  He was also a canny businessman who made great boatloads of money while utterly transforming the world.  He may never have launched a rocket or flown a satellite, but Marconi was the father of all that we do, and an example of all that we hope. 

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."

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? 

For SSPI, SEDS is a natural channel to young people who have already shown an interest in space.  Partnership with SEDS gives us a chance to tell them the good news: that space is about more than manned missions to Mars – it is an industry in which they can hope to start a career.  All they have to do is lower their gaze a few degrees to that part of space within the circle of GEO orbit.  

Last year, we helped sponsor the annual SEDS Spacevision conference at the University of Boulder in the US state of Colorado.  We expect to sponsor the 2012 event as well, thanks to the generosity of donors to the Dean Olmstead Educational Fund.  But our main focus is on devising a SEDS Challenge.  This is a competition for members to achieve some compelling goal.  In 2011, there was a SEDS Challenge on High-Powered Rocketry.  The goal was to design, construct, and launch a high-powered rocket carrying a 4 kilogram payload to a height of 3050 meters (10,000 feet) above ground level, as measured by a standard altimeter.  Rockets are cool, and lots of SEDS Chapters formed project teams to join the competition.  The winning team received a small cash grant and the pleasure of being envied by their peers.   

What should SSPI's SEDS Challenge be about?  We want it to really rock, so that students will line up to take part.    We want to spread the good news that young people thinking about space should be thinking about satellites.  

So, we need your ideas.  What would make a good competition that is within the reach of ingenious students?  It could be about business as well as technology, finance as well as engineering.  SSPI members have already stepped forward to advise us but we need more.  Like the industry we serve, we need the best and brightest to join the cause of bringing the world's talent to our door.  

To contribute an idea or volunteer to join our advisers, send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn. 

• For Men: business suit, dress shirt and tie
• For Women: Suit, business-style dress, dress with jacket or cocktail dress. 
• For US Military Personnel: Service Dress Uniform

• For Men: business suit, dress shirt and tie
• For Women: Suit, business-style dress, dress with jacket or cocktail dress. 
• For US Military Personnel: Service Dress Uniform