I’m one of those unfortunate American males with just about zero interest in sports.  Yes, I know, I know.  Weirdo!  Wacko!  Zombie-lover!    Hey, I am happy to play games but watching them live or on TV?  I just don’t get it.  Give me a good zombie movie anytime (if there is such a thing). 

But there is one sports term that I have come to treasure.  It is "inside baseball.”  The term describes those subtle, technical matters about the Great American Pastime that insiders appreciate but are invisible to the rest of us.  No doubt there is are equivalents in other sports, and some of the millions of people glued to their TV sets for the World Cup were practicing "inside football.” 

Whatever the sport, I like the term because it tell us about human nature.  When you’re inside, you’re in the know.  You’re cool.  You’re a player.  But when you’re outside, you’re a schmuck.   

We in the satellite industry, like the inhabitants of most technology-driven businesses, do the "inside baseball” thing all the time.  We use the jargon, we glory in our savvy, and we exploit our specialized knowledge to dazzle the unwashed.  It’s harmless – until we want to attract some of those unwashed to our business. 

In general, I think our business needs to get a lot better at explaining itself to the business press, the technology press and the general public.  If you read most journalists covering our business, it’s pretty woeful.  They get one or two ideas but typically miss what’s most amazing about the global satellite network, which its ability to connect anywhere at increasingly competitive costs, and to exploit the power of one-to-many broadcasting.  They don’t get the picture about how utterly our technology has shaped the world we live in.  Which means that the consumers of their journalistic product don’t get it, either.  Whether they are investors, potential customers – or the next generation of satellite professional.

I am thinking about this as I edit SSPI’s next big project, a "book” titled Liftoff: Careers in Satellite, the World’s First and Most Successful Space Industry.  Believe it or not, no such document seems to exist.  I put "book” in quotes because we will release it simultaneously as a Web portal and in print form, and we fully expect the Web to be the vehicle of choice for our target market.  Satellite marketer and writer Dan Freyer did the research and wrote the first draft.  I am editing it and working with our online team here to move it online.  Liftoff will debut on October 12, the night of the Future Leaders Dinner in New York City and the opening night of the SATCON conference and exhibition. 

As I edit it, I am doing my best to steer clear of "inside baseball” and ensure that anybody interested in a challenging career in a tech-based business can understand just how amazing our business is.  Because if the fans in the stands can’t figure out what’s going on, they may blow their vuvuzelas, but they’re not likely to come back again. 

I hope you will join me in New York City on October 12 for an exercise in predicting the future.  Now, I know, famed New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra did say that "making predictions is dangerous, especially about the future."  But I believe this is a reasonably sure bet.

On that night, which precedes the opening of the SATCON, HD World and 3D World shows at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, three young men and women will receive a Promise Award from SSPI.  Each will be under the age of 35.  Each will have been nominated by an employer, a customer or a colleague for demonstrating initiative, innovation, creativity and problem-solving ability – in short, for showing promise to become a future leader of our business. 

We will also honor an industry veteran who has given his or her time and talent to helping those young people succeed.   With our Mentor Awards, we celebrate the fundamental principle that has kept this business strong over half a century: that each generation hands down to the next the knowledge and skills necessary for success.

October may seem far away right now – but we are opening nominations for the Promise and Mentor Awards this week.  I encourage you to consider who you might nominate for either one.

This will be our fifth year for the Awards and the Future Leaders Dinner at which they are presented.  In our half decade, we have identified and honored some extraordinary talent.  Like Dr. Max Kamenetsky, who as Senior Systems Engineer at Space Systems/Loral has already made major contributions to the success of the Terrestar satellite.  Or Rob Scheige, who went from studying psychology in college to becoming what his boss called a "consummate broker" at Willis Inspace.  Or Hayley McGuire, who served as Chief of Staff to the president of Boeing Satellite Systems International  and, according to him, basically ran the division day-to-day while he was on the road.  Or Arnie Christensen, Operations Manager for CNN Satellites & Transmission, who took the newscaster into digital newsgathering via laptop and broadband connection.    I could go on and on, and you can read about them all on our site.

So, how are we doing at predicting the future?  Have the Promise Award winners fulfilled their promise?  It's not fair to ask, after the few short years since they received their awards.  But I think the question is moot. Given what they have already accomplished – and how it has brought them to the notice of their employers and their industry – it's just a matter of time. 

My thanks to the companies that have once again stepped forward to make possible the Future Leaders Dinner and our Award program: Arianespace, Ericsson, Intelsat, Space Systems/Loral, SpaceX , PaulHastings and SpaceIsle.  My thanks also to the member of the Awards Committee, who contribute their time to making these difficult choices.  And my thanks most of all to you, for the nomination you will soon be sending my way.

Is the satellite business old and grey?  Is it all-male?  In an age of mobile broadband, iPhone apps, Twitter and Facebook, are we hopelessly behind or still in the vanguard of change?

At the end of last year, SSPI published the first-ever profile of the satellite industry workforce.  The Satellite Industry Workforce 2009 was based on a survey of our 3,000-plus members around the world.  It turned up facts and trends that took some of us by surprise. 

Seventy percent of SSPI members work on the "sell” side.  Nearly half of those work for satellite carriers, while the other big categories are satellite manufacturing, hardware and software companies, and legal, financial and consulting organizations.  But nearly one-third of our membership work on the "buy” side who use satellite services every day.  Over one-third of them work in media & entertainment, 16% for government and military and 13% each for enterprises or terrestrial carriers.   

And yes, most of them are men.  Overall, men make up 83% of the industry and the roughly 80/20 ratio between men and women remains constant across age groupings.  As stereotypes would suggest, women are most heavily represented in the customer-facing jobs of sales, marketing and customer service.  But 18% of corporate management in the industry is female and 13% of the engineering talent.  In fact, one in three women in the satellite workforce is employed in engineering or operations.   That’s a good place to be, since they make up the single biggest group by job function (42%), followed by corporate management (19%) and sales (14%). 

The big surprise was the industry’s age distribution.  Government and military aerospace programs may face the challenge of a graying workforce, but the commercial industry generally does not.  Twenty-four percent of members are between the ages of 18 and 29, and another 19% are in their thirties.  Overall, 43% of members fall between the ages of 18 and 39, and 80% of members are under the age of 54. 

In a second report on our membership, we found that one-third of members are connecting with SSPI and each other through social networks, and another 40% want to do so.  The biggest group using social networking with SSPI consists of people age 40 to 54. Thirty-four percent of members read and comment on blogs.  They tend to be somewhat younger than the average, but 43% of blog readers are 40 or older and more than 20% are age 55 or older.

That’s who a satellite professional is – at least today.  Things change fast in this business.  To learn more, download a copy of The Satellite Industry Workforce 2009. 

Sixty-six satellites in low Earth orbit, a mere 10,000 customers worldwide, a $5 billion bankruptcy and a large and worthless pile of satellite phones.  In March 2000, that appeared to be the legacy of Iridium, one of the boldest technology bets in our industry’s history and winner of a 1998 Industry Innovator Award from SSPI.  When the company crashed and burned after successfully creating a new form of satcom, it tainted the satellite business with the investment community for years.  Not to mention shaking confidence within the business in our ability to innovate beyond decades-old business models. 

Within a year, the assets of the company were purchased by an investor group for just $25 million – less than 1% of their former value – at about the same time that DISA awarded the company a 2-year, $72 million service contract.  (Rumors abounded that the US defense and intelligence establishments had judged the company too important to fail.)  By 2006, the company was showing a profit.  In 2009, Greenhill & Co. bought it for a little over $500 million in a complex transaction that wound up creating a public company with a market cap of over $700 million.  Iridium was back on its feet and making plans for a new constellation called Iridium Next to begin launching in 2014. 

This history ran through my head recently as I read an article in Defense Systems (www.defensesystems.com) about a Joint Capability Technology Demonstration conducted by Iridium for the US DOD.  For a year, the company provided 100 phones configured for a service called Netted Iridium. It creates push-to-talk groups for soldiers in the field in which everyone could listen but only one could talk at a time.  The article quoted Igor Marchosky, technical manager for the Marine Corps’ Distributed Tactical Communications System (DTCS) program, which oversaw the test.  "The battlefield is not suited to dialing 12 digits and waiting 30-45 seconds for the routing to establish a call.  That's too long, and it requires both of us to maintain a link with a satellite to maintain the call. Also, a telephony-based system cannot scale because if every listening radio or telephone in the network is taking a channel, then the network has to scale by a factor of how many listeners are in the network."

"What we did is take telephony out of the equation," he continued, "and turn the Iridium constellation into a packet switched network in the sky.  The satellites become nothing more than broadcast devices. When the talker sends traffic to the satellite, the satellite simply broadcasts that traffic back down to the network. A subscriber to the net has only to listen to the traffic, and because all listeners are passive, that means that the architecture can now scale. The setup time for a talker to get on a channel is reduced from 30 seconds to two seconds."

The test has been so successful that plans are in place to deliver thousands more Netted Iridium phones in 2010. 

This is just one of many innovations introduced by the company in military, maritime and other markets.  But it caught my attention because Netted Iridium appears to be so much in the spirit that gave birth to the company – a spirit chastened by harsh experience but nonetheless something we all need right now.  We continue to fear that, sooner or later, the impact of the global recession will flow through our business in a serious way. Yet we are also entering a period of intense, probably disruptive innovation of the kind that can lay the foundation for impressive growth.  Changes in the pipeline range from dramatically higher-capacity satellites (Viasat and Hughes) and routers in space (Cisco) to cheaper launch vehicles (SpaceX) and accelerated turnarounds in satellite design and manufacturing.  Who knows how many will succeed?  How will existing industry leaders respond?  And if these innovations are successful, who knows how the investors will do?  Investment in fundamental infrastructure is not for the faint of heart.  Long before Iridium, the initial shareholders of the Channel Tunnel lost their shirts, as did investors in the Suez and Panama Canals. 

With innovation, you never know.  That’s why we honor the organizations that take the risks needed to move the industry forward, whether they succeed at first or not.  On March 16, SSPI will present six of them whose work is making new markets and changing the world for the better with our Industry Innovators Awards.  Look for the announcement on our Industry Innovators pages on February 10 and for your invitation to the award ceremony, sponsored by Booz & Co., just before Gala 2010 at the Gaylord National Harbor, site of SATELLITE 2010. 

The maritime satellite communications industry appears to be hot-hot-hot!  I have seen a steadily rising number of announcements coming out about new maritime services, new players entering the market, and the inevitability of growth.  Frost & Sullivan thinks it will be worth US$27bn by 2013 – up from $9bn in 2008 – including Inmarsat, Iridium, Globalstar and VSAT.  Driving it will be pressure to manage costs, and the increasing size of fleets, which have “forced ship owners to consider applications for weather, routing, monitoring, and security to gain an advantage over the competition.”

The entry into the market of smaller, lower-cost stabilized platforms for VSAT antennas has been a big factor, according to a November 2008 Via Satellite article.  It’s the age-old technology growth story – we eventually find the critical barrier to customer adoption, lower it, and finally break out of the small, early-adopter group to find broader commercial success. 

My colleague Simon Bull at Comsys told Via Satellite that “The impact of broadband VSAT services on Inmarsat and the maritime industry has been profound.  While the penetration into Inmarsat's market by VSAT operators was and remains small in terms of absolute numbers,  VSAT has effectively cream-skimmed the customer base, taking the largest and  most valuable users and dominating each of the segments it addresses.  Inmarsat is still used in the oil and gas rig and supply ship, cruise and ferry markets, but the vast majority of the traffic flows over stabilized C- and Ku- band VSAT systems.” 

Is there anybody who is not in this business yet?  Intelsat has a maritime group, SES is there, not to mention Vizada, Globecomm and the long-time market leaders Stratos Global, CapRock, Broadpoint and MTN.  New entrants and contracts are announced weekly. 

And yet…  A November 12 story in The New York Times should give us all pause.  It reports on the bankruptcy of a midsize carrier company, Eastwind Maritime, that sent a shudder through European banks, which hold over $350bn in shipping industry loans about which they are increasingly dubious.  Charter rates have plummeted due to a 25% decline in global trade during the current recession.  Global trade appears to be on the mend, but a glut of previously ordered ships due in the coming years could limit the extent of price recovery.  The bankers are increasing the amounts they set aside for loan losses and receiving financial supports from governments in regions sensitive to shipping. 

In our increasingly networked world, it seems obvious that ships at sea need to be floating offices with access to the network wherever they go.  And that is doubtless where things will end up.  But there may well be a bump or two on the road leading us there.