How have your diverse leadership roles at SES, Ursa Space, Comtech, and DataPath shaped your approach to guiding companies like Ubotica?
Across my leadership experience in companies involved in delivering SATCOM services, geospatial insights, and ground systems/hardware one thing has been universally true – success is found when the business orients itself around the customer. All too often we are tempted to shine the light on the specific product, service or widget we’re offering and can take our eye off of what actually matters to the end user. What is the problem they’re trying to solve? What is the mission they need help in supporting? When you place the customer and their needs in the center, and tailor your capability to meeting that need, both sides experience greater growth and success. For Ubotica, it’s less about the new tech and features, and more about what those capabilities enable: near real time access to critical insights and answers to those in the business of making rapid critical decisions.
What excites you the most about working in the space and AI industries?
The most fulfilling aspect of working in satellite and space is the sheer fact that it touches everything in our lives in one way or another, and as a career path, there is also a place for every discipline. The same can be said for AI and the incredible developments we’ve seen in recent years. When applied to the space community, AI can help us to increase innovation, reduce costs, improve orchestration across space-based assets, and mitigate major space concerns such as space debris.
When applied to the Ubotica value proposition, we see the clear value AI injects in terms of the ability to rapidly analyze data, deliver near real time insights and empower customers to make quick decisions.
What drew you to Ubotica, and what do you hope to achieve as part of the advisory board?
What excites me most about Ubotica is the potential they have to deliver real impact. By real impact, I mean on the things that matter most – improving and saving lives. It’s not just a tagline, it is the reality their technology is poised to deliver. By enabling earth observation insights and answers at record-breaking speeds, they’ll be poised to deliver time-dependent missions such as natural disaster response, evacuations and even thwart would-be security threats. As part of the advisor board, I’m motivated by the ability to help shape some of those potential use cases and help the company expand their reach into the communities in which they can realize this great impact.
How do you see the intersection of AI and space evolving in the next 5-10 years?
Ubotica is clearly paving the way of deploying never-seen-before convergence of AI and space technologies to empower rapid insight delivery. As their important work expands, they’ll drive the intersection of AI and geospatial by pushing vast amounts of satellite data with high speed and accuracy to provide near real-time insights. In 5-10 years, the value of these capabilities is likely so span far beyond the near term impact we are seeing in supporting proactive measures for climate change mitigation, safety and security features and intelligence, disaster response and resource management.
Expanding the use of AI across space can further enable the detection and diagnosis of issues, threats of collision, repairs needed, optimize satellite capabilities and lifespan and even empower longer missions to distant destinations for exploration and learning.
With your experience leading companies like DataPath and Comtech, what are the key challenges you foresee for companies operating in the space sector, particularly in relation to government partnerships and commercial ventures?
In my experience leading companies both small, mid-size, and large – the greatest challenge I foresee in the space sector is around the innovation that comes from new space and the start-up community. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a sharp decline in investments into these companies in early stage which could have an impact on our ability as a nation to truly leverage the brilliant innovations they’re set to progress. Recent belt-tightening in the investment community puts the future of satellite and space in a precarious position. If we think about some of the leading technologies and innovations we have in space today, they emerged from the start up community of scrappy new space pioneers. To continue this momentum, the industry should link together and continue to generate the interest from the investment community in fostering partnerships and collaboration that will support sustainable growth.