On Orbit Rachel Jewett

The On Orbit podcast has reached 100 episodes! Thank to our listeners for tuning in over the past three years for engaging conversations with the people driving the business of space. In this episode, co-hosts Jeff Hill and Rachel Jewett commemorate the milestone by looking back on some of their favorite episodes, and share a highlight reel of clips.
This episode’s guest is Jacqueline Good, founder of Magnestar and winner of the 2023 Startup Space competition. We talk with Jacqueline after her Startup Space win and dig into the issue of signal interference and how Magnestar is working to help with spectrum coordination and improve the resilience of space services. Jacqueline shares the story of going on a listening tour talking to satellite operators about the problems they face, and how those discussions led her to build a data solution to solve the issue of signal interference.
Jacqueline is also the first winner from Canada, and she has found a lot of value in the community of Canadian startup leaders. She gives her perspective on why Canada is such a robust proving ground for space startups, how playing competitive hockey influenced her approach to business. 

Ronda Schrenk has had a front-row seat to the evolution of geospatial intelligence in the United States. She started out as an imagery analyst for the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), just before it was combined into the new National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NEMA), which later became the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. 
Now, she is an advocate for the industry as CEO of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. Ronda joins On Orbit this week ahead of USGIF’s annual GEOINT Symposium, to talk about how she has seen the industry evolve. She recounts how one of her first assignments was manually counting boats around a small island, and how much analyst work was done manually in spreadsheets at the time. She talks about the enabling technologies that have increased the speed of insights and made life easier on analysts, and shares context behind some of the recent headlines in the geospatial intelligence industry. 

Today’s modern global economy runs on data, and the world’s most successful industries and organizations are defined by the speed and efficiency in which they access that data. Defining success in space will be no different – a vibrant, diverse, and productive economy in space will require massive amounts of data that can easily be accessed by facilities on Earth and shared between satellites, vehicles, and space stations in orbit. 
In the fourth episode of On Orbit’s Future Space Economy webcast series, host Jeffrey Hill speaks with leaders from Mynaric, Ramon.Space, OrbitsEdge, Nebula Space Enterprise, and Avantus Federal to learn how they are building to support advanced applications and automation in the space environment. Learn about how these systems operate in space and are protected from the harsh environment. The group also explains how virtualized networks will work to transfer data from space to Earth, and how data is processed, transmitted, and protected in the future space economy.
Learn more about On Orbit’s hit new webcast by visiting www.onorbitspace.com

Michelle Parker recently took on a new role as vice president of Space Mission Systems at Boeing. After restructuring Boeing Defense, Space & Security last year, Boeing brought all satellite programs together under Space Mission Systems including commercial and government satellites, Spectrolab and Millennium Space Systems in one organization. 
Michelle has a long career in the satellite industry, starting out more than 25 years ago with Hughes’ satellite division before it was acquired by Boeing, where she worked on the thermal design of the original 702 platform. Now she is tasked with integrating these teams and recognizing synergies across the business to present the best offerings to customers. 
She spoke with On Orbit host Rachel Jewett on the first day of the SATELLITE show in Washington D.C., as Boeing prepared to ship the first ViaSat-3 satellite to Cape Canaveral for launch operations. In this wide-ranging discussion, Michelle talks about the demand environment for satellite manufacturing across government and commercial segments in the multi-orbit era. She discusses responding to competition in the manufacturing market, how she has seen Boeing and the industry evolve, and the market for talent.

In this webcast, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Business Operations Casey Swails is joined by speakers from Voyager Space, Spaceflight, Loft Orbital, and BCG for a discussion about how private businesses, industries, civil space agencies, government organizations, and commercial space companies form strategic partnerships and collaborate with each other to accomplish a mission. Host Jeffrey Hill kicks off the discussion by asking how existing commercial space industry business models work. For example: How do customers engage with launch services? How are satellites procured? How can an organization access space without having to build their own satellite or buy their own rocket? The group also takes a look at the International Space Station (ISS) as an example of a space-based economic hub involving a variety of business models and partnerships.  
Please note: There are minor audio issues throughout the podcast related to speaker microphones captured during the livestream.
 

One of the most exciting things about the satellite industry is exploring how satellite can be used to improve life on Earth. Iridium and the Smithsonian have worked together on a particularly interesting example of that, tracking wildlife. The Smithsonian has an initiative called Movement of Life, that tracks the movement of certain species. The organization recently partnered with Iridium to use the operator’s satellite network to help track species like Asian elephants, Masai giraffes, jaguars, wildebeests, and bobcats. 
In this episode of On Orbit, Jared Stabach, research ecologist at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and Dan Mercer, vice president and general manager for Iridium, talk about how satellite-enabled IoT furthers conservation efforts by tracking these species. Jared talks about the research projects that Iridium’s network has enabled, like analyzing the impact of human activity on animal populations, as well as the satellite tech involved with designing IoT trackers that different wild animals can wear.