Celebrating Lifetimes of Achievement
On March 14, 2023, SSPI Members around the world will join together to honor the 2023 inductees to the Space & Satellite Hall of Fame. The annual induction ceremony will be conducted at the offices of K&L Gates in Washington, D.C. on the opening night of SATELLITE 2023. Learn more about the 2023 Space & Satellite Hall of Fame Reception.
The Space & Satellite Hall of Fame recognizes the invaluable contributions of the visionaries who have transformed life for the better through space & satellite technology. Members of the Hall of Fame are recognized pioneers in communications, aerospace, scientific research, or the development and delivery of space and satellite applications for business, institutions and government.
The 2023 Hall of Fame Inductees
David Kagan, Chief Executive Officer, Globalstar
Dave Kagan’s career is a lesson in the power of reinvention. It began more than 25 years ago when he worked in finance and operations for Norwegian Cruise Line. There, he saw the growing value of satcom to shipboard operations and passenger satisfaction. That led him to accept a position as president and CEO of Maritime Telecommunications, whose founder and fellow Hall of Famer Richard Hadsall invented the motion-stabilized VSAT antenna.
He did the things a good leader is supposed to do: growing the company’s revenues and expanding its customer base to include cruise lines, luxury yachts, oil rigs and government vessels. But he also forged a partnership that would reinvent the company: a deal with AT&T to enable mobile phone usage on cruise ships. When the World Trade Center was attacked, the company made headlines by offering phone and internet service for free aboard dozens of ships to let passengers reach their loved ones.
He moved to Globe Wireless, where he again did what a good CEO should. By the time he sold the company to Inmarsat in 2013, it had grown to support 6,000 ships worldwide. That success had unexpected consequences. Broader adoption of satcom created efficiencies that gave a boost to growth in seaborne trade. Reaching 11 billion tons per year in 2019, it raised the living standards of billions of people in the world’s poorest nations.
His biggest act of reinvention, however, took place at Globalstar, a company that launched its first satellites in 2000. Working with fellow Hall of Famer and Globalstar chairman Jay Monroe, Dave expanded its services beyond the legacy of one-way messaging and GPS to focus on satellite IoT. This was followed by a deal with Apple to enable direct-to-satellite SOS capability on the iPhone 14. That made its own headlines when a California couple, who survived a plunge off a cliff in their car, used it to call for rescue.
Reinvention is the name of the game for today’s space and satellite industry. And there are few better models than Dave Kagan for turning yesterday’s assets into tomorrow’s next success.
Mark Miller, Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, Viasat
In 1986, Mark Miller was a staff engineer at a company called Linkabit in San Diego. When its founders left to start a new venture, two other employees, Mark Dankberg and Steve Hart, suggested the three of them start a company of their own. It launched with less than $25,000 in capital and delivered its first product, a satcom test system, four very tough years later.
Today, that same company has 7,000 employees, who generated nearly $3 billion in sales last year from a wide range of systems, software and internet access services. For more than 35 years, Mark Miller has played a lead role in the success of nearly all, repeatedly developing breakthroughs in government and commercial satellite technology.
But this is not a story of one company’s growth. It is the story of the industry’s future. Among his many patents are several on high-throughput satellite (HTS) broadband architectures. These architectures share frequencies among hundreds of narrow beams and define the ground technology needed to handle them. Together, they have made it possible to multiply the bandwidth on orbit thousands of times.
Mark has been the lead architect and engineer on the Viasat 1, 2 and 3 broadband satellite systems. But that work is only part of the HTS story. Many operators today are flying HTS – and the new generations of VHTS and UHTS – and they have vastly expanded the reach and affordability of residential broadband as well as service to maritime, aviation, cellular, energy and many other sectors. HTS is also the native architecture for LEO constellations – one reason Euroconsult forecasts nearly 50% growth per year in total HTS capacity, reaching 60 terabits per second by 2027.
Fellow co-founder and Hall of Famer Mark Dankberg summed up his partner’s career this way. “My personal assessment, after interacting with many other systems engineers from academia, industry and government, is that Mark Miller is THE leading authority on satellite broadband technology in the world.” And he has the patents to prove it.
Joe Spytek, Chief Executive Officer, Speedcast
In 2001, Joe Spytek founded a company called ITC Global, which delivered fundamental technologies and connectivity solutions to meet the needs of remote operations. In its infancy, the company served the disaster recovery and mining sectors, quietly making a name for itself and gaining customers through reliable service and trusted support. By the time the company was sold to Panasonic in 2015, it was serving blue chip energy, maritime, mining and even cruise customers across 70 countries and the world’s oceans. It pioneered adoption of HTS capacity for critical applications and set industry standards for its well-known network design workshops with customers.
Joe joined Speedcast in a Board of Directors role in October 2019. By the end of Q1 the following year, he was serving as Chief Executive Officer, just in time to watch its key markets and customers devastated by the global pandemic. Joe led the company through a complete recapitalization under Chapter 11, from which it emerged just twelve months later as a private firm with new ownership. Soon after, the company was running more than 200 networks across its Unified Global Platform, increasing its already massive 23 Gbps of bandwidth, and standing up 65 additional networks in a matter of weeks to meet continued customer growth.
What made such a transformation possible? A massive amount of talent and hard work – but it could not have succeeded without the experience, stability, and leadership that Joe provided. As the company was emerging from its recapitalization, Joe listed his priorities for the organization to Via Satellite magazine. To integrate Speedcast’s businesses into a single global network. To deploy software-defined services in its customers’ networks. And to stay technology-agnostic to adapt to the massive changes coming down the road.
By 2022, he could check those items off the list. Speedcast had deployed a Unified Global Network making heavy use of automation and SD-WAN to deliver reliable, high-quality service. It introduced patented algorithm-based network management technology, known as TrueBeam, capable of automatically selecting the optimal network path for a remote site without human intervention, for fast and error-free switches and load balancing across the entire network. After becoming the first satellite service provider to gain Advanced Tier Partner status from Amazon Web Services, Speedcast was the first to integrate Starlink into a connectivity solution for a global cruise fleet that took advantage of its low latency while receiving a guaranteed service level thanks to Speedcast’s managed service.
Joe turned a company culture divided among many separate former companies into a unified team, focused on measurable performance, then gave them a vision and set them free to innovate. In just 18 months, Speedcast created the multi-path, multi-orbit, software-defined service and laid out the concept that the entire industry now talks about as its future. For customers, its global network has become the testbed for everything the satellite business hopes to achieve and an example of what can be done when the future is at stake.