Celebrating Lifetimes of Achievement - The 2020 Hall of Fame Inductees
On March 10, SSPI will induct three new members into the prestigious Space & Satellite Hall of Fame at the 2020 Hall of Fame Celebration at the Longview Gallery in Washington DC. They will join the leaders who created, sustained and expanded the industry over the past 60 years, including Dr. Arthur C. Clarke, Dr. Harold Rosen, Rene Anselmo, Takuya Yoshida, David Thompson, Greg Wyler, Mary Cotton, Romain Bausch, Pradman Kaul, Sidney Topol, Gwynne Shotwell, John Celli, Giuliano Berretta, Mark Dankberg, James Monroe III, Peter Jackson and Jean-Yves Le Gall.
Steve Collar
CEO, SES
In 2011, Steve Collar became CEO of O3b Networks, the company founded four years earlier by Hall of Famer Greg Wyler. The impact of his leadership soon made itself felt. Within two years, the company launched the first four satellites of its pioneering MEO constellation and added another eight the following year, and later bringing the number of O3b satellites launched to 20 in 2019. By 2016, O3b had built a firm backlog of $350 million with more than $100 million in current-year revenue, making it the fastest-growing satellite operator in history.
SES was one of the company's early investors and, in 2016, it exercised its option to acquire O3b Networks. The deal created the first communications satellite operator with spacecraft in both GEO and MEO orbits. Steve was appointed CEO of SES Networks, the newly-formed data-centric business unit of SES, in May 2017. Less than a year later, he became CEO of SES. Behind his fast rise was a major transformation in the marketplace, which demanded aggressive response from the company. Video distribution and contribution had long provided most of SES's revenue, but the explosive growth of online streaming triggered what soon became an accelerating decline in that business, with impacts across all the major satellite operators. With its significant exposure to that decline, SES needed a fast-growing source of replacement revenue, and SES Networks looked set to deliver it. Network revenues grew nearly 16% in 2018 and added another 5% through the third quarter of 2019.
There was more to the strategy than revenue replacement. Under Steve's leadership and with the support of the Board, the company has used its unique mix of GEO and MEO coverage to deliver high bandwidth to the mobility market, where maritime and aero are delivering strong growth. SES has also driven open networking initiatives as well as partnerships with cloud service providers into the satellite industry, advancing its vision to make satellite networks a seamless extension of the global communications ecosystem, becoming the first satellite network solutions provider to adopt an Open Network Automation Platform. In 2017, SES announced plans for a next-generation MEO constellation called O3b mPOWER, which will generate 35,000 electronically-steerable beams , delivering the flexibility to configure bandwidth, power and routing dynamically to suit customer demand and geographic position. Built by Boeing and scheduled for launch by SpaceX in 2021, the constellation will be able to deliver up to 10 gigabits per second to vessels, aircraft, enterprise, energy and government sites. As notable as its throughput is the commitment to standards long common in terrestrial IT and telecom: ethernet, APIs and Open Network Automation Platform orchestration.
Steve Collar is a veteran of the industry, having previously worked for Matra Marconi Space (now Airbus) and New Skies Satellites. Yet he saw and responded to the overwhelming need for his industry to step out of its traditional silo and become a fully integrated part of the global telecom industry by adopting its standards, taking advantage of its high rate of innovation, and pointing clearly to a new future for SES and the satellite communications business.
Tory Bruno
President & CEO, United Launch Alliance
Tory Bruno came to United Launch Alliance (ULA) in 2014 after a long career managing programs for some of the most advanced and powerful weapons systems in the American arsenal. As general manager of Lockheed Martin Strategic and Missile Defense Systems, he led a team of men and women responsible for the Navy's Trident II D5 Fleet Ballistic Missile, the Air Force's ICBM Reentry Systems and the Terminal High Area Altitude Defense System (THAAD). He managed a joint venture responsible for producing and safely maintaining the UK's nuclear weapons and has engineered control systems for rockets and hypersonic weapons, for which he holds numerous patents. No words describe him better than Tom Wolfe's famous phrase, "a steely-eyed missile man."
When he was tapped to lead ULA, the company was at a crossroads. What had been an effective monopoly on national security and NASA missions had turned competitive as new commercial competitors entered the business. The company needed to adapt to survive. This veteran of military space and missile programs might not have seemed the obvious choice of leader, but he was soon to prove doubters wrong.
He launched a major restructuring of the company to shorten launch cycles and cut launch costs in half – while maintaining its unprecedented 100% success rate on launches. Over a wrenching year or two, he restructured the company, reduced the number of launch pads the company used, and relentlessly advocated for the importance of space to the future of the nation. These difficult changes began to produce results. The company won competitive bids for many science missions from NASA, as well as multi-billion-dollar competitive bids for national security satellite launches. To maintain that momentum, the company began development of a new launch vehicle, the Vulcan Centaur rocket, which is on track for first launch in 2021. Purpose-designed for national security launches, it is based on the workhorse Atlas and Delta vehicle designs but with such efficiency that a single Vulcan Centaur will loft payloads that would have required strapping together three of the legacy rockets. Long-term partnerships with a vast supply chain are serving the dual purpose of keeping costs down while helping to stabilize the US space industrial base.
Tory Bruno's leadership has enabled ULA to survive and thrive through the challenging transition to a competitive market and has preserved for the US government a launch provider whose first priority is serving the nation's national security needs in space.
Paul Gaske
Executive VP and General Manager, North America, Hughes Network Systems
For much of its early history, the communications satellite business was all about video. TV distribution and contribution provided growing revenues and high margins, while giving broadcasters a uniquely cost-effective way to get programming to billions of viewers. But as early as the 1980s, Paul Gaske was pursuing a different destiny– a future in data networking. Joining Digital Communications Corp. – a classic garage startup founded by Hall of Famers John Puente and Burton Edelson, and other industry notables Gene Gabbard and Andy Werth – he designed satellite TDMA systems for Intelsat signatories in the engineering department headed by Pradman Kaul, also a Hall of Famer. The company was acquired by MA-Com, where Paul became part of the team that created the first interactive data VSATs and launched the satellite data networking business. Among its first customers were the retail networks of such major corporations as Wal-Mart, Chrysler and General Motors.
Then in 1987, Hughes acquired the company and launched a revolution in satellite data services. With Paul spearheading development of products and services, Hughes Network Systems grew into the world's leading supplier of VSAT technology for, retail, enterprise networking and other markets. To date the company has placed more than 7 million VSAT terminals in over 100 countries around the world.
Nine years later, Paul led the launch of the satellite internet service now known as HughesNet®. In the decades since then, he drove the growth of HughesNet and was part of the executive team that led the company through a series of business changes and technical and operational advances: most notably the roll out of High-Throughput Satellite services on the JUPITER™ System. HughesNet became the first ISP to offer FCC-defined broadband speeds from coast to coast across the US and ranked first among all satellite broadband providers across 11 performance metrics in the FCC's most recent report. The company has become the largest satellite ISP in the world, with over 1.4M subscribers with a 69% US market share, helping to bridge the digital divide by bringing services to underserved markets throughout the world.
Under his leadership, the company's enterprise service, HughesON™, has grown to serve nearly a half million sites, including more than 30,000 employing advanced SD-WAN capability. Its JUPTER Aero solution is bringing internet connectivity to more than 1,100 aircraft worldwide. For more than four decades, Paul Gaske has played a central role in taking satellite communications where it was never originally envisioned to go – making it a vital part of the data communications that underpins the global economy of the 21st Century.