What is your role at SES Space & Defense?
I’m responsible for setting the strategy based on our company goals and objectives. This involves establishing new differentiated business areas that will enable nonlinear growth for the company as we move forward. My department is leading the effort to create new markets, new businesses, and new technologies that will drive growth at a more significant pace than if we were doing the same things we’ve always done.
How does the Strategy and Innovation team support government and defense customers?
We work to understand what keeps our customers up at night. We aim to anticipate what our customers’ needs will be so we can solve problems and respond to changing requirements. It’s not just about simply integrating solutions and delivering services. We’re constantly working to understand how our customers use those solutions so we can improve upon them and stay one step ahead in developing innovations and new capabilities before our customers ask for them.
What are the specific challenges you and your team are helping SESSD customers solve?
One of the key challenges our customers face is maintaining connectivity in contested and degraded environments. Maintaining multiple parallel communication paths is expensive, but losing even a single link at a critical time can mean losing the mission. We addressed this by developing SIMON (Secure Integrated Multi-Orbit Networking), an orchestration platform that bonds multiple parallel links to provide new levels of affordable resilience. Another challenge we’re addressing is the threat in the increasingly crowded LEO orbit. Our Space Data Relay Services provide a fast and reliable way for our customers to transmit critical data from LEO satellites to the ground in near real time using our MEO network. These are just a few examples of how we are innovating to provide government and defense customers with more resilient, reliable communications in increasingly complex environments.
How are these challenges or requirements different today from 3-5 years ago?
Our conversations with government and defense customers were once largely about capacity, bandwidth, and availability. Today, it’s about resilience and ensuring continuous connectivity even as adversaries are actively trying to deny, degrade, or disrupt access. A few years ago, our customers were essentially limited to choosing from among a selection of purpose-built satellite communications systems. Today, customers want flexibility and adaptability, and we’re responding by delivering multi-orbit hybrid architectures that blend GEO, MEO, and LEO to enhance resilience and ensure continued mission readiness in the most hostile operational environments.
Why is your team critical for delivering mission success for both SESSD and its customers?
It starts with the word “team.” Our team is responsible for providing answers to the hard problems that need solving today and over the next several years. We’re doing this by leveraging our heritage and our collective decades of satcom experience to deliver solutions like space data relay, SIMON, and new hosted payload capabilities. These services only exist because people on our team listen to our customers and identify gaps between their needs and market offerings. As we move forward, our team will ensure that the architectures our customers need tomorrow will not have the limitations of today. In this way, the strategy and innovation team will keep SES Space & Defense relevant with our customers as mission requirements evolve.
How is SESSD, and your team specifically, ensuring that customers are prepared for the operating environment today and in the future?
Preparing customers for the future is not a one-time event. We think about readiness in terms of today’s environment and the one in which our customers will be competing in the future. It is our goal to continuously bring new options to our customers, instead of reacting to a new threat that has forced the conversation. Our job is to make sure that our customers aren’t locked into today’s architecture when the environment shifts, as it undoubtedly will. This is where a lot of our work lives: testing new capabilities, building business cases for new missions, and making sure that when requirements change, we have an answer in hand rather than starting from zero.
What excites and motivates you about working at the intersection of satellite communications and the defense industry at this moment in time?
Only a few people get to work in the inflection point environment that the satellite industry is in right now. After 30 years in the business, I’m as passionate about it as ever. The commercial space industry has matured to the point where we can genuinely serve national security interests and missions. The tools we are employing to solve problems today are fundamentally different and better than the ones that were available just five years ago. Whether it’s inventing new technology or building a case to get a capability fielded, we’re creating something new that our customers can rely on – and that is both satisfying and exciting.