View the Conference Program!

Greetings to our SATELLITE Community!

We find ourselves at the end of November and at the beginning of both the 2018 holiday season and of a six-month long process of preparing for an unusually late SATELLITE 2019 Conference and Exhibition. That’s right! This year, we will be opening the doors to the Washington D.C. Convention Center and kicking off SATELLITE week May 6-9. We may actually have fair weather! Though, predicting today’s climate is like betting on the spin of a Roulette wheel. Before you start packing your short-sleeve shirts and light jackets, the SATELLITE 2019 team and I have some exciting news to share — We have begun rolling out next year’s conference program! And, we have a pretty solid majority of the schedule firmly in place!

Let’s start this “sneak peak” at the very top with our brand new General and Power Session schedule. We’ve given these sessions a drastic makeover since last year. First off, the opening sessions on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday will be open to all attendees. The Monday Opening General Session, “What’s the (Next) Big Idea?” will feature a roundtable of speakers that will debate which technologies will disrupt the status quo of our industry during a time widely recognized as the 4th Industrial Revolution. Will it be cloud computing, new analytics and data fusion, 3D printing, lasers, robotics, block chain, machine learning, IoT, new propulsion systems, or augmented reality?

Our Tuesday Opening General Session will feature our industry’s leading CEOs and surprise special guests in a discussion about how satellite services fit into Industrial Internet-of-Things and Smart City ecosystems; cooperation and competition with terrestrial carriers; bandwidth resources for the 5G era; lowering the cost of the overall satellite connectivity infrastructure; and bridging the digital divide.

On Wednesday, the conference program kicks off with a general session that is long overdue. “Our Collective Role in Empowering Women and Cultivating Diversity in Aerospace.” This roundtable discussion will demonstrate that diversity works by sharing success stories of diverse teams, technologies and architectures. The speakers will also identify solutions for attendees to take away from the event so that they can move the needle on diversity and inclusion at their organizations. In addition to these open general sessions, we’ll have headline keynotes on Monday and Thursday, as well as closing Power Sessions featuring investors, innovators, and space policy makers. We’ll go more in depth on those sessions in future issues of Downlink.

Another major addition to the SATELLITE 2019 schedule is our Conference Presentation program. We will have 24 half-hour long, keynote-style presentations from industry speakers running throughout the entire week in Room 145. Similar to what was previously referred to as the Engineering Forum, but with a broader range of technical and financial topics, these 24 Conference Presentations were selected among the hundreds of proposals we received through our Call for Presentations portal earlier this Fall. This program features speakers from NASA, ESA, MIT, Airbus, FAA, University of Maryland, Ball Aerospace, the U.S. Department of Defense and a dozen more global aerospace organizations. We will also be bringing back the SGx keynote series for young professional attendees on Monday.

As you can see, SATELLITE 2019 is going to be a busy week! In addition to what I have already mentioned, we have nearly 75 percent of our daily conference sessions confirmed and scheduled, including the Finance Forum and Ground Systems Forum programs on Monday and Wednesday, respectively. Our Monday and Thursday keynotes, as well as our guest keynote for the Via Satellite Awards Luncheon will be announced soon! We will also be confirming speakers throughout the next month.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for updates, as there will be a lot of them throughout the next half-year. Enjoy the holiday season and save some shopping money by registering early for SATELLITE 2019. Spring will be here before you know it! We look forward to seeing you soon!

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Hill
Chairman, SATELLITE 2019