Thanks to the vagaries of scheduling, we are only 10 months away from SATELLITE 2020 — as we go back to our more traditional March timeslot. Certainly, this year’s event will live long in the memory thanks to a special keynote from U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, as well as Blue Origin’s major Blue Moon announcement at the end of the week. Space is most definitely cool again, and there are many ambitious business plans that were talkedabout at SATELLITE. We are rapidly approaching the era of thousands of satellites going up into space, as traditional business models get turned on their head.

At the time of going to press, SpaceX is getting ready to launch its first batch of Starlink satellites, and the whole industry is eagerly awaiting what SpaceX has up their sleeve. With projects such as Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, we are seeing things happening in the space industry that would have been deemed unthinkable not so long ago. For an industry that is often seen as slow moving, the pace is definitely starting to quicken.

I would also like to offer our congratulations, on behalf of Via Satellite, to Matt Desch of Iridium for being our first ever two-time winner of Satellite Executive of the Year, and Intellian for winning our inaugural Satellite Technology of the Year Award.

The SATELLITE show had an optimism that seemed even more than normal than year. Let’s be honest, the satellite industry is permanently optimistic, but this year, it reached a new level. Space is now front page news all over the world. Welcome to the new reality.

One final thing — next month, there will be no Via Satellite. We will be “Via Space” for one month only. So, look out for this exciting edition. We are super exciting to be working on it, and we hope you will enjoy. VS