Satellite Executive of the Year Nominees for 2022

Every year, Via Satellite honors an executive that has had a significant impact on the changing satellite industry. The Satellite Executive of the Year award honors an executive that has led a company to financial success, executed an innovative project, or furthered the conversation on a crucial issue facing the industry. This year’s nominees represent a broad swath of the industry from manufacturing, launch, situational awareness, imagery, and communications.

The winner of the award will be determined by a public vote combined with the votes of the Via Satellite editorial board. The winner will be announced during the Via Satellite awards luncheon on Wednesday, March 15, at the SATELLITE 2023 conference in Washington, D.C. Voting is open online from Feb. 22 to 12 p.m. on March 14 and can be accessed at satellitetoday.com/vote. Here are the 2022 Executive of the Year nominees.

Melanie Stricklan, Slingshot Aerospace CEO

As commercial and governmental activity increases every year in space, coordination and space traffic management are more important than ever. Melanie Stricklan is a leading voice on this issue as co-founder and CEO of Slingshot Aerospace, a space situational awareness (SSA) provider. Stricklan has led the company through a period of rapid expansion since taking on the role of CEO in February 2021.

She had a blockbuster 2022, including two acquisitions and two funding rounds. In August, Slingshot Aerospace acquired Numerica’s Space Domain Awareness (SDA) division including a sensor network for satellite tracking and Seradata, with its leading database of launch and satellite data. These acquisitions bolster Slingshot’s in-house SSA capabilities. Then, Slingshot rolled out a free version of its collision alert and traffic coordination tool to the industry, to make space safer across multiple orbits.

Stricklan is a U.S. veteran, with a 21-year career in the Air Force where she led more than 200 classified missions as an Experimental Spacecraft Crew Commander. She also served as the Director of Space Forces Liaison for U.S. Central Command. Now that she is in the commercial industry, government leaders still turn to her for her expertise. Vice President Kamala Harris selected her for the National Space Council’s Users Advisory Group, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg named her to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee as well. As a female CEO in a male-dominated industry, Stricklan speaks out about encouraging women and diversity and Slingshot Aerospace is part of the Space Workforce 2030 pledge to improve diversity in the workforce.

Peter Beck, Rocket Lab CEO

When Rocket Lab announced plans to go public in 2020, founder and CEO Peter Beck unveiled his vision to make Rocket Lab more than just a smallsat launcher, to transform the company into an end-to-end space company building satellites and space hardware as well. Just three years later, Beck has realized that vision, and Rocket Lab is known as both a launcher and a mission provider. The company now has a robust Space Systems business, which even outperforms its launch business in revenue, and landed impressive contracts in 2022 including the MDA subcontractor deal for Globalstar’s satellite buses, and deals with Inmarsat, NASA, and Varda Space.

He has also led Rocket Lab through its first year as a publicly traded company. At press time, Rocket Lab’s fourth quarter 2022 results have not been released, but adjusted guidance puts company revenue around $200 million for the year — a more than 200 percent revenue increase over the prior year. Notably, this beats the expected revenue Rocket Lab projected when it originally announced the SPAC deal. It is great success and growth for a company that first reached orbit just five years ago.

Beck is still pushing the company into new territory. Rocket Lab just inaugurated its second space launch complex, located in Virginia, and can now launch from two hemispheres. Development on the larger-lift Neutron rocket is underway, and Rocket Lab has its eyes on spacecraft missions to the Moon, Mars, and Venus. Beck has led Rocket Lab to success, but at the same time he stays humble and isn’t afraid to crack a joke — even literally “eating his hat” out of a blender after announcing the Neutron rocket.

Dirk Wallinger, York Space Systems President & CEO

Dirk Wallinger founded York Space Systems in 2012 with the goal to improve spacecraft affordability and reliability. Since then, Wallinger has built York, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, into a formidable satellite manufacturer. York is a small aerospace business that has logged wins against aerospace primes for big-time contracts. In the last two years, York has been awarded three major government contracts from the Space Development Agency (SDA), including a $382 million contract to build 42 satellites for the Tranche 1 Transport Layer (T1TL) of the SDA’s constellation. Notably, York’s contract for the same requirements was about half the cost of both Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman’s contracts.

Then in October, private equity firm AE Industrial Partners (AEI) announced it would acquire a majority share of York Space Systems in a deal that valued the company over $1 billion and promised to give York “significant institutional investor backing and capital.” Wallinger is staying on in his role as CEO. York’s workforce has grown 300 percent in the last three years, and revenues have increased over 250 percent, year-over-year, and it has expanded its in-house manufacturing capabilities multiple times.

Outside of his role as an executive, Wallinger serves as an advisor and a mentor in the space community and also speaks at local elementary schools in economically challenged neighborhoods with high numbers of minority students, sharing his own personal story.

Brian O’Toole, BlackSky Technology CEO

BlackSky Technology has had a seismic 2022 including securing the largest deal in its history and seeing strong revenue growth, as the company continues to be one of the most impressive satellite imagery companies. Led by CEO Brian O’Toole, BlackSky is seeing strong revenue growth and is set to nearly double revenue in 2022 over 2021. But, there is so much more to the BlackSky story than its revenue growth.

BlackSky’s highlight of 2022 was its selection by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) for the largest commercial imagery contract that the NRO has ever issued. It was an upset for younger companies BlackSky and Planet Labs to join establishment player Maxar on an NRO contract of this size. For BlackSky, this deal could be worth over $1 billion over the next ten years. BlackSky’s focus area is defense and intelligence, and the company logged a slew of wins in this area, including a contract with Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) to create and optimize data sets for use in Department of Defense AI models and applications, with a ceiling value of $241 million over five years.

2022 was in many ways the year that BlackSky came of age as a public company under O’Toole’s leadership, and it is set up for success for years to come with the NRO contract. The imagery market is a competitive market that can seem fragmented, but BlackSky has built a constellation of 14 satellites and a reputation as a trusted provider of imagery and on-demand, real-time dynamic monitoring of important and strategic economic assets across the globe.

Jay Monroe, Globalstar Chairman

When there used to be mobile satellite services (MSS) panels at SATELLITE two decades ago, with the likes of Iridium, Thuraya, Globalstar, and Inmarsat speaking, there were times when the future looked bleak for Globalstar. Jay Monroe, so often the front person for the company, has confounded doubters in spectacular fashion, when many had been predicting its demise.

Monroe was always ahead of his time. In 2009, it was one of the pioneers in terms of satellite companies when it came to use export credit agency financing. In 2022, Globalstar may have done the deal of the year in terms of significance when it was announced it would be the satellite provider for Apple’s emerging messaging via satellite for the iPhone 14. Apple is making a $450 million investment from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to support this capability, with most of the funding going to Globalstar. It is a deal that is already saving lives. Other partnerships may be worth more in revenue, but this deal elevates the position of the satellite industry as a whole. Everyone knows the influence of Apple in tech, and for them to partner with a satellite company is a huge deal.

While many at Globalstar worked on the deal, CEO David Kagan told Via Satellite it was Jay Monroe who sent a letter to Apple saying it would be good for the two companies to work together. This is the definition of executive vision. Monroe is a unique executive, and the deal with Apple may be his biggest ‘out of the box’ success yet. Globalstar is now one of the most talked about companies in satellite.

Will Marshall, Planet CEO

With climate change one of the biggest issues facing all of us, a company like Planet that provides daily data and insights about Earth is so much more than the sum of its parts. If Planet is successful, we all benefit. Planet has built itself into one of the leading commercial providers of Earth observation imagery with more than 200 satellites and more than 800 customers. CEO Will Marshall’s leadership is validated by Planet’s spot on the NRO’s EOCL contract and the company’s myriad partnerships with commercial organizations. In its current financial year, Planet expects to grow revenue 45 percent compared to the prior year. The company is one of the few companies that went public in the wave of SPACs with fiscal year 2023 revenue in line with its original SPAC projections.

Outside of the deal with the NRO, Planet signed a diverse range of partnership contracts in 2022. For example, it expanded its partnership with Microsoft to apply artificial intelligence technology and satellite data to support African climate adaptation projects. It also won a new contract from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that will see NOAA leverage Planet’s PlanetScope and SkySat products to evaluate oil spills, track marine debris, detect vessels and large marine mammals.

The company is ambitious with plans for the future. In 2022, it revealed the details of its new commercial hyperspectral constellation, Tanager. These satellites are designed to deliver hyperspectral data at a resolution of 30 meters with over 400 spectral bands. The first two Tanager satellites are likely to be launched this year. Will Marshall has realized the goal from co-founding the company in 2010 to use data from space to help life on Earth, and Planet’s impact is felt across many verticals from agriculture, consumer packaged goods, energy, forestry, and governments. VS