Satellite Executive of the Year Nominees for 2023

Since 1988, the Via Satellite Executive of the Year award has recognized outstanding leadership in the industry. This 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 within the past year. Recent winners include Melanie Stricklan, Tina Ghataore, and Gwynne Shotwell. This year’s six nominees represent parts of the industry from manufacturing, launch, satellite communications, and ground technology.

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 20, at the SATELLITE 2024 conference in Washington, D.C. Voting is open online from Feb. 20 to 12 p.m. on March 19 and can be accessed at satellitetoday.com/vote. Here are the 2023 Executive of the Year nominees.

Chris Kubasik, CEO of L3Harris

When L3 and Harris Technologies merged in June of 2019, the company did so with the intention to become a “trusted disruptor” as a prime contractor for U.S. government contracts. Then in January of 2022, the company reorganized to just three segments, bringing together capabilities for the space domain into its Space Systems sector. Under the leadership of CEO Chris Kubasik, that strategy is paying off, as L3Harris logged impressive wins and growth in its Space Systems segment in 2023. In recent years, the Space business at L3Harris has transformed from a payload provider to a prime contractor, moving up the value chain to full space vehicle integration.

The company has two segments that deal in satellite technology — Space and Airborne Systems and Communications Systems, which includes satellite terminals — and both grew in 2023. Space grew by 7 percent compared to 2022, with growth in space systems, mission networks, and intel and cyber. And Communication Systems delivered 20 percent year-over-year growth.

L3Harris has been one of the biggest winners of the Space Development Agency awards for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) – winning about $1.8 billion to build 36 satellites over three contracts. The company is using its heritage supporting weather payloads for NASA and NOAA for its missile warning capabilities, which are born out of its weather infrared sensors. L3Harris is also taking its weather expertise global. In 2023, the company won an award to deliver an imager and sounder for a Japanese government weather sensing satellite.

L3Harris wins in 2023 also included a contract to deliver a new multi-orbit, multi-waveform satcom capability to the Air Force’s Global Lightning Program, and a deal to build two reflector antennas for satellites built by Maxar. Its reflectors supported the Hughes Jupiter 3 satellite launched in 2023 as well. The company closed two bold acquisitions in 2023 — Aerojet Rocketdyne and Viasat’s Tactical Data Links business — both of which contributed to overall revenue growth in 2023. It will be interesting to see how L3Harris leverages those capabilities alongside its existing businesses in the coming years. Kubasik is nominated for how the company has grown and transformed its space business and capabilities in recent years, demonstrated by strong contract wins.

Eva Berneke, CEO of Eutelsat Group

It is always big news when one of the traditional operators hires a new CEO, especially one from outside the industry. When Eva Berneke became CEO of Eutelsat at the start of 2022, no one knew the impact she would have in such a short space of time. Eutelsat’s future at that point was open to question — What was the traditional operator’s place in this new world? Within two years, the tone of the conversation has changed. Berneke, showing decisive and courageous leadership, wasted little time making her mark, moving to acquire Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) operator OneWeb. Sometimes the traditional players are seen as slow to react to the changing market. But Berneke wasted no time making it clear Eutelsat needed a multi-orbit strategy, and executing the decision.

The merger, which closed in September, brings together an enviable set of Geostationary (GEO) and LEO assets, making Eutelsat the first GEO/LEO combined operator. The combined company Eutelsat Group now has a strong backlog, and can aggressively target markets with its combined GEO/LEO offering. In the first quarter of its current fiscal year, it reported that backlog at OneWeb is close to 1 billion euros, up 66 percent year over year. It has allowed Eutelsat to close deals like an exclusive multi-million-dollar LEO distribution partnership with Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom.

While the OneWeb acquisition dominated the narrative for Eutelsat in 2023, the year provided other notable highlights. Eutelsat collaborated with Intelsat on a multi-orbit agreement to enhance connectivity solutions over Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific, including OneWeb services. It also teamed up with the Imperial College London to explore harnessing the power of its LEO satellite constellation to enable global space weather monitoring to help protect satellite operations. It also bought the Eutelsat KONNECT VHTS satellite into service. While the jury is still out on the acquisition, Berneke displayed a daring and bold vision which we haven’t often seen from Eutelsat, earning her the nomination for Satellite Executive of the Year.

Kathy Warden, CEO of Northrop Grumman

In the five years that Kathy Warden has served as CEO and president of Northrop Grumman, the company has doubled its Space business. Northrop Grumman’s Space portfolio is large and growing, supporting civil space, national security missions, and commercial customers. Before taking the helm as CEO in January 2019, Warden served as Northrop Grumman’s COO and led the integration of Orbital ATK post-acquisition, essentially restructuring the entire company in line with her long-term vision for the company’s sustainability.

Since Northrop Grumman reorganized Aerospace Systems and Innovation Systems into the Space Systems segment in 2020, the new unit has been on a streak of double-digit growth, year after year. In 2023, the Space segment grew 14 percent over 2022. In both 2022 and 2023, Space Systems has been the fastest-growing and the largest segment at Northrop Grumman, overtaking Aeronautics Systems.

Looking to the future, Warden has advised investors that space sales will moderate, but it is still expected to be the company’s fastest growing segment. In its 2023 results, the company said Space has built a “tremendous backlog” in recent years and will now deliver a strong ROI, expanding margins, and generating cash. Part of that backlog is due to Northrop Grumman’s strong wins for the coveted Space Development Agency (SDA) awards to build Low-Earth Orbit satellites for the Space Development Agency's PWSA constellation. The company has won awards worth around $2.8 billion to build 130 satellites — more than any other vendor so far.

In 2023, Northrop Grumman also saw two C-band satellites it built for SES launch, and sold its third Mission Extension Pod to extend the life of an Intelsat satellite. While satellite servicing is a growing area of opportunity, Northrop Grumman remains the only company that has conducted commercial satellite servicing missions in GEO. In addition, its solid rocket booster business helps power NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and United Launch Alliance rockets. Northrop Grumman’s blockbuster growth in the Space segment validates Warden’s long-term vision when she led the integration of Orbital ATK and reorganized the company segments, earning her a nomination for Satellite Executive of the Year.

Mike Greenley, CEO of MDA

In August, MDA won a $2 billion contract from Telesat to build its much talked about Lightspeed LEO constellation, marking a manufacturing swap from Thales Alenia Space. A constellation of 198 satellites with the potential for another 100 more, it is the largest order in MDA’s history. It instantly catapults MDA CEO Mike Greenley into the conversation for Satellite Executive of the year.

Last year was an important year for MDA, as the company began to cement its own identity after Maxar divested the company in 2020. As well as the deal with Telesat, MDA received a contract from L3Harris Technologies, as part of the Space Development’s Agency’s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer program. MDA will design and build 14 flight sets of Ka-band steerable antennas and control electronics for L3Harris. It also completed a deal for SatixFy Space Systems, the digital payload division of SatixFy Communications. This deal aims to accelerate MDA’s market expansion in the United Kingdom and adds strategic in-country capability to produce satellite payloads. If that wasn’t enough, MDA is working on a new constellation for an undisclosed customer. In November, MDA received authorization to move forward on a contract for a new Non-Geostationary Orbit (NGSO) satellite constellation.

MDA’s momentum in 2023 is not something that happens every year, and the company will have a lot to prove moving forward as it executes on all of these awards. The shakeup deal with Telesat in particular impacted the conversation around both Telesat and MDA. It was a landmark year for MDA, earning Greenley the nomination for Satellite Executive of the Year.

Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab

Peter Beck was nominated for Satellite Executive of the Year in 2022 for his work to transform Rocket Lab from a smallsat launcher into an end-to-end space company, and the company has only continued further on that trajectory in 2023, earning the CEO a nomination for the second year in a row.

Rocket Lab had a number of big wins in 2023. In its Launch business, Rocket Lab finally entered its new launch pad in Virginia into service, and hit a new record of 10 annual launches. Although the company suffered a launch failure, Rocket Lab demonstrated resilience by returning to flight with a fix and a successful mission within a few weeks. The company continues to make progress toward making Electron a reusable rocket, flying a reused Rutherford engine for the first time in August 2023. In a year when launch options were extremely limited, Rocket Lab’s Electron was the second most-flown rocket behind the Falcon 9.

But the company’s Space systems segment is really driving growth. The company is nearing delivery of the first 17 spacecraft to MDA for Globalstar’s network upgrade. And Rocket Lab ended the year with a major win, its first award as prime contractor to the U.S. Department of Defense, with a $500 million award to build 18 small satellites for the Space Development Agency, the largest award in Rocket Lab’s history.

Rocket Lab’s recent preliminary guidance for 2023 revenue expects revenue between $243 million to $245 million — about 16 percent growth over 2022. Rocket Lab is not quite hitting the revenue projections it made when it first announced plans to go public (the company projected it would hit $267 million in 2023), but the revenue is not far off, considering how overly optimistic many other SPAC projections were.

As a rocket CEO, Beck keeps a humble outlook and a focus that space is a long-term project. “I want the company to outlive me,” he told Via Satellite in an interview in 2023. “The trouble with a lot of space companies is they're often so tied to the founder or the entrepreneur. When the entrepreneur leaves, those companies really struggle to survive. That’s not my definition of success.”

Stuart Daughtridge, Chairman of the DIFI Consortium

Progress in the ground segment of satellite is vital, but getting competing players to adhere to standards rather than promote proprietary technology has long been a challenge to the industry since the beginning of time. In the past few years, the work of the Digital IF Consortium (DIFI), led by Chairman Stuart Daughtridge, is having a significant impact across the whole industry. The DIFI consortium now has a momentum that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago. As an independent group, it advocates for interoperability between satellite and ground system networks. It set out to establish an interoperable digital interface/radio frequency (IF/RF) standard based on digital radio standard VITA 49.2.

In 2023, the consortium released version 1.2.0 of the DIFI Standard, which it said delivered a significant improvement over the previous version, to set up industry-wide standards that will help the deployment of key technologies going forward. There are now almost 60 organizations that are members of DIFI, showing its growing influence in the satellite sector. As well as a number of well-known satellite companies, it also has the likes of the U.S. Space Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Army C5ISR Center and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) among its members. The fact that so many have rallied behind DIFI’s work, including parts of the government and military, is a testament to the unifying work Daughtridge has done.

The organization also held its first Plugfest in September, where vendors tested the interoperability of their products based on a technical standard. It tested the new standard against multiple in reality for the first time. The 25 engineers attending tested 13 vendor systems and despite challenges along the way, nearly 90 percent were able to communicate, proving the functionality of the standard in providing interoperability among different vendor systems.

Since it was founded in 2021, the DIFI consortium has come a long way toward implementing a standard and creating consensus among the industry, toward the dream of a more dynamic, fluid ground segment. While we often nominate CEOs of commercial satellite companies for this award, we make exceptions for those who have a dramatic influence on the industry. Daughtridge, whose primary role is vice president of Advanced Technology for Kratos, is an exception, and deserving of this nomination. VS