This year’s installment of the Small Satellite Conference, a.k.a. SmallSat, was yet another excellent opportunity for the space industry to get together at the University of Utah in Logan. BlackSky was excited to bring the team including COO Nick Merski, who spoke on the Recruiting and Retaining Space Professionals panel, and CTO Dr. Peter Wegner, who participated in the Remote Sensing Data: The Need for Speed panel.
BlackSky CTO Dr. Peter Wegner speaking about dynamic monitoring at the Small Satellite Conference 2022
Not only was the conference informative and a great networking opportunity, it also yielded valuable insights. The enthusiasm for next-generation space development was clearly prevalent, and so was the willingness of organizations across the spectrum of engineering to partner on future projects.
Here are the top 3 takeaways from the BlackSky team:
Small satellites are enabling innovation in products and services.
“We saw technologists listening to customer problems and developing new and creative ways to break down challenges that exist in the geospatial intelligence sector – and beyond,” Merski explained. “The possibilities of the smallsat ecosystem, coupled with fresh thinking and innovation, are endless – extending well past static mapping. This is where our dynamic monitoring provides a huge advantage.”
There’s an increasing focus on interoperability, integration, and timeliness.
“These are business principles BlackSky has believed since our inception,” Wegner said. “The customer, whether government or commercial, needs a smarter approach to receiving and analyzing their data – and that’s where our disruptive speed and AI-enabled insights come in.”
Cybersecurity remains as important as ever.
“As the importance and visibility of small satellite-enabled businesses grows and becomes increasingly useful to a wider array of industries, we need to ensure the protection of these systems from a new set of threat vectors. BlackSky takes this seriously, especially as we have a software-first approach,” Merski said.
The BlackSky team unanimously agreed that the Small Satellite Conference 2022 was well worth their time. Our senior satellite systems engineer David Carter said it best: “It was exciting and inspiring to see everything going on in the smallsat industry and to see how big of a role BlackSky is playing in it.”