Opinion
Gedmark: Single GEO satellites offer cheaper national broadband than LEO constellations
“Once you're up, any asset you can get up in that high orbit is just becomes this incredibly valuable thing because you can park it over a country, Or part of the world and provide, you know, a service with just that one satellite. So it ends up being this like…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: US will win if space becomes a contested domain
“And that is why I am I think very confident to say that if space is a contested domain, that we will win.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: Silicon Valley ensures US victory in the commercial space race
“No, no, absolutely. That is what the United States has that will, even though these other countries are doing a better job of figuring out what to do with their government investment in space and how they're spending those dollars, the United States has Silico…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: Global fiber optic infrastructure has essentially reached its maximum physical reach
“I think we have essentially reached the people we're going to reach with fiber.”
Opinion
Gedmark: Space industry is the only viable solution for global connectivity
“It is on us in the space industry to solve this problem. I do not see any other means solving it.”
Disclosure
Astranis secured a U.S. Space Force contract in six weeks
“So I'm very proud to say that visit was extremely fruitful, and we are now on a new contract that General Gutlein was able to put in place in just six weeks from when he visited and we are off and rolling on that.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: China will never match US venture-backed space innovation
“And I think that is something That the Chinese will never be able to match, so we should be very proud of that, and we should make use of it.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: Space Shuttle era cost-plus contracts entrenched legacy defense contractors
“Then we entered into this era in the eighties, basically with the space shuttle, things got very entrenched with these cost plus contracts. And the major aerospace defense contractors were basically able to lock in, you know, these programs at a cost of billio…”
Insight
Gedmark: Commercial space emerged from dot-com wealth and Space Shuttle retirement
“So you really had all these ingredients of basically private individuals who had made enough money in the dot-com boom and had this passion for space to go and take a run at it. On the government side, you had the retirement of the special Coming up on the hor…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: GEO orbit historically received the bulk of satellite capital
“Historically, GEO is actually the most valuable orbit. That is where the bulk of money has been spent to put satellites into orbit.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: Off-the-shelf space hardware failed GEO specs, forcing custom components
“A lot of the components that you could buy were really designed for LEO satellites. And once we dug into it, would just not work for us in GEO, you know, and that's, you know, that's not through any fault of the of the vendors. It was just designed for a diffe…”
Insight
Gedmark: Internet bandwidth demand is effectively unlimited at low enough prices
“On the other end of the spectrum, if you put it up at a low enough price, then the demand becomes almost effectively unlimited. I mean, people will, at a low enough price point, people will consume all the internet bandwidth that is available and then, you kno…”
Assertion Contradicted
Gedmark: The global population without internet access has increased to four billion
“People used to talk about the other three billion that don't have access to the internet. When, you know, the internet was first really taking off. Now it's the other four billion. The problem actually got worse.”
Insight
Gedmark: Successful space startups inevitably attract US national security interest
“A company doing new technology for space for aerospace, you know, there's by almost by definition, there are national security implications of what we do. So there is almost always you know, I think if you're doing things right, there's almost always going to …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: Geostationary satellites failed to adopt smaller, rapidly iterable hardware
“In some ways satellite technology is just one of these last, especially in geo, it's just one of these last places where, We did not move to smaller hardware that you could build faster and iterate on more quickly and do a faster refresh of technology, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: Traditional satellites keep getting bigger instead of shrinking over time
“If anything, they've gotten bigger and bigger over time instead of smaller and smaller. They somehow, you know, got, found themselves in this, you know, part of the design space where they got, they fell into this, you know, local optima. Descending down this …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: Future lunar bases will require a dedicated GPS system for navigation
“The moon will need its own GPS system. You're on the lunar surface. You want to know where you are. Same thing as on the earth. You want to be able to just pull up, you know Google maps, navigate back to your lunar base, right? And then have that have that pos…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: Space industry can now launch small satellites rapidly on demand
“We can now launch small satellites on demand very rapidly and very responsibly. We've never been able to do that before.”
Assertion Contradicted
Gedmark: No company used small satellites in higher orbits before Astranis
“In some of the higher orbits that are more difficult to get to, but are still incredibly valuable, no one was going and taking a small satellite approach.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Legacy GEO satellites cost billions and take years to build
“They're typically only built by a handful of companies in the entire world. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars, ah, on the commercial side, and then on the military, national security side, it's in the billions of dollars. For a single satellite. And th…”
Prediction Partly held up
Gedmark: Astranis launching satellites for Alaska and Peru in 2023
“We're launching our first satellite in a couple months for the U.S. State of Alaska and then shortly after that we'll be launching another satellite for Peru”
Assertion Partly supported
Gedmark: China conducted more space launches than any nation over four years
“Over the last, ah, several years, last four years, China's been launching, doing more space launches than any country on Earth, including the United States, which I think is a fact people just weren't even aware of.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gedmark: Early satellite telecom studies projected six Wi-Fi users per flight
“So in the earliest days of in-flight Wi-Fi, the existing satellite telecoms sort of operators who are notoriously very conservative, very slow, did some studies that they believed that an average of six people per aircraft would be willing to buy this like 20 …”
Assertion Partly supported
Gedmark: The technology that won the XPRIZE became Virgin Galactic
“And the company ended up winning that, that, that group and that technology ended up becoming what is now Perger Galactic.”
