Disclosure
Mendler: Northwood is building a shared ground network for the space economy
“We're building the ground network for the industrialized space economy. You know, we view it kind of as the third critical pillar of infrastructure for space where you need to get things into space on rockets. You need to have things to put into space, which a…”
Disclosure
Mendler: Northwood Space aims to build 500 ground station sites near-term
“So our kind of you know, sub near term goal is 500 sites.”
Insight
Mendler: Individually booking ground antennas cannot scale with the space industry
“As the space industry has been scaling it's not really a sustainable model to think of, like, as you're needing to coordinate, you know, tens or hundreds of different sites to think about that individual booking and coordination”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mendler: Space communication will transition to software-defined global networks
“How the space industry is going to evolve in terms of communication, going from booking an antenna, like you book a science telescope to, Having the outcomes through a global network where you can you can have a lot of observability and control into that netwo…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mendler: Legacy government ground networks are sparse and vulnerable to outages
“They have aging assets that are kind of infrequent. Like there's, you know, certain networks that just don't have a lot of assets and they're old and they're vulnerable to outages, whether it's like an intentional outage. You know, by somebody targeting that s…”
Insight
Mendler: Satellite wildfire tracking is useless without low-latency downlinks
“The challenge with that is if you don't have your latency down low enough to be able to give the information, it's pretty much useless, right? Like if you deliver information like an hour later, then you can't you can't deliver anything actionable and helpful …”
Disclosure
Mendler: Higher orbit ground station shortfall is a major Northwood driver
“Like there's really a shortfall of ground assets in the higher orbits actually. And so that's something that we didn't enter into the business planning on, but that's something that has been like a very large driver of activity in our business over the past, l…”
Disclosure
Mendler: Northwood designs all components in-house while outsourcing early manufacturing
“We are a vertically integrated company. Like we design all of the different components. We have those outsourced and then you know, brought in. We're not you know, like making our own circuit boards at this point in time.”
Insight
Mendler: Data centers are ideal satellite ground stations due to existing infrastructure
“So data centers honestly become like a good spot to put them at because they have the power in the backhaul already set up.”
Disclosure
Mendler: Northwood avoids concrete pads to eliminate ground station permitting delays
“One advantage of the way that we're building our systems is we don't need to lay like a concrete pad, which can add Weeks to months to your timeframe, especially when you need to like do permitting and all that.”
Insight
Mendler: Ground infrastructure lets Northwood operate free from launch schedule constraints
“It's very convenient. We can work on our own schedule. I mean, we have different challenges cause you know, you're going to different countries and they have their own local regulatory regimes and all that, but we are not constrained by launch schedules, which…”
Disclosure
Mendler: Northwood is developing tech to track changing beam widths dynamically
“And we're excited through you know, the tech that we're developing to be able to track the beam with us. As it changes for more dynamic trajectories.”
Disclosure
Mendler: Government and defense contracts are a near-term focus for Northwood
“No, it's very near term. It's very real term. Very real term. Very, very real. Yeah. Across a number of different applications.”
Disclosure
Mendler: Northwood pursues satellite hardware partnerships rather than building in-house
“I think like so far we've been pursuing partnership there, but like if the need presented itself to stretch onto that side, we have amazing engineers that would be very capable of doing something like that.”
Bridgit Mendler