Bridgit Mendler, co-founder and CEO of Northwood Space, explains the technological paradigm shift toward cloud-style, software-defined ground communications.
“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 network, but it's much more like software defined and controlled kind of like modern internet infrastructure.”
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More from Bridgit Mendler
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…”
Bridgit MendlerApr 24, 2025▶ 0:26Building Northwood and a ground station network for satellites | Bridget Mendler on TBPN April 23rd
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.”
Bridgit MendlerApr 24, 2025▶ 4:19Building Northwood and a ground station network for satellites | Bridget Mendler on TBPN April 23rd
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”
Bridgit MendlerApr 24, 2025▶ 5:58Building Northwood and a ground station network for satellites | Bridget Mendler on TBPN April 23rd
AssertionNot 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…”
Bridgit MendlerApr 24, 2025▶ 21:09Building Northwood and a ground station network for satellites | Bridget Mendler on TBPN April 23rd
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 …”
Bridgit MendlerApr 24, 2025▶ 8:10Building Northwood and a ground station network for satellites | Bridget Mendler on TBPN April 23rd
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…”
Bridgit MendlerApr 24, 2025▶ 10:33Building Northwood and a ground station network for satellites | Bridget Mendler on TBPN April 23rd
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