Mendler: Northwood pursues satellite hardware partnerships rather than building in-house
Bridgit Mendler · Building Northwood and a ground station network for satellites | Bridget Mendler on TBPN April 23rd · Apr 24, 2025 · at 22:42
Bridgit Mendler, CEO and co-founder of Northwood Space, discusses whether Northwood builds onboard satellite communication hardware or focuses purely on ground infrastructure.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Bridgit Mendler
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…”
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.”
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”
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…”
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…”
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 …”