New Satellite Architectures: On-board Processing, Optical Crosslinks and Interoperability

Tim Farrar has over 30 years consulting experience across the telecom and satellite industries, having worked for leading technical and strategy consultancies in both the UK and US. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge, and since 2002 has run his own consulting company, Telecom, Media and Finance Associates, Inc., based in Menlo Park, CA, which specializes in the technical and financial analysis of wireless and satellite ventures. Tim has worked for numerous operators, suppliers and investors, including several prominent Silicon Valley companies, on market analysis, business planning, product requirements specification and due diligence assignments across the satellite and telecom sectors.

He was President of the Mobile Satellite Users Association (MSUA) from 2006 to 2015 and from 2010 until 2014 served as an independent board member for NTS, Inc., a publicly traded CLEC, based in Lubbock, TX. Since 2016 he has been an independent director of Marlink, the largest independent distributor of satellite services to the maritime industry.

Michael is the CEO of NOVI.
Through his career, Michael has run businesses and companies across diverse sectors including aerospace, advanced materials, energy and electronics. He has served as an independent director at one public, NASDAQ-listed, and four private companies. He worked on the NASA space shuttle Super Light Weight Tank program and received a doctoral degree in materials engineering sponsored by the Air Force Office for Scientific Research. He is an Inventor named on 27 patents and author of 12 technical publications in peer reviewed journals.

Tom Barton is the CEO and Co-Founder of Antaris™. Prior to Antaris™, Tom served as the COO at PlanetLabs. He oversaw organizational development including the hiring of CTO Karthik Govindhasamy as well as the CFO, SVP of Marketing, and Chief Revenue Officer. During his tenure, the company launched the first large-scale imaging constellations and acquired the high-resolution satellite business from Google/TerraBella/Skybox. Tom has held multiple CEO roles, including Rackable Systems (ultimately acquired by HPE). Rackable delivered server and storage solutions to hyperscalers, including the first implementations of AWS EC2 and S3 cloud offerings. He took Rackable public in 2005, which was one of the technology industry’s most successful IPOs that year. Tom also held senior leadership roles at open-source pioneers Cygnus Solutions and Red Hat.

Robbie is the CEO and a co-founder at Sedaro, a digital twin software and solutions provider for aerospace and defense. Robbie leads product strategy for the Sedaro Digital Twin Platform and for Sedaro’s open-source software and standards. These technologies unlock a new, ecosystem-based approach to aerospace and defense modeling and a future that will be defined by increasingly complex and distributed systems.

Prior to founding Sedaro, Robbie was the first employee at Ibeos, where he led the development of instruments and subsystems for spacecraft headed to LEO, GEO, and the Moon. During his PhD, Robbie built small satellite instruments, developed simulation software at US and German government labs, and installed space science instruments in Antarctica. Robbie received both his bachelor’s degree and PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Virginia Tech.

Jeff Thornburg is the CEO of Portal Space Systems. He is a career space engineer, having held prestigious roles across the space and energy sector’s top commercial and governmental organizations. Thornburg’s career is a testament to his devotion to humanity’s advancement on and off Earth.

Thornburg started his career in the U.S. Air Force and earned his master’s in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. While stationed at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Thornburg contributed to groundbreaking programs, including performing the world’s first hydrogen full-flow staged combustion cycle engine demonstration.

Thornburg has held key roles in most of the private sector’s most prominent commercial space companies, including VP of propulsion engineering at SpaceX, director of mechanical engineering and manufacturing for Amazon’s project Kuiper, vice president of propulsion engineering at Stratolaunch, senior vice president of engineering at Agility Robotics, and chief of engineering at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

As SpaceX’s second-ever head of propulsion engineering, he architected and developed the Raptor Engine for the Starship and Starship Booster programs. He also oversaw the successful launches of six Falcon 9s and streamlined certification processes with government agencies like NASA and the U.S. Air Force.

Throughout his career, Thornburg has been recognized with awards from NASA and the Air Force, including a NASA Space Flight Awareness award, the NASA Made It Happen award, the NASA Stennis Space Center Propulsion Test Director’s Leadership Award, and an Air Force Research Laboratory Technical Program Manager of the Year.