Space & Satellite Professionals International (SSPI) is starting their Opening the Final Frontier, a multi-week campaign that will feature videos, podcasts, live online conversations as well as a new issue of SSPI’s digital magazine, The Orbiter.
The campaign explores how enterprising companies in partnership with governments are putting into place the practical foundations and critical components of a thriving space economy reaching from LEO to cislunar space and beyond. Opening the Final Frontier is underwritten by Virgin Orbit.
The campaign begins today with a podcast interview with Virgin Orbit COO Tony Gingiss, made possible with support from Momentus Space. SSPI will feature videos on launch and orbital debris management in SSPI’s Better Satellite World series as well as several from Virgin Orbit on the same day. New content will be published weekly at this direct link…
About Opening the Final Frontier
Space really is the final frontier. Since Star Trek first crossed TV screens in 1966, we have believed that humanity’s destiny lies among the stars. And in the third decade of the third millennium, we are closer to that dream than ever before. Today, after decades of imagining the future, enterprising companies in partnership with governments are putting into place the practical foundations and critical components of a thriving space economy reaching from LEO to cislunar space:
- Drastically lower launch costs coupled with an accelerating cadence of launches.
- Horizontal launch systems that make access to space available to any nation with international airports.
- A boom in launch sites as national and local governments trigger economic development of spaceports for vertical and horizontal launch.
- Inter-satellite communications capabilities with the potential to turn satcom in LEO, MEO and GEO into a global mesh network offering massive bandwidth.
- In-space operations vehicles, fuel depots and manufacturing facilities that, still in their earliest stages, are creating completely new capabilities with commercial value.
Continued progress depends on finding solutions to the human-made problem of space debris. It is a challenge to policy as much as to technology, and to our ability to cooperate as well as compete. But here, too, companies and governments are creating more effective ways to monitor debris of all sizes, to agree on avoidance maneuvering and enforce de-orbiting protocols, and to develop fast and flexible systems to target the most dangerous debris and remove it from orbit. The same innovation that gradually created the space debris problem also offers the best hope of resolving it to keep open the roads to the final frontier.
“Our multi-week online campaigns are focusing interest on the mega-issues impacting our industry and the world,” said executive director, Robert Bell. “Opening the Final Frontier continues the online conversation started with Climate Sense and Untangling the Supply Chain earlier this year. After decades as an almost-invisible niche industry, space and satellite are now on the agenda of government and business leaders around the world.”