Episode 77: Adam Trumpour, Founder, Launch Canada Challenge

02/14/19 • 32 min

My guest this week is rocket expert Adam Trumpour. By day, Adam is a mild mannered engineer for Pratt & Whitney, by night he works on rockets and helps mentor students interested in rocketry. One of his latest endeavours is student focused Launch Canada Challenge. He’s also involved the $1M dollar Base 11 Space Challenge. Today Adam provides us an update on both projects.Listen in.

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Previous Episode

Episode 76: Sara Spangelo, CEO of Swarm Technologies

My guest this week is Sara Spangelo, co-founder and CEO of Swarm Technologies. The company is noteworthy for its innovation in developing a communication satellite 1/4 the size of a traditional CubeSat, which is 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm. To put it another way, and as my guest put it, the size of a grilled cheese sandwich.The company wants to build and launch 150 of these pico satellites, called SpaceBees, to create a global network to allow Internet of Things devices such as sensors in a farmers field to send small amounts of data back to servers for processing. Currently the company has 7 experimental satellites in orbit.Swarm is less than two years old and it's gotten more attention than perhaps they would have wanted. Last year could have been a company killing year for a startup as they ran afoul of the Federal Communication Commission when they not only launched 4 of their satellites without an FCC license, they also performed unauthorized weather balloon-to-ground station tests and unauthorized tests of satellite and ground station equipment.They settled with the FCC, paying a whopping $900,000 fine and they recently closed their Series A round of financing for $25M. The company wants to put past mistakes behind them and build the company out with its innovative technologies.

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Episode 78: Mike Greenley, MDA on Growing the Company Which Turns 50 This Month

MDA has been in business for 50 years now, which is no small achievement, and it’s not easy to keep a company growing for a long period of time.In today's SpaceQ podcast I speak with Mike Greenley, Group President of MDA.It’s been nearly a year since Mike was last on the show, and today we’ll discuss MDA celebrating its 50th anniversary this month and the changes at MDA and parent company Maxar since Mike joined the company last year.Companies go through quiet periods, and occasionally turbulent periods. This past year has been a somewhat turbulent period for parent company Maxar. The stock price has plummeted. The GEO satellite communication market hasn’t recovered and now some SSL assets are up for sale. A short seller attacked the company, the company lost its flagship WorldView-4 satellite, and now there are some shareholder lawsuits which could cause some additional problems. These are some hefty issues to deal with. With relative ease, Mike discusses these issues.There's also been another change at MDA, a subtle one, but one which we touched on when Mike joined the company last year. As a share of the overall MDA business, the defence portfolio is in the minority, but it is growing. And contracts from the Canadian Surface Combatant Program which will add upwards of 200 jobs, demonstrate how MDA is once again adapting its business model.Listen in.

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