Via Satellite: SATELLITE 2022 is expected to spark many talking points as the satellite industry gets together in force to debate the future of the industry.

In this analyst roundtable, Via Satellite talks to Brad Grady, president and COO of NSR; Pacome Revillon, CEO of Euroconsult; Daniel Welch, co-founder and senior consultant for Valour Consultancy; and Siddharth Shihora, senior associate for PwC to get their major talking points for the show.

Geospatial World: Can you tell us about the current transformation in the space sector? In terms of the major transformations in the sector, the first one is the number of satellites. Just next year, we should have over 400 satellites in orbit delivering an extensive variety of data. This comes together with major agreements, an increasing level of maturity of data platforms in the Cloud, and an increasing number of automated process to add layers and facilitate the development of services for public and private end users.

Via Satellite: As the COVID-19 situation is improving around the globe, the cruise industry is emerging from a period of near-absolute inactivity. In the early days of the pandemic, contamination clusters onboard cruise ships made the headlines. Shortly after, travel restrictions were adopted throughout the world. This had a very strong negative impact on mobility markets worldwide, especially cruise. As cruises resume, one of the biggest challenges for the industry is to regain customers’ confidence in order to recover profitable fill rates of the vessels.

Constellations: The development of commercial operators led to new approaches to improve the productivity of infrastructures in space and on the ground to increase profitability.

MSUA: Even after more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the world is still fighting against the virus and its many variants. As a result, sanitary restrictions are still applied in several countries impacting the ability or easiness to travel by air, domestically and internationally. Hence, the international air traffic is struggling to recover its pre-COVID levels. On the other hand, the releases of lockdowns and other measures like ramped-up vaccinations taken at the country level have certainly helped partial recovery for at least the domestic air travel markets. In some countries like Russia and China, the domestic air traffic has already overpassed the pre-COVID levels. All in all, the recovery of the global aviation industry, and therefore of the In-Flight Connectivity market in general, is currently not expected before 2022 with disparities between domestic and international markets.

Via Satellite: The space segment has been undergoing a major transformation for a number of years now. Earth observation is moving towards a constellation approach, populating new orbit inclinations and altitudes and diversifying sensors. Connectivity-focused space systems are now invading the Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) orbit with broadband constellations and payloads in all orbits are offering more capacity and higher flexibility.

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