Ashley Mastronardi: I’m joined by bell ringer Stewart Bain, founder and CEO of NorthStar Earth & Space. Welcome to the New York Stock Exchange.
Stewart Bain: What a great pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Ashley Mastronardi: Such a pleasure to have you. What was it like to ring the closing bell today?
Stewart Bain: A little bit surreal.
Ashley Mastronardi: Yeah. Have you ever been up at the podium?
Stewart Bain: No, I’ve never been to the podium before, and it was a really great experience, and I really enjoyed it very much.
Ashley Mastronardi: Yeah. All right. So you started trading October 2nd.
Stewart Bain: October 2nd.
Ashley Mastronardi: What has that process been like? What was it like getting here?
Stewart Bain: Quite remarkable.
Ashley Mastronardi: Yeah.
Stewart Bain: I mean, quite a remarkable experience. Quite an experience with the team, the legal team, the finance team, the accountants, all the regulatory work that has to go into it, and the filing. I think it was such a great transition for us as an enterprise to go through that and to understand, you know, the responsibility of being traded on the public market and the transparency and the governance that comes with it, that I think aligns very much with our clients and the folks that we serve.
Ashley Mastronardi: Can you walk us through the NorthStar business?
Stewart Bain: Yeah, sure. You start with the fact that right here, where we’re standing, every financial transaction goes through a satellite. So our entire economy runs through satellites. Our communications, our Earth observation, and of course, military readiness runs through satellites.
So we took upon ourselves the task of solving a problem. How do you monitor all of the activity that’s going on in every orbit that is near Earth? And it goes out to more than 36,000 km above the surface, or 36,000 miles above the surface of the Earth. So that volume of space that you want to monitor is 200,000 times the size of all the oceans of the world combined. And so it’s a big volume.
So we said, well, how will we monitor it? And then we came up with an architecture to do that. But mostly what we do is algorithms and software and processing of imagery to be able to deliver intelligence and information to our clients, so they can predict where threats are coming from, where collisions might be, or when somebody is deliberately doing bad acting in space.
Ashley Mastronardi: Was this a gap in the space market?
Stewart Bain: I think so, very much. Certainly when we started, certainly when we came up with the idea, and I think it’s still there. And so it’s like anything. A lot of people can say they’re doing space domain awareness. That’s the term we use to describe what we do. But at the end of the day, there’s a big checklist of things that you need to be doing that are embedded in our architecture and in our services, that if you’re not doing that, you’re not filling that technical gap.
And there’s also a gap in terms of, that’s a lot of checklist to check off as a company, and we just took the time to do that. So it took time, but it gave us a head start, believe it or not, in taking that amount of time to put up such a complete, coherent picture of what’s going on in space.
Ashley Mastronardi: When you say there are bad actors in space, what are bad actors doing in space?
Stewart Bain: Things we don’t want. So getting close to somebody, getting their satellite close to somebody else’s satellite. Well, you’ve probably heard of anti-satellite testing. So, you know, taking down another satellite in space, grappling or grabbing another satellite that you don’t own. Bad activity in space is, you know, threats, cybersecurity, cyberattacks, jamming, getting near to somebody and then putting a frequency that’s very strong into somebody that’s transmitting and essentially jamming their signal. So that’s bad. That’s bad behavior.
So what you want to know, before they get close enough to do anything, is that they’ve changed their orbit. And we pick it up when it happens, attribution to the person that’s changed orbit, and then provide that information to, usually, military and security people, so that they can take appropriate action.
Ashley Mastronardi: Are those your customers, military and security?
Stewart Bain: Absolutely. Well, we also have commercial clients, commercial operators, governments. But mostly, right now, the lead on all of this, on space domain awareness, is government military services, both within Canada, within the United States, in Europe, and within the NATO allies.
Ashley Mastronardi: Stewart Bain, founder and CEO of NorthStar Earth & Space, thanks for joining us at the New York Stock Exchange.
Stewart Bain: Thank you for having me.
Ashley Mastronardi: And congratulations.
Stewart Bain: Thank you so much.
