 Okay, so thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. If you want to start by just introducing yourself, telling us a little about your work, that would be great. Sure. So my name is Katherine Munson. I am a Tufts alumnus. I work at a company called KSAT, Kongsburg Satellite Services. So I run our US office for KSAT. KSAT is a company that provides ground stations as a service. So for those not in the space industry, essentially what that means is that all of the satellites that are in orbit and then also the rockets that are getting satellites to orbit need to have a way to communicate back to Earth. So they need to share telemetry data, which is essentially the state of health of the rocket or the spacecraft, as well as whatever information that they're capturing. So satellites that are taking pictures of the Earth that you may have seen on your Google Chromecast or, you know, any time that there is any satellite imagery that's in a newspaper, all of that data when it's collected by the satellite needs to find a way back to Earth. So we provide that communications link from space to Earth through a series of radio waves currently, but actually the future is also including optical communications. So using lasers to communicate. So that's one of the kind of major things that we do at KSAT, but we also provide analytics based on satellite information. So we're looking at that satellite data, that satellite imagery, and we're helping folks extract information from it. So some of those use cases are oil spill detection. So being able to see is there an oil spill A and then B being able to prosecute and hold someone accountable or, you know, making an oil spill. Illegal fishing is another application. So we're looking at being able to control fisheries that would be outside of a terrestrial awareness. So once you're 50 miles off coast, you are kind of under the curvature of the Earth. So there's no way of getting a radio signal back. So it's very hard to monitor coastline that isn't directly on that coast. So illegal fisheries is one application. And then we also are doing a lot of work right now with Arctic monitoring. So some of that is helping ships figure out what is the right way to go across the northern pole and have a way that is not going to get them stuck in ice, but then also from the climate science perspective to be able to monitor how quickly is ice melting, where is it melting more quickly, and being able to provide some of those inputs for climate scientists. So that's kind of what we do at KSAT, but it's essentially we're working with satellite-based data. So this is obviously like a really interesting and important field of work, but I don't think a lot of people like understand what it looks like. So could you maybe explain what the day-to-day looks like at your at your role? Absolutely. So I think when I was a student at Tufts, I was majoring in international relations and I really was interested in defense policy. So I had a security concentration for the IR major and at that point in time I think I had the world view that the only way that you can do policy is if you work for the U.S. federal government and I quickly learned that that's actually not the case, but there's a huge amount of policy work that is driven by industry. So KSAT being a private company, we're a member of industry. So my day-to-day work, you know, spent a lot of time on the phone in coronavirus times. Before that I did a lot of international travel. So I probably was traveling between 50% of my time up to 75% of my time. So the space industry is very global. We work across the world. We have ground station locations, so big antennas, that we run at 23 different sites on every single continent. That includes a site up at Svalbard, which is it is the northernmost inhabited land mass in the world. So it's up at 70 degrees north, all the way down to Antarctica. So we're the only private company to operate in Antarctica. So we're working truly in a global environment, which means that in any given day I could be talking to customers who are located in any country in the world, as well as some of our host partners who operate those ground stations. And each of those people is also potentially impacted by policy. So each country with their own space, with their own jurisdiction can set their own space policy. So I have done quite a lot of work in the United States working with the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, as well as NOAA, which is the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. I believe that's right. Maybe it's agency. We'll have to double check that one. But so FCC and NOAA set a lot of space policy right now. So working with those folks as well to create policies that are going to protect people's use of radio frequency spectrum. So quite a lot of policy work happens from industry, and I guess that would be my big take home for students at Tufts, is you don't have to work for the State Department and the Defense Department to be involved in policy. So this is obviously a field that's always developing. So can you tell us a little bit about what sort of developments you've been most excited to see in the field thus far? Absolutely. So, you know, the field is not very old at all. So it's about 50 to 60 years old, depending on how you want to start measuring. So in a very short amount of time, right, there are people alive today who remember the very first satellite, which is Sputnik. So the entire field has developed in a very short amount of time. I would say that the most exciting thing in the last five years is really how commercially viable space has become. So before it was not a way, space was a very tough place to have a business unless you had big government contracts. So unless you were, you know, Boeing that was building the International Space Station for a big United States government customer, it was tough to make a business work, because it's so incredibly expensive to build something that is often either very small and very technically complex, and then launch it, which costs millions of dollars to buy a rocket, and then to keep it, you know, keep in communications as a hard engineering task. So it has been in the past very hard so that only governments were really space players. But what we've seen in the last five years is that the same technology that, you know, allows my cell phone to be this size and not, you know, a car phone that's an entire box has happened in the space community as well, where we're seeing folks are able to do a lot more with a lot smaller platform. And because that smaller platform is then rockets cost, they scale pretty exponentially with regard to mass. So if you have a smaller thing, you can launch it much less expensively, which means that universities can now launch CubeSats. High school is our launching satellites. And all that means is that people are getting more experience in space platforms and pushing the boundary of what we think was possible. So I think that's what's really exciting in the last five years is that there's a huge amount of growth, because people are experimenting because that experiment is now affordable in a way that it wasn't 10 years ago. So on the topic of the commercial space industry, obviously COVID-19 has had a large impact on all industries. So could you tell us a little bit about how it's affected the commercial space industry? It's a very good question. I think one of the things that was very humbling for me to remember is there is an entire segment of the space industry that is really focused on helping people communicate who don't otherwise have that type of infrastructure. So one example is a customer of ours called Iridium. And Iridium is a large constellation that's in a low Earth orbit. And what that means is that there are these satellites, they talk to the other satellites, so that if you are anywhere in the world, then you have an Iridium phone, you're able to use the Iridium constellation to communicate. So that type of infrastructure is increasingly important when folks are looking at providing healthcare to regions that have been greatly impacted by coronavirus, but would not have the same infrastructure to be able to support, you know, health services. So all of the telehealth type applications that we're seeing, all of that only works if you have a telephone. And those are the types of things that we, you know, that I living here in Boulder County, Colorado or living in, you know, the Boston metro, we take for granted, but there's so many parts of the world still that aren't connected. So space communications platforms allow those folks to be connected. So I think that's definitely one positive application. One of the other interesting things that we've been following very closely is there, some of our partners, a cart lab, or based down in New Mexico, they have been doing a lot of very interesting analysis and that showed up on the front cover of the New York Times by looking at, you know, when people stayed home, how, how did the atmosphere respond? How did, you know, looking at the climate science of folks not driving, you know, buildings not running their air conditioning. So that's also been a very interesting application from the COVID-19 times is really finally having an interesting beta test of, you know, here's what normal human activity looks like. If it scales way back, how does the earth respond and how quickly? So that's been a really fascinating data center that the folks that they part lab have been looking at. And then shifting gears a little bit, what does it like to be a woman in a male dominated field and how has that shaped your experience both professionally and socially? It's a good question in that I think. So a mentor of mine, actually a Sherman who used to run the IGL once said, respect everyone and be in awe of no one. And I have really taken that to heart over my career in that everyone is a person. So, you know, you may not like someone, you may have personality differences, but they're a human being regardless of how impressive they may seem on paper or what role or title they may have. I think in some ways, you know, I when I was at Tufts, I was studying security. There are certainly I have very good female friends who are also in that security concentration. I went on to do a fellowship at the Pentagon where my boss was a woman and her boss was a woman, which was actually quite rare as I look back on it. But in all of those circumstances, it is safe to say that it was male dominated, right? And if you say, it really don't actually quite like that framing. So there are more than 50% of the people in that group were identifying as male. And I guess I don't, I've never really thought about the number so much because I've always been able to find a sense of community regardless of whether it's 50% or it's 40%. So that's maybe a piece of the advice is you see what you choose to see in some ways. So I choose to see that I've had amazing female mentors, you know, Heather at the IGL is a fantastic female mentor, for example. And there are, I would say in the space community in particular, there is a very strong support network for women. So I have now been part of two different, you know, groups in my career. One when I lived in San Francisco was the Bay Area Women in Space Organization. There's another very strong organization here in Colorado run by a former colleague of mine, Carolyn Bell. And both of those groups provide fantastic friendship opportunities, fantastic career opportunities in terms of networking, in terms of support. So in many ways, I think actually having that type of group is an advantage. Because there isn't a male space industry group. There just is the space industry. So I think in many ways it's, if you look for the silver lining, it's usually there. And in particular, I think in aerospace, there are incredible women who are running companies. I mean, Gwen Shotwell is a good example of running SpaceX. There are quite a few others that I could name as well. But I really don't see that we have so much of a gender diversity issue in the space industry. What I would say we absolutely have, and there are good people working on ways of helping change this issue, is there is a demographic diversity issue in the fact that most of the space industry is white. So there are not very many people of color represented in the space industry period. And there are especially not very many people of color represented in space leadership. So that I do think is a big problem that the space industry needs to grapple with. Because the things that we're trying to do are hard. And if you don't have the best of everyone, you're not going to be successful. So there are some scholarships that folks are working on to help provide support for folks looking to join the industry. Because I do think that's a real problem. You know, I can look to Gwen Shotwell and see an example of a woman who runs a company that is incredibly successful. If I were a person of color, it would be a lot harder to find that example. It's really interesting. And then over the course of your career, how have you seen international policy change in relation to space? That's a good question as well. There's a good example I suppose I can draw from. So before I was at KSAT, I was at a company called Spire Global, which launches cube satellites that are about the size of a wine bottle. And they are looking for weather data. When Spire was started, it was founded in San Francisco. And at that point in time, the policy was that U.S. companies were not allowed to export U.S. satellites, which prevented them from launching with rockets such as the PSLV, which is the Indian it's a big workhorse for the Indian Space Research Organization. And so at that point in time, at Spire, we made the decision to move the manufacturing of the satellites from the United States to Scotland. And once they were UK, you know, UK satellites, they could be exported to India, which allowed us to launch on the Indian rocket, which was a fraction of the cost of the options that were currently available in the U.S. So this was before Falcon 9 was really kind of in a good cadence. That one decision essentially caused the United States. And we did a lot of advocacy work as well to say, hey, look, we're an American company. We want to launch in the United States, but there isn't a competitive market. There are not enough launch opportunities yet for us to be able to only launch in the United States. And that type of advocacy then caused the rules to be rewritten. So I do think that space industry is lucky in that there are some very, very dedicated, intelligent people in the industry who are willing to work with regulators. And I give the regulators a huge amount of credit in the United States because likewise, they're willing to listen to industry and try to understand the problem set. So we've seen a lot of change in terms of, you know, U.S. companies can now launch with just about anyone's rocket. You can launch on the Soyuz and the Russian rockets. You can launch with the Indians. And that's a change in just the last six years. There's also been quite a lot of change with regard as to how the security of satellites is managed. So before the security barriers were incredibly high because the expectation was that if you were launching a satellite that you were probably a government and that you were getting government quality data. But now when you have high school students building CubeSats, that's not the goal, right? They're not looking to try to spy on North Korea. They're looking to try to understand how do you build, you know, how do you do the engineering? How do you do the mechanical, the electrical engineering to make this all the subsystems work? And they still need to be able to launch as well and have a set of rules that applies to them. So there's been also a lot of good policy work that's been done to create an entire track of licensing for experimental satellites or tech demos, which has allowed a lot of people to try a lot of different things and not have to meet, you know, an incredibly expensive and also a pretty tough regulatory bar in terms of, you know, having a network operation center that set up industry best practice. And that's not even to get into all the moon policy, which is a whole nother conversation that we could talk about that is happening right now. So along with that, what do you see as the next development in the global space race that's ongoing? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there are kind of two pieces that are happening in parallel. One is the increasing commercialization of space. So people who are running businesses. Some of those, again, are pretty straightforward. So telecommunications, earth imaging, you know, any type of science application that you can sell that data potentially to a finance sector, mining sector. But then we're also now starting to see some of these businesses that were maybe a bit too early five years ago, start to look more viable. So folks who are doing in orbit servicing, which essentially means you have one satellite, you have another satellite that comes up that robotically docks onto the other satellite. Keep in mind that these satellites are moving in incredibly quick speed and is able to do maintenance or is able to give it more fuel to be able to adjust its orbit. So that's an entire set of businesses that wasn't viable five years ago that is now starting to be viable. All the way out to folks who are still talking about mining asteroids to be able to do mineral extraction. So there's quite a lot of interesting work on the policy perspective to be done with regards to how does ownership work in space and who's jurisdiction is it to show ownership. A lot of that also applies to the moon. So NASA has now publicly said last week that there is water on the moon. Hey, that's fantastic. That means a lot of things might be a lot easier than folks maybe had worried that they would be. But if you start building things on the moon and you take things away from the moon, do you own it? Just the United States own it? Who owns it? So there's quite a lot of interesting research and policy I think to be done with regards to ownership rights in space. And all of that is going to impact whether or not there's a business case to be closed that allows people to invest the millions hundreds of millions of dollars that it will take in order to make some of these projects become real. And then on that topic of commercialization, what do you believe will be the next influential space technology, like for example, GPS that's going to impact the lives of like the average person? Oh, that's a good question. I do think that there and maybe the average person is not who's going to be impacted, but they're the telecommunications constellation. So Star Link being an example, one web being another example, the ability to connect people who do not live on the grid is going to be very important for those people, right? So it may not affect me living in Boulder County. But if I lived even, you know, 10 miles up the canyon, I wouldn't be able to get internet. And then I wouldn't be able to do my job. So I think it will very much help create an infrastructure that is a lot more dynamic. That's particularly helpful in places where there are infrastructure damage. So that could happen in any type of hurricane and storm situation. It could happen from civil unrest in places where governments control the terrestrial fiber. This now provides an, it provides a more independent network for people to be able to communicate. So I do think these telecommunications network is going to, networks are going to have huge impact for the people that need them. So for those of us who are comfortably using terrestrial fiber, we probably don't notice as much. But there's a huge percentage of the world's population that doesn't have access to that infrastructure. And then finally, this is a pretty broad question. But what do you think is the future of international relations in space? For those who are interested in getting involved in the field, like what can they expect in the future? Ooh, I wish I knew the answer to that question. There is so much that has not been decided yet because it hasn't yet been possible. And that is a very exciting position to be in. I have found my home in the space industry because there are so many people here who are incredibly dedicated, who are incredibly passionate, who are incredibly intelligent. The challenges are very tough from a technical perspective. They're also tough from a commercial financial perspective because it's expensive to do all of these things. I think there is a huge amount of opportunity because everything that is done right now essentially creates precedent. That is not true in so many different domains. So you can spend an entire career looking up, you know, various policies for things that have happened on earth and you would have to deal with those precedents and you would have to change those precedents in order to make change. In the space industry, you just have to show up because every single day people are doing different things and trying to figure out how to make it all work. And it's going to take all of the various sectors to make it work. It takes government, it takes, you know, the regulators, it takes industry. And so there's a huge atmosphere of collaboration because it's never been done before. So I would say for folks who are excited about having an impact, the space industry is really just getting started in many ways. And so just by nature of being here and being part of the discussion, you're having an impact because we're all doing it for the first time. Great. Thank you so much for having this discussion with me. This was really informative and interesting. And we really appreciate your input and expertise. Well, thank you. I am super excited to see more Tufts alumni in the space industry. Pretty much every space company that I know of is hiring right now. So for those folks who are seniors or juniors and looking for career opportunities, definitely check out any of the websites of any of the major space companies. It is an incredible time of growth and Tufts students I think are uniquely prepared to be able to look at the world and look at problems. And instead of seeing those borders or barriers, the opportunity. That is really great to know for all of those future graduates. So thank you again for your time. We really appreciate it.