SSTL was back in Paris again this year, with our exhibition booth providing a base for a busy few days of meetings and conversations with customers, partners and colleagues from across the international space sector.
Away from the stand, SSTL Managing Director Andrew Cawthorne joined the conference programme for a panel entitled “Smallsats, Big Ambitions: Manufacturing at the Pace of Innovation.”
The discussion explored a challenge SSTL knows rather well: how the satellite industry can build faster and at greater scale, without losing the engineering discipline, reliability and mission focus that space demands.
Andrew said: “World Space Business Week is always a highlight of the conference calendar for SSTL. It brings together customers, partners and industry leaders from right across the sector, and the conversations tend to be very focused on where the market is going and what we can actually do together.
“The pace of change in space makes those conversations more valuable than ever - particularly around how we manufacture faster, make better use of heritage and continue to deliver ambitious missions at sensible cost.”
Andrew also found time away from the conference programme to sit down with Laura Todd of SpaceWatch.Global for a Space Café conversation, discussing SSTL, the changing small satellite market and some of the opportunities ahead.
He also spoke with Kevin French of Talk Satellite for their Executive Interview series, continuing a conversation with an audience that has followed SSTL and the wider satellite industry for many years.
As ever, much of the value of World Space Business Week happened between the formal sessions: catching up with familiar faces, meeting new ones and comparing notes on where the industry is heading next.
And there was certainly plenty to talk about.