ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ

Dan Smoot discussed his career and work as CEO of in a special presentation at the University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder.

Smoot addressed the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences on Tuesday, Jan. 21, answering questions on his life, the future of space-based Earth imaging, and Maxar’s fleet of Earth observation satellites.

The company, based in Westminster, ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ, oversees the most advanced commercial Earth observation constellation, operates in 85+ countries, and employs over 2,200 people.

What’s it like launching a satellite?

Each one of these satellites costs anywhere between $200-300 million. We launched two in May. We launched another two in August. If all goes to plan, we’ll have two more in the February time frame. The new satellites will have a 30 cm resolution, giving us the ability to collect more than 6 million sq km of Earth imagery each day. That includes up to 15 revisits per day of some locations on Earth.

We have a satellite, that’s still in operation and about to get to 100,000 rotations around Earth, which is an amazing accomplishment.

How do you deal with cloud cover when collecting imagery?

Maxar is phenomenal at the planning side. There is a location in Latin America just outside Bogota, Colombia, where you can collect one image a year because of cloud cover. It’s crazy. You have to plan it.

The Korean peninsula is another high cloud cover area. We’ll get a task order and we have to plan it. When we’re supporting an intelligence mission where collecting an image is a “must,” we have a partnership with a company called which specializes in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. SAR allows you to see through clouds, identifying outlines of objects to give you a sense of what’s happening on the ground. We can then fly back over with our imagery and get a clear view. We have data scientists working on that all the time.

If you’re collecting thousands of new images a day, do people go through all of those manually?

We have more than 400,000 government and commercial users around the world, and with the advancements in AI and more importantly large language models, we’re moving into not just collecting imagery but actually producing data on change.

If we’re just delivering imagery at this massive scale, how do they actually know something has happened? We use an algorithm to tell you what changed. If you’ve ever seen an analyst looking through 100 different images, it’s painful. If I can tell you automatically what changed instead, I have a product.

What was your career path?

I’ve done just about every job under the sun. I was an engineer, then I was a sales guy. I ran a finance organization at one time. You learn everything through your career. When you think about what you’re going to do next, don’t ever think you need to go one path.

Life is about happenstance. I ran into somebody at a Christmas party who was a branch manager at IBM. I started talking about how I loved their logistic controls that helped pneumatic conveyance and she asked me to interview with her. I had no concept or clue that I’d become a systems engineer at IBM.

I got well known pretty quickly as a guy who fixes stuff. I just love fixing things. If somebody throws something really hard at you? Take it. Because you’re going to learn a ton.

Your undergraduate degree is in environmental studies. Does your passion for the environment come into play at Maxar?

We help monitor illegal mining. Illegal deforestation. Human trafficking. We actually worked with the Associated Press to stop slave-based fishing. There were people who had not seen land for almost 10 years out near Singapore. We tracked them. We stopped it.

How much of an issue is orbital debris?

I was at our Mission Operations Center the other day and alert came up: collision. There are 22,000 pieces of debris up there. It looks like the world’s worst air traffic control. What are you going to do? The engineer said we have 24 hours to shift our orbit slightly. By the way, when we say shift, it’s usually about 10,000 km. Operating the satellites is a 24-hour, all-the-time thing.

Aren’t you able to collect images of objects in space, too?

Yes. I thought I was fairly good at math until I understood we’re starting to take imagery of other satellites in orbit. We had someone launch and they couldn’t find their satellite. We knew the coordinates of about where it was. We’re moving 18,000 mph this way; they’re moving 18,000 mph that way. We nailed it. Got the image so clean we could tell they were spinning. We gave that back to the company and they were able to stabilize the satellite.

Trying to capture that moment is hard. It’s one thing taking a picture of the International Space Station, because you know where it is all the time. We don’t know where an adversarial satellite might be going. You have to figure out the calculus of how to do that. Non-Earth imaging is a fast growing business.

How do you deal with countries deploying anti-satellite technology?

GPS-denied environments are an issue. There are certain nations that have the ability to make high-megahertz pulses targeted straight up. Primarily they’re targeting drones, but they also can impact satellites. We have concept of operations (CONOPS) so as were going through those areas, we know how to handle it.

We’re also building solutions to these problems, mainly for drones. If you’re flying drones and you don’t have GPS, what happens? It just crash and burns. But what if you have a company that has a highly accurate, precise 3D map of the entire world? You take the 3D map and you can triangulate where that drone is based on the landscape. Do you need GPS anymore? No. It is a capability that Maxar just demonstrated on live drones to show they can fly right through GPS-denied environments.

Smoot visited Smead Aerospace as part of the Future Insights seminar series, hosted by Mark Sirangelo, entrepreneur-in-residence. This series brings aerospace leaders to campus to meet with students and discuss their careers and the future of industry.