S&P Global Inc. (SPGI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] [Operator Instructions] So just to get us started, what are we talking about? And why are we talking about it now? We would be remiss if we didn't at least talk about the SpaceX IPO earlier this year, that brought a lot of fresh attention to the space technology market for a lot of different reasons. It was a huge market event, catalyzing the overall IPO market in the U.S., a total of [ 146 billion ] of common stock was offered in U.S. IPO in the first 6 months of this year, dwarfing the 26.46 billion offered in the first half of 2025 and the $42.09 billion offered all of last year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. Of the first half total this year, $86 billion was raised by the SpaceX IPO, accounting for more than half of the overall total. This webinar is by no means going to be all about SpaceX, but we just can't ignore the impact that, that company had on the space technology market and the interest around it. That's also true of the M&A, not just the IPO market. The space technology market has seen 33 -- sorry, $338 billion of investment in the first half based on 193 transactions. This includes both M&A and fundraising. That's up from just under $22 billion from 133 transactions in the first half of 2025. Once again, SpaceX is playing a major role here with its $250 billion combination with Elon Musk X AI or now SpaceXAI and then some of its other follow-up transactions more recently. But SpaceX or the space story goes so far behind SpaceX's Mega IPO and its mega-M&A deal. It's also about how competitors are turning to M&A to compete with SpaceX, which is the market leader in both satellite broadband and rocket launch capacity. Amazon is racing to catch up with the LEO constellation. And in mid-April, it bought the mobile satellite services provider, Globalstar, for over $11 billion. The deal, which can largely be viewed as a spectrum play, we'll integrate Globalstar's satellite operations, infrastructure and globally operated mobile satellite service spectrum licenses into Amazon satellite network, Amazon LEO, and enable the deployment of direct-to-device services, D2D services starting in 2028. Then in June, Rocket Lab agreed to buy Iridium for $8 billion combining Rocket Labs launch business with the Iridium's mobile satellite network. And so we've got all of the deal activity that is really designed around these companies positioning themselves to better compete with SpaceX and getting their satellite networks up there, getting that launch capacity up and seeing if they can play catch up. But before we get too deep into these different constellations and why each was attractive, I want to hand it over to my colleague, Eli, to walk us through some definitions of terminology. And then she'll hand it off to Johan and John to get us started.

thank you so much. Okay. So to dive into the space economy, we figured we should probably talk about kind of setting the scene for what we're actually looking at. So hopefully, you can see on the slide, we've got a bit of a diagram showcasing. Some of the key terminology and some of this might be familiar to our listeners and if not awesome, great, if it is a review, take it as such. But we want to talk about in this webinar, mostly this focus on orbit. So you might hear some terms such as low earth orbit or LEO right? That is on the left of your diagram. And you can see that usually, that's consisting of satellites for communications, earth observation, scientific research as an orbital space, it's very full and very busy. So you'll hear the term LEO quite a bit. We also have some other orbits that we might be discussing. So we've got our Medium Earth Orbit, which usually consists of some navigation satellites such as those found in GPS. And then we've also got geostationary orbits, so those would be communications, broadcasting, weather satellites and anything that you want good coverage within that orbital sphere. Some other terms that we want to bring up. We have this as a region between Earth and Lunar Orbits, as the new space economy kind of grows, this area is becoming more and more important. We're talking in transportation, communications, logistics, how do we interact within space as a whole, so not just terrestrially, as we go to the moon as we build out some of our capabilities there, right, how do we focus on lunar space and expand that? And then, of course, on your far right, we've got Lunar Orbits. There's a couple that we're going to talk about. We've got low lunar orbit and there's near near-rectilinear halo orbits as well, as we develop the space economy and move towards the moon in a bigger way, lunar orbits are going to play just as big of a role as our earth orbits play for us today, right? We're going to need satellites, we're going to need communication. And so all of those are important to keep in mind. We've also got the lunar service. While we aren't going to discuss it as much in this webinar, it's a key part of the eventual new space economy. So that would be lunar exploration, space mining, research stations even tourism. And along the bottom of the slide, you can see some of the reasons why each of these reasons -- regions matter, sorry. So we've got communications, navigation earth observation satellites, right? We talk about weather and monitoring it. That's what a lot of the satellites that we see today have been kind of working on. We're going to see an expansion of that. We've got space transportation for that cislunar space area, the lunar economy, which fits into this new space economy, and of course, driving a lot of this, in addition to economics is science and exploration. We love exploring space. We're using it for science for exploration, but also to feed back into the existing terrestrial economy. So we've got this lovely give and take there. So any time you hear some of these terms, right, this is what we mean. This is kind of the scope of our new space economy, not comprehensive, but hopefully a good setting of the scene. And I'm actually going to pass it back over to my colleague, Johan, who's going to talk about some of the differences between not just the new space economy, but how it compares to this older space economy that we might have seen previously. Johan?

Thank you, Eli, for setting the stage. As you mentioned, the new space economy. That's what we're talking about. And how is it different from the old. Looking at it, just a very brief historic overview. These are -- I think in my life and my parents life even, got you up in the middle of the night, the things that are landing on the moon. That's why you bought it television and watch these. Obviously, this early space rate was dominated by the U.S. and the USSR with national space programs, organizations like NASA, Roscosmos. And in Europe later, the European Space Agency, with the big defense primes as the primary contractors that could build like the space shuttle but they had very high launch cost, enormous, massive rockets, the space shuttle or whichever launch vehicle, bringing up huge satellites into geostationary orbits, primarily focused at weather information communication satellites for -- so in Europe, we could see like American television shows, but also like the navigation systems. Ellie just mentioned GPS, which is just the U.S. version, the type of satellite GNSS, global navigation system satellite. GPS is the U.S. version GLONASS, the Russian version. And some of these Russian navigation satellites are already up to 50 years old and still operational, more or less. [ Baidu ] is the Chinese version. And then in Europe, we have the Galileo satellites but it was like primarily dominated by high launch cost and up to as much as 300 per kilogram. If we're talking about the new space economy, we see that emerge in the early 2000 as we begin to move towards more reusable rockets, the foundation of SpaceX. First, private space, like missions, smaller satellites bring down the launch cost. So it opens up to new commercial opportunities. And generally speaking about the new space economy. I'm seeing 3 primary drivers, which I highlighted in 2019, 2022 and this year, the IoT satellites, the Russia, Ukraine war and this year, the Orbital data center push. As cost goes down and the use cases increased the number of satellites has increased significantly during the last decade. And I'll hand it over to John to look at the numbers in the next section.

My team is putting together a series of reports on satellite broadband next month. And so what I did is I went through those 3 reports that will be available to our subscribers and kind of plugged out some of the more interesting tables, I thought to kind of talk about what Johan as the new space economy. So as we've mentioned, I'm going to be focused mostly on satellite broadband. We do have a report on DTD. And then another one on regulatory threats in addition to the opportunities. The TLDR with regulations is that compared to terrestrial broadband operators, satellite operators have very little red tick to get up and running nowadays, which is -- which is kind of interesting and gives them a little bit of a late-mover advantage in a way. So Ellie LEO and GEO, I went on into the Kagan archive yesterday, and I was wondering when satellite broadband started. And our first numbers were in 1998. 23,000 satellite broadband customers at the time those services use geo, geostationary satellites, which are anchored to their position in the sky. So for example, just envision where you're sitting right now as you watch this webinar, there's a satellite above your head. As the earth spins that satellite still above your head, morning and day. These satellites, they're 10,000 miles plus above the earth that impacts the speed you get in the broadband and also the latency. And the new version of satellite broadband launched around 2020, including these LEO satellites. And these things are only about 100 miles above the ground. It's very close to the earth, and not -- they're not -- they're not like anchored to the earth. They're flying at 18,000 miles an hour above us over our heads. It's actually a pretty cool website called satellitemaps.space. You can kind of find where you live, zoom in and they track the StarLink satellite. You can see how fast 18,000 miles an hour is. It's pretty shocking to see that. But 100 miles above your heard, you can get a lot better speeds, a lot lower latency. So it kind of kind of change things for satellite broadband. And Johan mentioned Sputnik. and sputnik until Y2K, we went from 1 to 700 satellites. And as the costs have come down and the new space economy has kind of emerged since 2000, we've added over -- I think, that number is just from orbitalradar.com. It's more like 17,000 satellites in space right now. So it's ramped up. I mean you talked about a hockey stick of growth. This is kind of quantifying how fast and how many more satellites there are now. And about 2/3 of those satellites belong to Starlink alone. Digging in a little bit to the components of these LEO operators, the current constellation is -- or as of March across the big ones, there's about 10,000 here. and their total plan that they've got approval from to eventually put up in space. And that hockey stick is not stopping anytime soon basically is kind of the takeaway here. This also in the bar chart kind of underscores the scale at which Starlink and Amazon LEO are going to have when we just look at these LEO satellites orbiting currently and in the future. So shifting gears a little bit, looking at back on earth, if we look at the broadband market in the U.S. in 4 different buckets: cable broadband, telco, which includes fiber and DSL, satellite, which is what we're talking about and fixed wireless. And Fixed wireless has been the major growth story in the United States since 2020. And I think in the last couple of years, satellite is not becoming another growth story. So again, back in '98, it started modest, and it never really cracked 2 million subscribers up until about 2020. And now we have -- just in the last year, if you look at that market share table down there, satellite has gone from 2% share to over 3% share. in the United States just based on Starlinks growth alone. The next slide digs in a little bit more to the components in the U.S. for satellite broadband. You've got the 2 legacy operators. And then, of course, Starlink ramping up on the left is total subscribers on the right is net additions by quarter. Starlink really ramped up recently compared to their competitors. Looking at the economics a little bit on this line chart on the left here, this is average revenue per user per month for broadband services. That blue line that starts out in '23 is the highest. That's just Starlinks ARPU, and you can kind of follow that line as it falls to the right and down through 2026. And you kind of envision, okay, they're competing for market share by holding down their price. Now the other 4 lines are the other 4 broadband technologies, which have basically tracked inflation for the most part. I think things starting to soften up last year as the culmination of StarLink and fixed wireless, led to what I call the broadband price war last year. This is now no longer a low-hanging fruit market. It's pretty saturated. And leading up to the IPO, StarLink rates in the U.S. were as low as $30 a month, which is an incredible discount compared to what the competitors we're offering. I think they still have some $30 a month service offerings, but on the table on the right is looking at the economics of the SpaceX connectivity division, which is basically Starlink. And they're getting a good profit margin already in terms of EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA in the 60% range in 2025. On the next slide, this kind of underscores -- these are the top 10 countries in the world by broadband penetration like satellite penetration. And there's 2 takeaways here. Number one is it's not a primary connected connection method for broadband anywhere. I mean the biggest adoption rate is in [indiscernible]. And so it's not like the leading broadband method anywhere. The other takeaway here is, I think 8 of these top 10, if you look at the countries involved, U.S., Australia, Russia, Canada, these are geographically large countries with the population spread out, which really kind of hits home to what satellite broadband sweet spot was. It's really good for rural area and rural connectivity. And the reason is because running wires, whether they be fiber or DSL or cable to remotely populated areas, the return on investment just isn't there for a lot of companies. I've heard some companies say it's as high as 100 years until they get that money back from digging a trench and running a line and connecting the home, whereas you put satellites up and you connected those homes automatically as long as they have a line of sight to the Sky, there's no trees or mountains in a way. I did because I covered wireless for 15 years. I was curious about what the spectrum map looks like for the big 3 broadband operators in the U.S. And Starlink, ViaSat and Hughes, they have far more megahertz worth of spectrum than the terrestrial wireless operators. I think if you look at Starlink 15,000 total megahertz is about 15 x one of the big 3 wireless operators has in terms of low and mid-band spectrum. They have about 1,000 megahertz to run your smartphones and also this fixed wireless technology. The biggest difference is these guys all share Ku-band spectrum. Now the wireless operators, they buy at auction and they pay a nice premium to have access to spectrum chunks that's just their they don't share it at all. We're looking for simple ratios to make at Kagan. And one of the things I kind of looked at here was, well, how many subscribers per satellite in orbit are these big 3 operators dealing with. And that's the graphic on the right there. And I kind of went through for Starlink and tried to count the satellites in orbit above the Lower 48 in Hawaii and Alaska. And it was about 200. I saw yesterday, someone had estimated it was more like 500 satellites above those countries that could be in the range of your home connection. And so -- but anyway, using my more conservative 182 satellites, you divide that by 3 million subscribers, it's only 17,000 subscribers per satellite for Starlink, and that really kind of underscores a big difference between LEO and GEO just in terms of the volume of satellites we're talking about here, with LEO compared to the legacy satellite broadband services. As Sarah mentioned earlier, there's been a couple of big satellite deals, again, thinking of the ratio to kind of compare these guys to looking at LEO and GEO. It's kind of a mixed bag right now in terms of Total deal value divided by its satellites acquired. We do this a lot for towers for wireless communication companies, but there's a big tower deal, we give an average of value per tower and it's more like $200,000 to $1 million per tower. Compared to here, we have -- it's in the millions per satellite acquired and the 2 deals from this year so far are definitely ranking up at the top of this table. Just kind of underscoring just how popular this. It's a good story right now, and it's a hot space. So the deals are pretty expensive. And my final slide, this one is a little bit of a head scratcher for me. But so let's start with the bar chart on the right, that is the cost to build a terrestrial communications tower for smartphone connection and for fixed wireless, about $0.5 million. to build a tower in the United States, and that doesn't see -- and the red tape, the costs involved with -- and the time involved to get approval with local state county et cetera, et cetera, to build your tower, it can take many years to get approval and build these things. And the accountants say, okay, we're going to amortize this asset at a 30-year cadence. I think that's -- a lot of us have 30-year mortgages. It's kind of a real estate business kind of makes sense. I think if you maintain your tower properly, that tower can last forever. I mean Eiffel Tower is over 120 years old. They maintain it. They make sure it's not rusting that thing will last forever. So shifting gears now and looking at satellite. Well, I was curious about -- for those satellites launched, on average, what does it cost? I'm looking at V3, which StarLink just launched last week, some test launches for this. So looking forward a little bit for all those LEOs up there that Starlink, it's about $1.4 million to build and to launch and get these things in orbit per satellite. So it's a lot more than a terrestrial tower. But the thing that confuses me a little bit is that the accountants say the amortization schedule is just 5 years for these things. After 5 years, the life span of that LEO satellite has -- we can bring it back through the atmosphere and let it burn up, we don't need that satellite anymore. The economics of that is a little bit confusing to me. And I think what Johan mentioned earlier about the cost. This $1.4 million per satellite is not set in stone. It's going to keep coming down, and that might make this make a little bit more sense. So -- but it is kind of interesting to think of none of these wireless operators are burning down a tower after 30 years of operation, they can use them a lot longer than that. And so there's an economic question here, but then there's also a little bit. There's definitely an environmental concern with how many hundreds of satellites are going to start falling through the atmosphere and burning up and hitting birds and adding to pollution and things like that. So on that note, I'm going to switch gears and pass the microphone back to Johan.

Thank you, John, for that introduction. You primarily talked about communication satellites. In the introduction, I mentioned the IoT satellites as a push for the first wave of expansion. And roughly since 2019, we've seen dozens of new start-ups focusing on small satellites in low-earth orbit to serve those IoT use cases based on low-bandwidth communication protocols such as LoRa 1, NB-IoT and some proprietary protocols. What we've put on this slide is that we've been monitoring the adoption of some of these use cases in our 451 Research, voice of the enterprise, the OT perspective survey. We have monitored the adoption of satellite technology by enterprises. And especially in the oil and gas sector, already 67% of respondents indicate they leverage satellite connectivity. And of these, like 2/3, monitoring remote assets is by far the most popular use case followed by several environmental use cases. And asset tracking is mentioned by 30% of oil and gas companies primarily focusing on locating like very expensive equipment that tends to get lost and someone can't find it. But if we talk about these IoT satellites, we've seen many startups come into play like 2019, 2021. The difference is compared to the old navigation satellites and communication satellites in geostationary orbit. These are operate in low earth orbit. And they are a lot smaller and therefore, also a lot cheaper. But compared to the GLONASS satellite operating for 50 years. John just mentioned like the amortization 5 years life expectancy, in low earth orbit, the cube sats has become the standard. And Cube sat refers to cubes of 10 x 10 x 10 centimeters in different configurations. So you can have a 2U for you or a 6U satellite configuration totaling the number of 10 x 10 X 10 cubes. But obviously, those are lot lighter than the old mega satellites that operate in geostationary orbit. But we've been tracking those companies, those IT startups for several years. And we saw a myriad of startups entering to different use cases. Each launching with an idea the specific use case that gained some traction, monitoring fishing boats in Indonesia or herd kettles on the Argentinian planes or pipelines in Siberia. And many of these start-ups stay launched their own proprietary constellation or at least they filed their plans with the FCC spectrum applications. So earlier, John mentioned roughly 15,000 active satellites. But looking back at the forecast, we did in 2023, we saw that the total application for spectrum amounted to over 100,000 satellites by 2033. And since we're only 3 years into that decade forecast, the numbers are falling short of the FCC filings, particularly SpaceX aimed at [ 42,000 ] by 2030, still a little under 10,000. So they're falling short on their own ambitions. In many cases, the business case proved hard. Some of the start-ups pivoted, abandoned their own constellation plans, piggybacking on other constellations or just refocus to the specific use case data collection. And since the starting of the war in Ukraine, we've seen next drive emerge. spy satellites, of course, have been the exclusive domain of national governments, departments of defense. During the war in Ukraine that shifted. Military on both sides started using commercial observation satellites. So whether it's Hyperspectral imaging, synthetic aperture radar or just high-resolution optical satellites to just assess troop movements, even identified targets, Starlink became essential for drone navigation. And just the military use of commercial satellites, another trend emerged. Those private citizen started using Maxar planet ISI, satellite for open source intelligence to support Ukrainian army in identifying targets or simply to confirm Battlefield claims or investigate rocket damage on civilian targets. Currently, we're in 2026, and we're seeing a major push in FCC filings for orbital data centers. And the primary post, I think, is the debate that's going on by the proliferation of AI and the power consumption of AI data centers and the availability of energy. So the immediate reflex is like, okay, we got space in space, and it's gold. So we don't have cooling issues. We don't have CO2 emissions. We can directly capture energy from the sun. So we solve the energy problem, but it's a little bit more complicated than that, and Ellie will go into that later. But the FCC filings this year they've been accumulating to pretty much of a perfect galactic storm with, obviously, Starlink Space Act's being most ambitious, again, announcing plans for 1 million orbital data centers; Blue Origin, 51,000. And there's a couple in the bottom that are still in development, don't have finite numbers on the constellation plans. There is a very small red dot on the left-hand side, Kepler Communications, which should be even smaller, so small, you wouldn't see it. So it's a bit larger than comparative, but Kepler Communications is an example of a start-up that has an orbital data center in space. But to put that into perspective, its first orbital data center has 44 GPUs and compare that to a hyperscale campus in context like the IT satellite ambitions, there is a difference between FCC spectrum applications and what will actually be built. So are we chasing stellar mirages or dreams. We're seeing definite use cases for space edge computing. So some of the drivers that we're seeing, the energy constraints, cooling, CO2 emissions might look to be an answer. But Ellie will tell you that's more complicated. Because on the [ inhibitor ] side, we see the same things emerge as [indiscernible], the energy constraints, cooling, radiation shielding, orbital add to that. If we're looking at the trends and challenges, we see the vertical integration that Sarah mentioned, Amazon, Iridium, Rocket labs, it's not just satellite companies buying competitors operating in the same space. But it's space companies buying capabilities in different orbital plane. So Starlink for instance, operating in low earth orbit, buying larger communication satellites in geospatial orbit or it's the vertical integration that concentrates the entire technology stack and not just the satellite capabilities, but also the launch capabilities, the rocket technology or robotic engineering companies for autonomous operations, for instance, for in-orbit servicing as these data centers could have a life span of 5 years, they would need servicing. But one of the trends that we primarily see emerging space edge, compute, as all these earth observation satellites capture more and more images, high-resolution images of earth. It makes sense to do the first processing in space. So space edge compute before sending down the results to Earth to avoid downlink constraints rather than sending up AI inferencing workloads from earth up to space. Space communication. As Ellie mentioned, we're moving on towards Lunar space operations. We need to establish that space communication infrastructure to enable asteroid and Lunar mining, but the business case remains a hard nut to crack. Then there's sustainability and sovereignty, which we'll touch upon later. But as the example from the Ukraine, Russia war already also showed is that we have a governance issue to solve if military uses commercial satellites. How does that happen? How does that work? Who is responsible? And then there's a whole lot of other challenges that we will dive into.

All right. Perfect. I'm going to take over the screen a little bit and talk about some of those challenges that Johan had mentioned. So obviously, this slide says sustainability, but I would love it if we framed it more as practicality, right? We're talking about expanding the space economy and moving into these new levels of satellite launches, stuff in space. We need to think practically about what that actually means in terms of how do we make this happen and then also the impact if we make it happen. We have a great opportunity here as we're scaling into space to move into this new frontier and to build it sustainably from the ground up. And that's not something that you always get the opportunity to do, right? A lot of times, you start with a project and you're already halfway though it and you look back and you say, "Oh, I would have done that differently, right? But as we're moving into these new frontiers, we have the chance to really start smart and build things in a way that will last in a way that is actually good long term and works well. So that's kind of what we're going to talk about in the next couple of slides here. And so as we talk about sustainability within the space economy, the long-term growth of space economy depends on managing resources responsibly. And resources come in lots of different shapes and sizes. Obviously, you think environmental resources. As we talked about, we have orbital resource constraints as well. And we'll dive in a little bit into that in a bit more detail. And we'd like to look at sustainability across an entire lifespan of an operation as we discuss the space economy, obviously, we've talked about satellites. We've talked a little bit about data centers in space, launch systems, right? All of that, plus the supply chain goes into these considerations along with end-of-life considerations and deorbiting procedures because as John had mentioned, we can't just leave stuff up there forever, right? It's not like building a tower, it's not going to work for 30, 100, 150 years. There are other considerations that we need to Keep in mind, as we expand into space because the environment there is, frankly, very different than what we're used to on Earth. And each stage of this space life cycle includes different sustainability considerations that are going to be magnified as we try to hit these proposed expansions into the space ecosystem. So first, looking at supply chain, right? And when we're talking data centers in space when we're talking satellites, compute communication, rocket launch technology that stuff doesn't just magically materialize in space -- in earth, right? We need physical materials to make all of this happen. So some of the same constraints in supply chains that we're used to dealing with on earth for compute construction, for communication, that all comes into play in the same way as we enter the space economy. So carbon fiber, aluminum, titanium, rare earth minerals, all of these have some sustainability implications from extraction and processing. They're well documented on earth. It kind of doesn't matter whether you're building a data center on earth or in space, you need those materials to do so. And we can get into asteroid mining later, but you need to get the material from somewhere, and that takes work, right? And that has add-on consequences. So as we move along kind of the space story, we need to get stuff into space, right? That also takes work. And traditionally, we have rocket propellant and all of those from solid rocket fuels to refined kerosene, those release emissions into the atmosphere. So you can talk about emissions from terrestrial data centers. But as we move into space, it's not emission free, it's just you change kind of where those emissions are released. And a lot of that is from the launch technology. And with traditional rocket propellants, most of the time, they've included large amounts of ozone-depleting chemicals, including black carbon, and we have nitrogen oxides. Part of the issue with rocket launches that isn't really factored in when we're talking terrestrial data is that you're actually launching into the atmosphere. So where are those emissions are released really changes the impact of those emissions. And so they can be a lot more destructive and harmful if they're released into the atmosphere as opposed to closer to Earth surface. As rocket launches continue to scale, we talked about the cost of Rocket lunches going down, but we also need to think about the environmental cost of rocket launches. Yes, you can make it cheaper and cheaper to get into space. But if you're still being massively pollutant while you're doing it, we should consider that as well. Fossil fuels burned by the space industry right now, only make up about 1% compared to those burned by conventional aviation. So obviously, the numbers are really, really small right now. But if we look at all of these FCC filings, as we look at how things have really scaled up in terms of what's going where, moving into space, the projections for where we want to go, that ratio is going to change, right? And we're lucky now because we have the opportunity to really target that and think about that from the ground up, no pun intended. The pollution launches is definitely something that we need to keep in mind. Not only are we talking stratosphere and mesosphere and the atmosphere impact of all of these emissions, we also need to keep in mind, launch site ecology. And we've talked a lot -- there's been a lot of studies done around rocket launches, the impact on local plants, animals, the environment, right? We talked about well-executed rocket launches. You can do a pretty good job planning and saying, okay, if this launches successfully, this will be the impact on the local ecology. Of course, anyone who has tracked anything with the space economy knows that not all rocket launches work successfully, right? You have a catastrophic failures, you have learning events. And I'm sure you're learning quite a bit. But when your rocket blows up on the pad, what does that mean for the local landscape through vegetation and for the animals, plenty of space agencies, including NASA monitor launch sites and try to minimize launch impacts. But that's not the case across the board. There are several launch sites around the world that have historically just kind of been used for rocket launches without much concern for the local environment, creating large zones of pollution caused by years of leaking and toxic rocket fuel, seeping into the soil. So we can really cause a lot of problems if we aren't thoughtful about how we're launching stuff into space. Now when we move on to the third section of kind of this space life cycle, which is the actual in-orbit section. And we'll talk about -- I'll talk about it a little bit more in the next slide. But we can get something called orbital congestion, right? So even though space is big and we have relatively few numbers of satellites now compared to what we want to put into space like we have limited orbital bandwidth for what can go where. And so on the next slide, I'll talk a little bit more about the congestion story. We also have this new kind of type of satellite that is being designed to specifically serve as orbital mirrors beaming some light on-demand to different places around the world. even nonorbital mirror satellites can reflect quite a bit of sunlight toward earth. And so when you put satellites into orbit, they actually can be really detrimental especially to research and astronomy and physics as you're trying to look past our earth orbit and into the greater cosmos, and we need to keep mind this for us here on earth, but also as we try to continue our exploration further out, we need to make sure that we aren't blocking ourselves off intentionally or unintentionally. And then finally, at the end of a satellite's life, we want to keep in mind some of the sustainability considerations there as well. So that would be disposal without causing massive problems. So one of these solutions to help prevent overcrowding orbits is this idea of deorbiting satellites. So there's a couple of ways to do that. And you can safely degrade an orbital satellite and let it burn up in the atmosphere on purpose. So this is controlled. This is meant to clear up overcrowded orbits instead of having a bunch of dead satellites orbiting around causing problems. Deorbiting satellites is pretty standard practice anymore. In low earth orbit satellites are usually finished with their mission and they're mandated by the FCC and the European Space Agency orbit as soon as possible, and it's actually baked in that they aren't supposed to orbit any more than 5 years past their mission completion. So there is a plan already in place to try and help keep those orbital lanes as clear as possible. The problem, of course, with burning up satellites as they reenter the atmosphere is just like burning jump here on earth, they release additional pollution into the atmosphere. So that adds to the emission problem, right? We aren't just meeting as we launch these satellites and those systems, they're also further emitting as they reenter the atmosphere. And some satellites, we don't deorbit at all. We actually move them into a graveyard or a junk orbit, which happens further up. So instead of burning up inside of earth's atmosphere, these satellites are moved into these kind of long-term storage orbits that are outside of our low earth orbit and our geostationary orbit and are meant to kind of be long-term holding cells, graveyards for these dead satellites. And it does help clear operational orbits. But we have this nice beautiful, unpolluted, so to speak, space that we are now just dumping junk into. So it's worth keeping in mind that as we have graveyard orbits, they're going to stay there, these satellites for thousands or even millions of years. They don't break down in the same way that you have stuff weather here on earth, there's not air resistance, there's not weathering. If you put something up there and you don't deal with it, it can stay up there for much longer than any of us are going to be around. So it's worth keeping in mind kind of our long-term impact as well. So those are some of the things to look at from a sustainability perspective. And just a little bit more on this congestion sort of story. So we've gone through a lot of numbers already on this webinar and talking about what is up in space, right? And it's interesting to think about because most of the time you look up at the night sky or even the sky in the a day, and you don't see much, right? You got your clear blue sky, you've got lots of stars, sometimes you'll see the fun SpaceX constellations going around in their little trains. But there's actually a lot of space debris up in space, most of which we can't see with the naked eye. So with these numbers, we've got from the European Space Agency. And we've had, since 1957, more than 7,000 rocket launches total placing more than 26,000 satellites into orbit. Now these aren't satellites that are operational, right? These are just -- satellite that has ever been placed into orbit since 1957. And the total mass of all of these space objects in orbit is more than 16,000 metric tons, okay? Now we talk about satellites as these nice little packages. But they don't always stay that way. I mentioned that things don't weather in space, you don't get degradation. Well, that happens as long as they don't run into other things. But if we have collisions in space, things are moving very, very quickly up there and that can cause debris fields that can really amplify the amount of stuff that we've got in orbit at any given time. So on the right-hand side, we've got some estimated numbers of objects in orbit. There's no way to really count. All of these are based off of models, again, in this case, from the European Space Agency. So as far as objects go, those that are greater in size than 10 centimeters, we've got about 54,000 objects, right? That could be active satellites that could be and pieces of satellites anything that's 10 centimeters or bigger, we've got 54,000. But as we move into these smaller and smaller scales, we've got millions and millions of very small pieces of space junk that are just orbiting around. And you can think oh, well, a small thing isn't a problem, but think about a bullet, right? A small thing moving very quickly can become very problematic very quickly. And one sort of term you might read about or come into contact with is this idea of the Kessler effect, which is that these small pieces of space junk can create these catastrophic chain effects where all of these interactions and collisions can lead to [ full orbital bands ] that can't launch satellites that they interfere with communications that we can't use an orbital band because it is so full of junk and it's just not safe. And while that hasn't happened yet, it is something that really needs to be considered as we must avoid this scenario at all costs sort of thing. So having a proper plan in place to make sure we're deorbiting satellites in a safe, sustainable way that we're dealing with this space junk problem, right? We already have a lot of space junk that's out there. And if we could minimize the amount that is in our orbits that we want to use, that would be very important as well, especially as we're trying to expand and really regulate what's going on up in space. And with that being the case, right, we really need to focus on international standards, space traffic management actively removing the debris that's there. And then, of course, as we've already started, we've got this reusable launch system already in place. We've got work being done for more efficient fuels and the work towards building a sustainable space economy is definitely actively happening right now, but there's certainly more to do and more to think about. It's never just as easy as, well, let's just send the data center up to space, and we'll be done with it there. All right. One quick note that I wanted to make on sovereignty. I know we're getting close on time. We had a really great look forward journal article published by a bunch of 451 Research analysts come out recently. There's a lovely QR code in the bottom right corner of your screen, if you want to read the full report and discussing this idea of compute sovereignty and kind of what that means terrestrially. I did want to flag just really quickly this idea of sovereignty as a driving factor within the space ecosystem as well. So governments across the world are looking at sovereign cloud environments, domestic AI, high-performance computing, quantum computing skill and capacity and just to make sure that we've got secure data shortage, transmission that things are built in a safe sovereign way. And as we look at space and space infrastructure, sovereignty as well is going to continue to come up as a key driver here. And because the same questions and the same discussions we're having here on earth are going to apply to space. And that includes with data sovereignty, application sovereignty, compute sovereignty as we look at data centers in space a little bit more. And so that's going to play a driving role in that. So what's next? We've got all sorts of stuff coming up, space mining, infrastructure build-out, the new space race regulations. There's a lot that's going on, and we're excited to keep tracking what's going on within that. So I know we're close on time, I'm going to pass it back over to Sarah and she can manage any Q&A?

Thanks, Ellie. Yes, we had a couple of questions come in, and I'm going to race through them so that we can cover as much ground as possible. We had a question come in about satellite life spans? Are they considered technically not useful anymore after the 5-year time frame we mentioned. That's a really interesting question. And honestly, it depends on the constellation we're talking about, right? Now we're talking -- that 5-year time line has mostly to do with the Starlink LEO satellites that spend lot of the webinar talking about, some of the constellations that are -- have different constructions like Telesat. Their construction, although LEO, their satellites are going to be a little bit higher up, they're going to be a little bit bigger, they're going to -- they envision launching far fewer of them. And those satellites are expected to launch -- or expected to last. I think, closer to 15 to 20 years, if I remember correctly, as opposed to that much shorter life cycle for the lower earth orbit satellites that Starlink, but then also Amazon's LEO envisions using. And so that is in terms of these different ways, these different constellations, that's definitely something to keep in mind. Ellie, we had a question come in about space radiation damage, data centers and how -- what are you hearing on that?