I had the unique opportunity to talk to Greg Wyler a month before OneWeb’s descent into bankruptcy, and then a month after the news.
February 2020: Before the Storm
I spoke to Wyler in February 2020, only a few weeks before OneWeb’s descent into Chapter 11. At the time, I asked him that with LeoSat’s downfall, could history repeat itself? He said somewhat prophetically, “That is absolutely a danger. The biggest dangers in this industry right now are financing and space debris. One second you are there, the next second you are not.”
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He said of LEO satellites: “We are somewhere near the StarTac phone in our evolutionary timeline. It was a fantastic phone. There are a lot of systems out there that are derivatives of OneWeb or kind of some version of it. And these systems are also like StarTac phones. This tells you that there is a lot of opportunity in the future. No-one yet has released the iPhone version of a satellite.”
April 2020: After the Storm
One of Wyler’s goals in life has been to connect the unconnected. When asked if the marriage between Wyler and the satellite industry is over, Wyler admits he has a “lot of pent-up ideas” but refuses to say whether the industry has seen the last of him.
“I wouldn’t say I am out of satellite. I still believe satellite could play a very big role for a lot of use cases,” he says.
He adds, “I would have done things differently. Technology has changed dramatically. Everyone is still on the 2012 OneWeb plan. It has taken nine years to turn that into a physical embodiment. The world has changed a lot.”
When asked if large-scale consumer broadband is feasible for satellite, he says: “the large-scale consumer broadband market is dead on arrival for satellite. It is niche at best.”
Failure is a Part of Risk
Wyler makes an interesting analogy to Charles Lindbergh who did the first solo transatlantic flight. “People said to Lindbergh, you are probably going to fail, you will never make it across the ocean, and they were statistically correct, but it doesn’t mean he shouldn’t try or advance technology or accomplish a goal.”
“I was told at a space conference with hundreds of New Space startups, that OneWeb’s high profile and high funding made a number of people recognize the value and potential of space. OneWeb put billions of dollars into companies to develop space hardware. That was a major boost for the space industry.” VS
