Photo: Northwood Space CEO Bridgit Mendler speaks at SATShow Week. Photo: Leandra Bernstein for Via Satellite

Bridgit Mendler detailed how she and the team at Northwood Space are working to solve the “gnarly problem” of satellite ground infrastructure by developing an end-to-end ground system built for rapid deployment.

“There will continue to be exponentially more spacecraft going up into orbit,” she said. “We’re going to lose track of that if the ground systems are still ballooning in cost. So, you need to be able to build something that can actually match that proliferation.”

Mendler brought star power to SATShow’s closing fireside chat on Thursday, where she discussed her path from Disney actress and singer to MIT graduate and founder of Northwood Space.

Raised in an engineering household, Mendler returned to her technical roots after a career in entertainment. Northwood was born from her exposure to space through MIT, her husband and CTO Griffin Cleverly’s space tech background, and a pandemic project that made her realize “the ground needed to have its own transformation,” similar to launch and satellite manufacturing.

“We want ground to be like cloud in the sense where it is immediately available,” said Mendler, describing the need to streamline satellite resource allocation, capacity planning, and the physical infrastructure complexities of the ground segment.

“Ground is a gnarly problem,” she continued. “We want to be a partner to companies so that they can think about what does ground enable, as opposed to what are all the pain points and sticking points.”

Northwood, which raised $100 million in Series B funding in January, has already deployed operational Portal phased array units in Australia and one other continent, Medler said.

The first Portal system took three months from manufacturing to delivery to installation, Mendler said, with the first eight units produced in a four-week manufacturing sprint.

She described it as “a good starting point,” noting the Portal design criteria was for a modular system as easy to install as a refrigerator. According to earlier reports, one site was installed in 12 hours and began communicating with satellites the next day.

Northwood was recently selected by the U.S. Space Force to provide its Portal phased array system for the Satellite Control Network (SCN). The contract includes S-band links for telemetry, tracking and communication (TT&C). The company reports operating primarily in S-band and X-band from Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) to Geostationary Orbit (GEO).

Mendler announced Northwood just secured a new 180,000-square-foot manufacturing facility to support production of hundreds of antennas. To keep pace the company is taking advantage of high-volume commercially available components for rapid manufacturing and supply chain resilience, she said.

In the coming year, Mendler said Northwood’s top priority is transitioning the company into production, scale and operations to handle customer missions. The company is also working toward additional global deployments.

As ground segment deployment has taken members of Northwood’s team to far-flung locations, Mendler shared her team has started an internal ‘Northwood Naturalist Society’ Slack channel to document local wildlife across their deployment locations.

“We currently have five entities in different countries and we’ll be doing a lot of different global deployments this year,” she said. “So, looking forward to more flora and fauna around the world.”