The space sector invests heavily in orbital hardware for comms and sensing, but less attention is paid to scaling up the technology to bring back all that data.
“You can have the satellites, but if you can’t talk to them, it doesn’t really help at all,” Shaurya Luthra, cofounder and head of software at Northwood Space, told Payload. “We believe the ground industry of today is not ready for that boom.”
Luthra’s company aims to be a vertically-integrated manufacturer of ground stations, offering satellite operators plug-and-play access to their spacecraft. The 28-year-old’s job is building that service—spanning everything from terminal software to the company’s “global ground orchestration platform.”
Not his first rodeo: Luthra built out the ground segment for Capella Space, the SAR remote sensing firm that does multi-million dollar business providing data to the DOD and intelligence community.
He quickly learned the startup ethos. “Capella was this whole different experience—I joined, and we’re launching in three months,” he said. “We had no ground stations, no working payload downlink, and, hey, we’re going to do it—this is going to be fun.”
The experience served him well when his current cofounders came looking for ground-side expertise. After a colleague introduced him to CEO Bridgit Mendler and her husband, CTO Griffin Cleverly, “we nerded out over the ground side of space, and then, lo and behold, Northwood.”
Mind on the mission: After immigrating to the US from India with his family as a child, Luthra became an Eagle Scout. As a senior at Cornell University, Luthra interned at Lockheed Martin, working on a program to pull down classified data from space. That same project eventually became his first job out of school.
The job highlighted the importance of space data to national security and the world writ large, something that influenced him when choosing between his job at Capella and an opportunity to design advanced computer chips.
“Something just really pulled me into networking for space data,” he said, crediting “the team at Lockheed who truly believe in the importance of the mission and the concept of mission.”
