Photo by Hayley Young for Seattle Business Magazine
First Mode President & Chief Engineer, Chris Voorhees, and Vice President for Business Development & Strategy, Rhae Adams, share their thoughts on the growing role of Seattle in the space industry. Be sure to check out Seattle Business Magazine’s feature on the area, including other local companies like Spaceflight Industries, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Amazon, Cray Inc., and RBC Signals.
“Seattle is absolutely a big player in the satellite-constellation business,” says Rhae Adams, vice president of strategy and business development at Seattle-based First Mode — an engineering-services firm that applies deep-space exploration technologies to a variety of industries, both on and off planet Earth. “Once all these ventures play out, you could be creating incumbents [in the industry] that will last for decades.”
Chris Voorhees, president and chief engineer of First Mode who worked previously as a lead engineer for several of NASA’s Mars-rover missions, is a bit measured about the prospects for a space-based internet business model. He says if satellite-powered broadband ends up proving to be a solution that solves a problem for people on Earth, “then that’s the thing that’s going to take off.”
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