Session: Women in Space
In a sphere typically dominated by men, a female COO is spearheading one of the most significant disruptions to the satellite connectivity industry. Caroline De Vos is co-founder of SatADSL, the creators of neXat, a disruptive satellite service aggregator billing itself as the first “booking.com” of satellite services – a marketplace for teleport and satellite operators to resell their satellite capacity.
In this talk, Caroline will discuss the challenges she overcame to achieve her goals and what it means to represent women in the space industry. From breaking into the ‘boys club’ of astronaut candidacy, to thriving in a male dominated environment like space engineering, Caroline has first-hand experience of what it means to be a successful woman in tech, business, and space.
Bio
Both outer space, and the technology of the space industry, have been a subject of fascination to Caroline for most of her life. Undeterred by the male dominated nature of the industry, Caroline received her formal education at prestigious European institutions pursuing master’s degrees in Business, Physics and Space Engineering and has devoted much of her career to working with the European Space Agency (ESA) - even becoming a candidate for the incredibly prestigious astronaut programme.
Caroline actively cultivated the experience, skills and understanding, that helped her to build on her passion for space and seek out new opportunities in the industry. She quickly identified one such opportunity, providing satellite connectivity to geographically remote communities over challenging terrain. This was an opportunity not just to engage with her passion but also to provide real world value.
In 2010, Caroline and her co-Founders created SatADSL to solve this problem. SatADSL provide innovative satellite networking solutions to parts of the world where terrestrial connectivity options are simply not feasible. To do this, SatADSL use their complete OSS/BSS, carrier grade, fully redundant cloud-based platform, neXat.