Why Should I Care About Satellites? | Ian Cinnamon #499 | The Way I Heard It

I asked Ian Cinnamon to make me care about satellites. Turns out, I already did—I just didn’t know it.

Ian is 33 years old and the CEO of Apex, a company in Los Angeles that builds satellites. Not designs them in some theoretical sense. Builds them. On a manufacturing floor. With actual human beings.

According to Ian, most of us interact with a dozen or more satellites every day without realizing it. They help us find our way to work, predict the weather, connect to the internet, track wildfires, keep airplanes in the sky, and spot missiles before they arrive. Take them away, and a surprising amount of modern life stops working. That got my attention.

So did the way Ian is building them. For most of the last 70 years, satellites have been largely bespoke creations. Apex is trying to manufacture them more like Henry Ford manufactured cars—at scale, a lower cost, and with a workforce that doesn’t necessarily need an aerospace degree to get in the door. Some of the people working there used to repair cars. Now, they’re building machines that will soon be orbiting the planet.

Ian is a smart guy building something ambitious, and he explained a complicated industry in a way that even I could understand, which is no small feat. But for me, the most interesting part of the conversation came back to the people building these things—the meaningful, cool, and consequential work I suspect a lot of young people have no idea is waiting for them.

When was the last time you thought about a satellite?

#podcast #technology #satellite

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