The most influential person in space business

Who is the most influential person in space business? Who has, or will have, leave the greatest impact on the man kind as a whole? There are many great figures in the story, Tsiolovsky, Goddard, von Braun, Webb, Korolev. Maybe Jeff Besos. Or even iconic Elon Musk?

But what is the most important achievement? Is Apollo program more important than GPS? Is ISS more valuable than Landsat? Or can Vostok and Juriy Gagarin's first space fight be more important than the first telecommunication satellite? One of tech billionaires, Naveen Jain, backer of Moon Express, said that success in life is not measured by the amount of dollars collected, but in number of people whose lives were touched. And by that measure, there is one name that stands out: Greg Wyler.

He is a serial tech entrepreneur that puts even Elon Musk to shame. His early work were in PC components business and his first success, Silent Systems, was focused on advanced liquid CPU coolers. He studied engineering, law and business. But only after his personal tragedy, he embarked on a mission of helping other people. His first try was bringing Internet connectivity to war-torn African country of Rwanda. It turned out that laying fiber cables in the country with no infrastructure, shabby roads, poor electricity was the easy part. Even allocating insufficient satellite bandwidth was easy. The really hard part was interfacing with the local government and their status quo. They were so successful, that the company (Terracom) was forced to gun-shot marriage with the state telecom. After just a year of painful restructuring, the same company had to endure gunshot divorce (nationalization), but Greg Wyler was already out planning his next big leap.

Although before Rwanda experience, he took the position that satellites are just too expensive, slow and bandwidth constrained, and that fiber is a way to go, on the ground he saw first hand that connecting people with fixed landline links is too slow and requires huge investments to reach large number of people. In the same time, he experienced first hand, what it means to bridge the digital divide and bring people and children Internet connectivity. Thus he quickly expanded his vision from a single country to the whole world. Soon O3b was born. Its name reflected its mission - to connect other three billion people to the Internet. It was 2007, with the wounds of Iridium, GlobalStar and Teledesic bankruptcies still fresh. And looming stock market crash coming, His proposal was focused on building LEO constellation of satellites - something that failed multiple times less than a decade ago. And yet he managed to persuade SES, Google and other institutional investors to fund this project. It became the most successful satellite telecommunications project in the recent history. But it failed from its original mission and scope. Orbit was raised from LEO to MEO. Instead of hundreds of originally envisioned satellites, its number was restricted to just a dozen. And instead of whole world, 03b was focused more on the portions of the world closer to the equator.

Disappointed, Mr. Wyler left the company, trying to find partners to build his original vision. He briefly went to Google, but quickly terminated his engagement probably due to different goals for satellite communications network. The he went on the crash course with Elon Musk. Again, there was no alignment of the mission. But his influence went so far that SpaceX started building team and plans for its own satellite constellation. And it secured sizeable, billion dollar investment from Google.

And yet, burned by his O3b experience, Mr. Wyler saw SpaceX constellation as moving too slow and to a different direction. SpaceX vision is closer to a backbone intercontinental fiber links, just moved to space. That is a vision closer to grand unified world domination style often seen in the Silicon Valley approach. Latest Mr. Wyler's enterprise, OneWeb, is more oriented to addressing the last mile problem in poor areas of the worlds. It addresses concerned of local governments and existing telecom operators, giving them means and tools to rapidly deploy and connect terminals in remote areas with no infrastructure - no roads, no fiber, no electricity.

And around his vision he managed to bring on board very impressive list of investors. Intelsat. Coca-Cola. MDA. Qualcomm. Bharti. Softbank. Virgin. Airbus. Even more notably, there are no VCs or angel investors from Silicon Valley. He engaged aerospace sector from both Europe and Russia, totally avoiding SpaceX and its "sliding window" of launches and delays. Because he is in the hurry.

How did he achieve this? He is obviously very persuasive person. And OneWeb investors are not fillantropistic organisations. They invest because they expect to profit from it. Qualcomm expects to provide chipsets for many terminals. MDA expects to build payloads. Airbus will build satellites and contract the launches. Virgin wants to assure market for its Launcher One. Intelsat wants to provide back-to-back connectivity with seamless LEO to GEO handover (and maybe to catch up with SES/O3b). And yet, in public presentations and talks Mr. Wyler never speaks about how much money they will make. Instead, he wants to connect two million schools. Make them hubs where billions of tablets and smartphones will gather around and connect to the Internet. Or recharge from the solar panels. This time, he wants O3b mission done right. So that there is no-one left behind. And that is why Mr. Wyler is the most important person in aerospace. Because his work will affect lives of more people than Apollo, Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon and Facebook combined. And that is what matters the most.