Peering Over the Horizon, WildBlue Co-Founder Tom Moore Sees Opportunities Beyond Launch of ViaSat-1 Satellite
The countdown hasn’t started just yet, but in five months, Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]) will be launching its first satellite, ViaSat-1, aboard a Proton rocket from the Baikonour Cosmodrome, the Russian space launch facility in Kazakhstan.
“We’re done with the really tough testing, where you put the satellite in a thermal vacuum chamber and cycle through extreme temperatures,” says Tom Moore, a ViaSat senior vice president and CEO of WildBlue Communications who heads the company’s ViaSat-1 satellite initiative. “Now we’re just going through the last stages of testing and processing before shipping to the launch facility.”
Tom Moore
Getting the satellite into a geo-stationary orbit centered 22,300 miles above the United States will be the crucial final maneuver in a plan that began in 2007, when ViaSat decided to build a satellite for Internet service—“the highest capacity satellite ever built by an order of magnitude.” But a successful ViaSat 1 launch would also represent a personal triumph for Moore. He has travelled full circle in returning to WildBlue Communications, the satellite-based Internet service provider in Denver, CO, that he co-founded in 1998—and which ViaSat acquired at this time last year in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $568 million.
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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