Ground Control

Everyone is racing to put satellites in orbit. Far fewer are building what it takes to make them useful. As constellations scale and data volumes surge, the bottleneck is shifting to the ground. Without the infrastructure to move that data, it goes nowhere. Bridgit Mendler left entertainment, earned degrees from MIT and Harvard, and bet everything on one of the least visible and most critical problems in space. What does it take to build the layer everything else depends on? Bridgit Mendler, Co-Founder and CEO, Northwood Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Content Officer, Fortune