With war on the fringe of the Mediterranean and on NATO's eastern flank, the thinking vis-a-vis the role of the satellite industry is rapidly coalescing around the role of public and specifically defense funding and Europe's widening space gap with the rest of the world. The space gap is increasingly looking existential. At SmallSat Europe, the takeaway, as reported by Satnews, is that Europe is stepping up to close that gap.

We all know orbital space is becoming crowded, but is that something we need to be worried about? Kayhan Space's Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Araz Feyzi thinks so. In his words: "the launch curve is going vertical."

The emergence of direct-to-device satellite communications has set off a wave of investments, partnerships, new service announcements, and spectrum grabs in spite of the bandwidth limitations of the technology. Advocates are talking about near universal wireless coverage with the prospect, in the future, of broadband speeds.

I thought I was living the lonely life of a disconnected traveler without any hope of sympathy or understanding until I dialed into Ookla's latest reports on in-flight connectivity. Here, I discovered, Ookla gets me.

Data centers are coming soon to a patch of open land near you feeding off of and fueling the boom in artificial intelligence. With the rapid onset of hundreds of data centers sprouting across the country and the world has come a bumper crop of opposition from local residents concerned about power and water consumption, noise and air pollution, and overall quality of life impacts.

I joined the Mobile Satellite Users Association as president on Monday of this week. I am taking the helm of a more than 30-year-old organization that is coming to grips with an explosion of implementation activity from the launching of hundreds of new satellites to a proliferation of new hardware and software and, most recently, artificial intelligence.