The Corporate
Chieftains
Few industries have been as challenging as the aerospace
industry over the last 15 years. It is an industry that has gone through wild
ups and downs as defense budgets shrank quickly after the end of the Cold War
only to shoot back up again after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The industry
also flirted -- sometimes disastrously -- with commercial communications markets
and endured a decade-long decline in NASA and DoD budgets that prompted a wave
of mergers and acquisitions.
Jim Albaugh -- As president of what is now
Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems, Albaugh has made space and defense a major
profit center for Boeing. Long known primarily as an aircraft manufacturer, the
company remains the largest space firm in the world despite a spate of recent
problems in the company’s launch and satellite manufacturing units. Albaugh had
the task of bringing together several large companies acquired during the merger
boom of the 1990s, including Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas and the satellite
manufacturing unit of Hughes Electronics. He has moved the company’s launch
services and satellite manufacturing units away from commercial business to
focus on their core customer: the Pentagon.
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Albrecht | |
Mark Albrecht -- As President of International
Launch Services Albrecht has made the company a dominant force in the global
launch industry the only company with a large base of both government and
commercial customers. The former executive director of the White House National
Space Council has worked aggressively and effectively to win contracts from the
Pentagon and most of the world’s satellite services companies. ILS has used the
partnership of Lockheed Martin and Russia’s Khrunichev State Research and
Production Space Center to sign contracts for eight launches already this year
-- more than any of its competitors -- on either the Lockheed Martin-built Atlas
series of rockets or the Russian-built Proton.
Giuliano Berretta -- As chief executive officer of
Eutelsat, Berretta guided the privatization of the European satellite services
company and gave it a strong commercial focus. Under his leadership Eutelsat
established a global presence and is hungry for more business in the Middle
East, Africa and parts of Asia. The company’s financial position has been strong
enough that Eutelsat resisted takeover attempts in 2002 by PanAmSat and
Intelsat.
Charles Bigot -- As chairman of Arianespace, the
European launch consortium, Bigot spent the 1990s carving out a major piece of
the international commercial launch market for the Ariane 4 launcher, which in
its heyday was the dominant commercial launcher in the world. He also worked
with the European Space Agency to develop the Ariane 5.
Vance Coffman -- After succeeding the legendary
Norm Augustine as chairman of Lockheed Martin, Coffman guided the company trough
some stormy times, particularly on the space side of the business where
unexpected losses on major defense space programs and tough competition in the
launch business after the expected boom in commercial business never
materialized. During his tenure, Lockheed’s stock went from a low of $17 a share
to trading at about $54 a share for much of this year. Before moving to the
corporate suite Coffman guided the development of the Milstar satellite
communications program, the Follow-on Early Warning System (now called Space
Based Infrared System) and the corporation’s work on Iridium.
Steven Dorfman -- As a vice President of Hughes
Electronics and president of Hughes Space & Communications Co., Dorfman made
the company’s satellite manufacturing unit the dominant player in the industry
with more than 50 percent of the market globally. He pushed hard to meet the
demands of his government and commercial satellite customers by gradually
reducing the time it took to build a satellite from three years to as little as
12 months.
Manfred Fuchs -- The president of OHB-System has
transformed his company from a boutique maker of a few small satellites and
hardware for the international space station into Germany’s biggest
military-space contractor. While OHB had been diversifying into different areas
for several years, including the purchase of Carlo Gavazzi Space of Italy, it
was winning the German Defense Ministry’s five-satellite SAR-Lupe radar
reconnaissance contract that put the company and Fuchs into another
league.
Ted Gavrilis -- The president of Lockheed Martin
commercial space Systems has made the company a major force in the global
satellite market and the top U.S. satellite manufacturer. To keep the company
competitive in a market with significant over-capacity, Gavrilis aggressively
cut costs and stuck to the company’s A2100 satellite bus, resisting the
temptation to build ever-larger satellites. The decision proved the right one as
insurers and commercial customers started resisting having to risk so much money
on the launch of a single satellites. Frost & Sullivan recently named the
A2100 as the most reliable of the large satellites now on the market.
Tim Hannemann -- By the time Northrop Grumman
closed its purchase of TRW’s aerospace business, Hannemann, the president and
CEO of TRW Space & Electronics had delivered two huge contract wins to
sweeten the pot: the National Polar Orbiting NPOESS and the James Webb Space
Telescope.
Eddy Hartenstein -- Hartenstein, the long-time
president of DirecTV, spent more than a decade building the company into a major
competitor to the giant U.S. cable companies. As the leader in the market with
more than 12 million customers, DirecTV became the object of a bidding war
between News Corp. and DirecTV competitor Echostar. After U.S. regulators
quashed the proposed deal with Echostar, Murdoch moved in and grabbed his
long-sought prize.
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Kullman | |
Conny Kullman -- The Intelsat chairman has
successfully led the company through a long and painful transition from a
monopolistic, slow-moving consortium owned by governments or government
regulated telecoms, to a fully privatized firm. The company announced Aug. 16
that it would be purchase by a group of private equity companies for about $5
billion, including the assumption of about $2 billion in debt.
Herb Satterlee -- The president and CEO of
DigitalGlobe has guided the company to the top of the commercial imagery
satellite market after struggling for several years to get a working spacecraft
in orbit. The company, originally dubbed EarthWatch Inc., was formed in 1995,
and had its first imagery satellite fail after four days in orbit and lost its
second spacecraft in a launch failure. DigitalGlobe’s QuickBird satellite,
launched in October 2001, provides the sharpest pictures of the current
generation of spacecraft, capturing images with 0.61 meter resolution. In
January 2002, the company received one of the first ClearView contracts from the
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to provide imagery to the U.S.
government, and in September 2003, DigitalGlobe captured the first NextView
contract, which is designed to foster development of the next generation of
commercial imagery satellites. The spacecraft, dubbed WorldView, is scheduled
for launch no later than 2006.
Bernard Schwartz -- The long-time chairman of
Loral Space & Communications was not afraid to gamble when he sold the
firm’s defense business to Lockheed Martin in the 1990s to concentrate on the
commercial satellite manufacturing and communications services businesses. It
was a fateful decision. The company’s disastrous multibillion-dollar investment
in the Globalstar satellite mobile communications business drove Loral to
bankruptcy protection. As the company moves closer to emerging from bankruptcy
with its Space Systems Loral and Loral Skynet units in relatively decent shape,
Schwartz could be poised for a comeback. Despite the Globalstar debacle,
Schwartz continues to have admirers on Wall Street. “If he pulls Loral out of
this one and still emerges as head of the company, it will be just one more
miracle that he has performed,” said one financial analyst.
Yuri Semenov -- The long-time Russian bureaucrat
became a major industrialist following the breakup of the old Soviet Union.
Energia is a major supplier of space hardware not only to the Russian space
agency and Russian military space forces but also for NASA. Without Semenov,
NASA would never have gotten so much hardware assembled at the international
space station. As the agency looks to Russia for additional launches in the wake
of the shuttle Columbia accident, Semenov remains a force to be reckoned
with.
Albert E. Smith -- For much of his tenure, space
was nothing but a headache for Lockheed Martin. It was an expensive business
that required heavy investment on the satellite and launcher side – a key
technology area for a company that is the biggest defense company in the world,
but one in which fickle commercial markets for satellites and launchers was
shrinking fast. Under Smith’s guidance, the company took multibillion dollar
write-offs on its space business and laid off thousands of employees. The
results, however, speak for themselves. Lockheed Martin is a dominant player in
both the launch services and satellite manufacturing markets. And unlike some of
its rivals, it has a strong core of both government and commercial
customers.
Ron Sugar -- With the purchase of TRW’s aerospace
business orchestrated by Sugar and former Northrop Grumman Chairman Kent Kresa
now complete, Sugar has set out to make the company a major player in the space
business. The TRW acquisition added space to Northrop’s strong defense portfolio
and already has helped the company win big contracts like the Kinetic Energy
Interceptor.
Bill Swanson -- Since becoming Raytheon’s
president and CEO Swanson has used the strength of the company’s classified
programs and missile defense work to push the company into profitability.
Swanson is known as a progressive -- and aggressive -- CEO who looks for the
best available talent anywhere he can find it. He is a passionate defender of
the missile defense program, who in an interview with Space News boisterously
yelled out a barnyard epithet when asked to respond to the allegations of
critics that the national missile defense system would never work.
Dan Tellep -- The retired chairman of Lockheed
Martin moved quickly in the early 1990s to position the company for the post
Cold War world. As one of the first U.S. aerospace executives to reach out to
the Russians, Tellep helped form Lockheed Khrunichev Energia, the forerunner of
International Launch Systems, at a time when many American aerospace executives
were still hesitant about working so closely with people who had been “the
enemy” just a few years earlier.
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Thompson | |
David W. Thompson -- The chairman of Orbital
Sciences Corp. is one of a handful of corporate managers to have built a
space-focused company from the ground up. Thompson and two classmates at Harvard
Business School started the company in the early 1980s to build a satellite
upper stage for payloads that would be launched from the cargo bay of NASA’s
shuttle fleet. When that market vanished in the wake of the Challenger accident,
the company shifted gears and developed the Pegasus small launch vehicles.
Thompson has guided the company through losing ventures such as the Orbcomm
constellation of data satellites and the remote sensing company Orbimage. In
recent years, the company’s niche market for small geostationary commercial
communication satellites and its sounding rocket and target vehicle work for the
Missile Defense Agency have made it as strong as any time in its
history.
Wilbur Trafton -- Throughout the last decade
Trafton has been a major figure in the space business and not afraid to take on
a new challenge. He ran NASA’s human spaceflight program in the early 1990s
during the beginning of cooperation with the Russians. He has also run
International Launch Services, Sea Launch and Boeing Launch Systems. His latest
job is chief operating officer of Kistler Aerospace, the struggling reusable
launch firm that hopes to transform the launch business.
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