From Government To Private Space Sector with Agnieszka Lukaszczyk

Agnieszka Lukaszczyk [: 00:00:00

It was really a male dominated industry, and I was more like entertainment for them to see me in these meetings and these rooms.

But, you know, I persevered, and, I thought that if I can do it, anybody else can do it. And I thought that was an important job to give the voice of the youth in those rooms in those meetings.

Hi. I am Agnieszka Lukaszczyk, and you are listening to 'Your Business in Space'.

I'm currently the founder and CEO of High Altitude Consulting. This is a very new thing, but I have been focusing on space policy, Earth observation, and space security for many years. And that means that I've been working with the commercial companies, the public sector, NGOs, and nonprofits.

I've done the whole circle on these topics, and I'd be very happy to tell you more about that. So I'm not your typical space cadet. When I was a kid, I grew up in the Polish mountains. I was really into skiing and snowboarding and all kinds of winter sports. And my dream was always to, achieve the other sounds and make a world a better place. So I wanted to do something that is going to have a global impact and I wasn't quite sure what that would be. I wasn't really thinking about space at that time. I was never really particularly interested in space.

Living in, in the mountains in Poland, one may think that you don't have as many opportunities as, many other people and I always I thought I was going to be working for, United Nations or or some other big, global institution and I just didn't know quite how to do that. I was studying hard. I was a pretty good student. And, when I was 12 years old, my mom and I actually moved to United States. And, I finished my education there and continued kind of with this volunteer work. I was in all kinds of different clubs where I could really, you know, debate and be impactful. But I was still not quite sure what I really want to do. I did my undergraduate studies in political science because I thought that kind of gives me a opportunity to do lots of different things afterwards and I was really into politics.

And then after that, I did my master's in Washington DC on international security And, that kind of gave me this idea that, I could something with security, defense, intelligence, but I wasn't quite sure where to go at that time. I was doing internships at the Polish embassy in Washington DC at the Polish senate. I was, doing also a program with the European Union and Brussels and, you know, I was trying to test things out. And finally, after I graduated, I was applying everywhere trying to see, you know, where I have a chance. And at some point, surprisingly, I got an email from Space Generation Advisory Council, SGC, that you probably heard of, some of you. And, they wanted somebody to run their operations. SGC was and is the largest youth space organization in the world, and everybody's a volunteer. And they wanted somebody who's gonna be there as a full time director who is going to, navigate this organization and make it successful.

I was super surprised because I was never interested in space. So I thought this was a total mistake. And I actually when they asked me for interview, I told them, which you should never say at a interview, that, I'm probably the, I'm incompetent for this role. Like, they should not, consider me because I know nothing about space. But it turns out that they really wanted somebody with a policy background. So, somebody who can work with the United Nations, somebody who can work with different space agencies and different governments, and they told me that the space part I can learn. And, that meant that I would have to move to Vienna where SGAC has its office. And this is how my adventure with space, started.

That that was: 2006

So SGAC has the observer seat there and can make statements. And since I was a director of SGAC, it was my privilege to give those, statements. When I went to COPOS for the first time, it was a room full of older men, who looked at me, and probably thought that I was lost. And, nobody really took me very seriously because I was very young, I was a woman, and I wasn't really from the sector. I was very intimidated and very stressed, but the there was an amazing, director of the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs, UN USAA, Sergio Camacho, who became my mentor. So I really believe in mentoring people, who told me, who asked me actually during one of the receptions, when are you gonna give your statement? And I said statement, I have nothing to what can I say to these people that they don't know? What can I bring? He was like, think about it. You are representing here the youth of the world. You are the voice of the youth of the world, and, you better, say something.

And I'm gonna put you on the agenda for tomorrow morning. So I the entire night, I was working on a speech. I didn't get that approved or cleared by anyone because there was not enough time. And, when I gave it, when I read it the next day, I was so nervous and I was reading so fast that the interpreters were not able actually, interpret what I was saying. So everybody turn around because SGAC has to see that they had back up the room, and we're looking at, like, who is this girl, talking, and, making these statements, and and and we wanna see what's going on. So everybody was looking at me. And then after I was done, very nervous, you know, people were showing me thumbs up, and there was this one gentleman, the ambassador of a certain country came up to me. And he said, you know, this was very nice.

Congratulations. But, you know, you're never gonna make it in this sector. And when I heard that, that I think was the biggest motivation that I have ever received, because there's no way that I will not make in this sector or any sector. If I want to do something, I would've put my mind into it. I'm gonna do my my best to to succeed. And, and I think I've done okay since then. But it was it was very difficult. During that time, there were this was 2,006.

I mean, we're still complaining about not having enough women in this sector. We're still complaining about not having women in the management positions. Back then, there was almost none. I mean, it was really male dominated industry, and I was more like entertainment for them to see me in these meetings and these brooms. But, you know, I persevered and, I thought that if I can do it, anybody else can do it. And I thought that was an important job to give the voice of the youth in those rooms in those meetings. You know, I always say to everyone that it's always the most difficult thing is to get your foot in, in the door, to get that first job, and then you need to let your will work just, speak for itself. Because I was the director of this amazing organization, I was extremely visible.

I was everywhere. Every SGAC was me. It was my face, which, had the silver lining of that was that people knew me, people heard me, and I I was kind of building up credibility for myself, throughout the globe, really, because it's a global organization. To make the long story short, I was, eventually, recruited by the Secure World Foundation, which is a US think tank focusing on space security. I was running their European office. That made me to, move to Brussels and open their office, and this was a extremely interesting opportunity, and I worked with them for about 4 years. After that, I went to work you know, if you're in Europe and if you're in Brussels, European Commission is a very, very tempting place to work for various reasons, but this is where the decisions are made and this is where you feel like you can really make an impact. And I eventually was able to work at the European Commission.

I was working on their, on their space policy and security first and then on their earth observation program, Copernicus. So I was working for this international organization that is quite powerful, on this program, Copernicus, that was just recently launched at that time. And, and we're kind of building something new. Copernicus has free and open data, and we were really trying to encourage people to use that data and to get familiar with it because we knew that this is a breakthrough. So this is quite fascinating time. But after some time, I kind of realized that, this public sector maybe not for me so much because, you know, you don't think for yourself. You, you get instructions. There's only so much growth that you can have.

t when I was hired to SGAC in: 2006

And, they just, at that time, bought a company in Germany called Blackbridge, and they wanted to really boost their European operations. And they wanted somebody who understands how Europe works, who has the network, and who also knows how to, work for an American company. And what I liked about Planet that it wasn't it that it wasn't just a regular, commercial company that just needs wants to make profit, but it's a it was and it is a mission driven company and that really appealed to me because I felt that I can be still impactful while working on this business that is growing because at that time, Planet was still growing. It was still fairly small, and I felt like, I could really help build something amazing. And, and, at the end of my journey with Planet, I was the vice president for government affairs for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. And, and I'm very proud of that time that I spent at Planet because it was an amazing adventure. Planet, it's is a Earth observation company that has the largest constellation of satellites in the world, optical, that monitors every place on Earth every day. And that is really a groundbreaking thing that planet did because nobody has done that before.

And as you can imagine, a lot of things change daily on the surface. And, if you are not aware, if you don't have that awareness of what is happening on the surface, you cannot react. So if you have that sort of intelligence, you can make informative decisions and this is what planet gives you. It's quite fascinating. As I said, it's a mission driven company. It what it does is trying to help life on Earth, through its technology and, and it has grown a lot. It has several constellations now and, and nobody still until today, nobody else is monitoring every place on Earth every day, and that is something really important because you can't really manage what you cannot measure. Whenever Joe thinks about space, they think about astronauts.

They think about distant planets. They mostly think about exploration, which is fascinating. But an average person that struggles with lots of things, like, unemployment or inflation or health or whatever, you know, there might be, they don't quite understand often that why countries will put money into into space where there's so many problems on earth every day. And I get into these conversations sometimes with Uber drivers, which is quite funny. And they you know, it's a small dog. They ask you, what do you do? And I was like, I'm in the space sector. They're like, oh my gosh. It's a choice of money.

And then I'm trying to, you know, switch this narrative and I asked him, well, imagine we turn off the all the satellites, for 24 hours. What's gonna happen if we turn off all the satellites? First of all, you won't be able to drive me to my destination because you have no idea where it is. You're using satellites right now. Why are you complaining about the space sector? But the telecom, shipping, banking, stock exchange, aviation, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So many sectors either depend on space technologies or are really very enhanced by spec space technology. We're just not very good as a sector to talk about it. You know? Like, talk about, you know, using satellite data for agriculture, not very sexy. Right? But talking about, sending an astronaut to the moon, very sexy.

So what people hear is the side, which, again, fascinating, but I'm always trying, to convince to make people aware there's much more to space than that. So I am one of those space cadets who's looking from space down on Earth rather than from Earth up into space. And so I'm I'm trying to convince everyone that the the economy is gonna grow always growing because of space, that their business may grow because of space, and that there are all these applications that could be used, that are essential for our life today, and and that's why we have to fund them. Well, I guess this answer will depend on who you ask, but since you're asking me, I'm gonna be again very down to earth. So, for me, a success is going to be that there's going there are going to be policies in place around the globe, that will recognize space as a, space technology or satellite technology, as an important tool, that there are going to be budget lines, to use that tool, and that we can use it for, you know, especially all the environmental issues, climate, biodiversity laws. That this is not gonna be going to be something that we're going to have to convince people anymore because it's going to be obvious. Just sort of like, you know, GNSS or, or everybody calls it GPS, although we know there are, different systems. But everybody's using their GPS without even thinking about it.

Right? But it's all satellites. So I would like that to happen for Earth Observation as well that you can just plug in into that data source and get it and use it and benefit from it. So this is going to be success for me. It's not gonna be very visible. So, again, not very sexy, but extremely useful. So that's something I would like to see. If you look at the space sector at large, I'm sure everyone will talk to you about will tell you about exploration, you know, setting a colony on on on the moon, landing on Mars, and all of these things, are fascinating, and, it would be amazing if we could do that and would do that. But my first priority is this beautiful little planet that we live on called Earth.

I think space is for everyone as, you know, generic as it sounds. Like I said, I didn't come from I didn't study engineering. I didn't come from space. I wasn't really interested in space. I got into this sector by accident. I realized how amazing it is. So it is you know, we need doctors. We need engineers, of course, scientists, of course, but we need, economists, lawyer, lawyers, communication specialists, marketing specialists, pretty much everybody, biologists.

So if you think space is something that you're interested in, doesn't matter what you study, there is a there is a place for you. And I feel like, actually, we need more of those other portfolios or backgrounds, to make space more approachable and interesting. And that's something that's I think we'll need more and more. So, so that's that's one thing. The second thing is that if you become successful, don't forget to pay it forward. That's usually that's usually how it works. I think I've gotten to the place where I am largely or, you know, because I had a lot of good people around me who, were great advisors and mentors and role models, and I'm trying to be that for, for people as well. I'm very excited about, generally speaking, about about NewSpace and all these different ideas and companies that are coming, popping up all over the world and the fact that, venture capitalists understand their value and are supporting them.

This is, this is great, and I hope this is there's gonna be more, more of that. Space business is expensive, and it's very hard. So from you know, you have 10 companies starting, maybe 2 will make it, but we need 10 companies to start for that to happen. So, I I'm happy to see that there's lots of enthusiasm for that, and there's lots of support also from governments more and more. What I would like to see more, I think, and this is, sometimes a little bit controversial, what I'm about to say, but global problems need global solutions. So a rational cooperation in space, is absolutely necessary. And, unfortunately, sometimes politics come, in between that and get in the way. And I would like to see a little bit less of that, especially when you talk about these environmental issues like global warming, climate change, biodiversity loss, etcetera.

We just need to, look outside of our own personal agenda or our own national agenda or our own regional agenda and look what's good for the world as a whole, because we can only win this battle if we work together. And, during difficult times like right now, first, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and conflict in in in Gaza, etcetera, you see a lot of lot of division, and that's not helpful. So I hope we can look at the bigger picture, and really put our minds together to do something good for this home we live in. So after working for about 18 years, in all these different aspects of space. You know, I started with the NGO, then I went to a foundation, then the international organization, then the commercial sector. Now I started policy security and EO. I've kind of wanted to put all of those together and, well, first of all, I wanted to take a break. Let's be honest.

I wanted to take a break, and I have a little 2 and a half year old at home, and I just wanted to take a break and reflect on life and and think what to do next. Turns out I'm not very good at, taking a break. So I've, started my own company called High ALtitude Consulting. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to offer government affairs services to companies that don't have them or, don't have enough of them. I've noticed in lots of commercial companies, they do not have government affairs or they have a one person or so. And this is a really important aspect of a business because you have to influence policy and you have to influence budgets if you want to benefit from, national or international procurements. And, and this is something that my company can, can do. And, it's very exciting because that way, I can kind of work with all kinds of different companies from EO to exploration to telecom.

So it's I'm also kind of broadening my horizons and working to, like, a common goal to put space on the political agenda. So that's something that I'm doing right now. I'm very excited. This is very new. Never been an entrepreneur, so let's see how it goes.

I'm Agnieszka Lukaszczyk. You've been listening to 'Your Business in Space'.

All the ways to connect with me are in the links in the show notes. To discover more, head to interastra.space

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In this episode, you’ll discover:

“I didn’t come from a scientific or technical background… I came into space purely by accident, and it just became a passion.”

- Agnieszka Lukaszczyk

Find your place in the business of space: https://interastra.space

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