Space & Defence Investors Evening

​Space stopped being a science project and became infrastructure and now a contested one. Navigation, banking, defence and communications all run through it, and the countries and companies that can see and defend what happens up there are about to matter far more than the ones that can't.

​That shift — space as the fourth domain of defence, and one of the largest commercial openings in deep tech is what this evening is about.

​Co-hosted by Universe Ventures, SpaceTech Startup Consultancy and FUTRPROOF, it brings founders, investors, operators and researchers into one room around defence, space and orbital intelligence and the commercial openings underneath them.

​The night centres on a session with Bianca Cefalo, who spent 15 years engineering spacecraft NASA's InSight Mars mission, then thermal systems on Airbus telecommunications satellites worth hundreds of millions each — before founding Space DOTS. She'll get into where in-orbit intelligence is heading, and why measuring what is actually happening around a spacecraft, rather than trusting a pre-launch model, is becoming a hard requirement for defence, satellite operators and insurers alike.