New KSAT CEO’s mission to keep the pioneering spirit going

Marte Indregard has spent two decades at KSAT. Now, as its first female CEO, she faces the challenge of sustaining growth without losing the culture that got the company here.

When Marte Indregard officially became CEO of Kongsberg Satellite Services on February 26, she stepped into a role defined by continuity as much as ambition, her predecessor Rolf Skatteboe spent 25 years at the helm. KSAT, which operates one of the world’s largest networks of ground stations for downloading and processing data from polar-orbiting satellites, has grown from a company of 70 employees to one of 600 over the two decades Indregard has worked there. Revenue has grown dramatically in the past four years. But according to Indregard, the trajectory only goes one way.

“We by no means have a plan to stabilize. We have a plan to continue that growth. Even though we are different from when we were 70 people 20 years ago, we really need to keep that pioneering spirit. It’s important to state that now, when we have become a big company.”

Indregard has spent 14 years on the KSAT management team and more than a decade in senior executive roles at the company’s headquarters in Tromsø, the Norwegian Arctic city from which one of the world’s largest space service companies is run. Most recently she served as Head of the Ground Segment — responsible for KSAT’s global network of antenna stations — involved in the strategic decisions that shaped the KSAT of today, and now responsible for what comes next.

Indregard’s appointment as KSAT’s first female CEO comes at a pivotal moment for the industry. New satellite constellations are proliferating, geopolitical tensions are driving governments to invest in space-based surveillance, and the race to deliver data faster is reshaping the market.

“The demand for near real time data is growing. And this is where KSAT has been focused on from the beginning.”

The strategy is not a sharp turn, she emphasises — but a deepening of what KSAT has always done: building services on top of infrastructure and staying close to what users actually need.

“Infrastructure is just infrastructure. You need to provide good services on top of it. All our focus has always been to understand what the users need and then to build on that.”

A ground station in space

KSAT’s network of more than 300 antennas spans 40 sites across the globe — from its home station in Tromsø to SvalSat on Svalbard at 78° North, the world’s largest commercial ground station for polar-orbiting satellites, to TrollSat in Antarctica at 72° South, as well as sites in Inuvik in Canada, Punta Arenas in Chile and Singapore.

“It’s because of Svalbard’s geography. These satellites are polar orbiting, and we have a ground station there because it’s a good place to access the data.”

But geography and geopolitics are increasingly hard to separate in the Arctic, and KSAT finds itself squarely at that intersection.

The company is now making two major infrastructure bets that will shape its next chapter. The first is a network of large antennas designed for lunar communications, which is vastly larger than its standard 3.7-to-13-metre array and is built to capture data from the emerging lunar market. The second is what KSAT calls its Hyper Constellation: a ground station placed in orbit itself.

“In order to get the information from the satellite actionable to the end user, you come back to the latency. You need to get access to the data quickly.”

KSAT has navigated disruption before. When smaller, cheaper satellites began reshaping the industry a decade ago, the company assembled a dedicated team to rethink its approach and develop a more cost-efficient service — one it is marking ten years of this year.

Beyond ground station services, KSAT operates an Earth observation division providing maritime awareness services — tracking vessel movements, detecting illegal fishing and monitoring ice conditions — that are central to Arctic governance and data collection. Norway has been using satellite data for this purpose since the 1990s, and KSAT has been at the centre of that work.

“The Arctic is really, really important for the world right now,” Indregard says.

The combination of the two business areas is, she argues, KSAT’s sharpest competitive edge.

“We have competition in both areas, but we don’t have a competitor who actually does both.”

Understanding her maritime surveillance customers also gives KSAT a clearer picture of what satellite operators need — frequent data and lower latency.

The climate challenge at 78° North

While much of the conversation around the Arctic focuses on geopolitical competition, Indregard notes that the most pressing concern for the manager of KSAT’s Svalbard station is rather more immediate: the ground itself is changing. Keeping the road to the station intact and managing water on site are becoming day-to-day operational challenges — a reminder that the strategic importance of Arctic infrastructure runs up against the physical realities of operating in one of the fastest-warming places on earth.

“That is what he is mostly concerned about, making sure we can operate in a good way and take care of our colleagues who work there,” Indregard says.

European sovereignty and Nordic collaboration

The Arctic’s growing strategic importance has sharpened European efforts to achieve technological sovereignty in space — and that conversation lands squarely in KSAT’s lap. Indregard is careful not to wade into politics, but she is direct about capability.

“We have the capacity that is needed in order to be able to deliver our core business to Europe with European assets.”

European partnerships, she adds, are essential to making that sovereignty real rather than theoretical.

“In order to make it resilient and efficient, it is really important to take the best capacity that exists and put those together. That will make this stronger and faster.”

She pointed to recent bilateral discussions between Norway and Germany, and Norway and Canada, in which space figured as a key pillar of broader defence and resilience conversations. The expansion of NATO to include Sweden and Finland has, in her view, sharpened Nordic cooperation across domains including space.

“We see that there is much more focus on Nordic collaboration now, which is very positive.”

In Indregard’s view, the geopolitical shifts of the past decade have raised the stakes for the space industry. Defence and government have always been drivers of space activity, she notes, but what is new is the convergence of political urgency and technological capability. A decade ago, space-based data may have been theoretically useful to governments and militaries, but latency was too high and satellite coverage too sparse to make it truly actionable. That has changed.

“I think it’s a combination of the geopolitical situation in the world — that there is more demand for these types of services — but also that the space sector is now actually meeting that need. The growth of new constellations and new satellites is driven by these needs, which again helps our market, because satellite operators are our customers.”

Keeping the pioneer spirit

Rolf Skatteboe built KSAT from a niche ground station operator in northern Norway into a global market leader. For Indregard, one of his most important legacies is cultural — and she sees protecting it as one of her central responsibilities. KSAT grew up with an entrepreneurial identity, and the risk now, as the company approaches a potential thousand employees, is that scale quietly erodes it.

Being the dominant player in a sector brings its own dangers. Technology is changing faster than infrastructure cycles, and KSAT has made significant capital commitments. Legacy systems, she warns, can become anchors if they are not questioned.

“It’s easy to think: we have been doing this for ten years, so we just continue. We need to have the mindset to change — maybe throw away something even if we have put a lot of work into it. We need to make sure that we are not ignorant to just being big now. We need to make sure that we are still going about in ten years.”

For a company whose core infrastructure sits at the top of the world, where climate change, great-power competition, and the commercial space boom are all converging, that is not a hypothetical concern. It is fast becoming the central question of Arctic strategy itself.