\u201cWe had the truck arrive at two o\u2019clock in the morning,\u201d Mendler said. \u201cSix hours later, we were operational. We started running passes. We were able to transmit to a satellite on our first try.\u201d The team had been up all night by then. \u201cI guess that\u2019s when my Celsius addiction kind of kicked in,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Guzzling energy drinks isn\u2019t the healthiest activity, but it fits with the high-energy, frenetic rush of building a space startup. To survive without a billionaire\u2019s backing, startups must stay lean and move quickly. And it\u2019s not at all clear that Northwood will<\/em> survive, as most space startups fail due to a lack of funding, long technology horizons, or regulatory hurdles. So within a year of seriously beginning operations, it\u2019s notable that Northwood was already in the field, testing hardware and finding modest success.<\/p>\n From a technological standpoint, a space mission must usually complete three functions. A spacecraft must launch into orbit. It must deploy its solar panels, begin operations, and collect data. Finally, it must send its data back. If satellite data does not return to Earth in a timely manner, it\u2019s worthless. This process is far more difficult than one might think\u2014and not that many people think about it. \u201cGround stations,\u201d Mendler acknowledges, are some of the most \u201cunsexy and boring problems\u201d in the space industry.<\/p>\n The 32-year-old Mendler now finds herself exactly where she wants to be. The life she has chosen\u2014leading a startup in gritty El Segundo, California, delving into regulatory minutiae, and freezing in rural North Dakota to tackle \u201cboring\u201d problems\u2014lies a world away from a seemingly glamorous life in the entertainment industry. That\u2019s just fine with her.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was growing up, I always said I wanted to be everything,\u201d she said. \u201cSo in a certain sense, maybe I wouldn\u2019t be surprised about where I ended up. But I would certainly be happy.\u201d<\/p>\n Mendler may have wanted to be everything, but in her early years, what she most wanted to be was an actor. In 2001, when Mendler was eight, her parents moved across the country from Washington, DC, to the Bay Area. Her father designed fuel-efficient automobile engines, and her mother was an architect doing green design. Her mom, working from home, enrolled Mendler in an acting camp to help fill the days.<\/p>\n Mendler caught the bug. Although her parents were supportive of these dreams, they told her she would have to work to make it happen.<\/p>\n \u201cWe still had the Yellow Pages at the time, and so my little kid self was just flipping through the Yellow Pages trying to figure out how to get an agent,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it was a long journey. Something that people outside of acting maybe don\u2019t realize is that you encounter a shit ton of rejection. And so my introduction to acting was a ton of rejection in the entertainment industry. But I was like, \u2018I\u2019m gonna freaking figure this out.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n After three years, Mendler began to get voice-acting roles in small films and video games. In November, 2006, she appeared on television for the first time in an episode of the soap opera General Hospital<\/em>. Another three years would pass before she had a real breakthrough, appearing as a recurring character on Wizards of Waverly Place<\/em>, a Disney Channel show starring Selena Gomez. She played a vampire girlfriend.<\/p>\n Mendler starred as \u201cTeddy\u201d in the Disney Channel show Good Luck Charlie<\/em>. Here, she\u2019s sharing a moment with her sister, \u201cCharlie.\u201d<\/p>\n Credit: Mendler impressed enough in this role to be offered the lead in a new sitcom on Disney Channel, Good Luck Charlie<\/em>, playing the older sister to a toddler named Charlie. In this role, Mendler made a video diary for Charlie, offering advice on how to be a successful teenager. The warm-hearted series ran for four years. Episodes regularly averaged more than 5 million viewers.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n My two daughters were among them. They were a decade younger than Mendler, who was 18 when the first episodes aired in 2010. I would sometimes watch the show with my girls. Mendler\u2019s character was endearing, and her advice to Charlie, I believe, helped my own younger daughters anticipate their teenage years. A decade and a half later, my kids still look up to her not just for being on television but for everything else she has accomplished.<\/p>\n As her star soared on the Disney Channel, Mendler moved into music. She recorded gold and platinum records, including her biggest hit, \u201cReady or Not,\u201d in 2012.<\/p>\n Prominent childhood actors have always struggled with the transition to adulthood. Disney stars like Lindsay Lohan and Demi Lovato developed serious substance abuse problems, while others, such as Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, abruptly adopted new, much more mature images that contrasted sharply with their characters on children\u2019s TV shows.<\/p>\n Mendler chose a different path.<\/p>\n As a pre-teen, Mendler would lie in bed at night listening to her mom working upstairs in the kitchen. They lived in a small house amid the redwoods north of Sausalito, California. When Mendler awoke some mornings, her mom would still be tapping away at her architectural designs. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of how I viewed work,\u201d Mendler said.<\/p>\n One of her favorite books as a kid was Miss Rumphius<\/em>, about a woman who spread lupine seeds (also known as bluebonnets) along the coast of Maine to make the countryside more beautiful. The picture book offered an empowering message: Every person has a choice about how to make an impact on the world.<\/p>\n This environment shaped Mendler. She saw her mom work all night, saw experimental engines built by her dad scattered around the house, and had conversations around the dinner table about the future and how she could find her place in it. As she aged into adulthood, performing before thousands of people on stage and making TV shows and movies, Mendler felt like she was missing something. In her words, life in Los Angeles felt \u201canemic.\u201d She had always liked to create things herself, and she wasn\u2019t doing that.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cThe niche that I had wedged myself into was not allowing me to have my own voice and perspective,\u201d she said. \u201cI wound up going down a path where I was more the vessel for other people\u2019s creations, and I wondered what it would be like to be a little bit more in charge of my voice than I was in Hollywood.\u201d<\/p>\n So Mendler channeled her inner nerd. She began to bring textbooks on game theory to the set of movies and TV shows. She took a few college courses. When a topic intrigued her, she would email an author or professor or reach out to them on Twitter.<\/p>\n Her interest was turbocharged when she neared her 25th birthday. Throughout the mid-2010s, Mendler continued to act and release music. One day, while filming a movie called Father of the Year<\/em> in Massachusetts for Netflix, she had a day off. Her uncle took Mendler to visit the famed Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research lab brings together grad students, researchers, and entrepreneurs from various disciplines to develop technology\u2014things like socially engaging robots and biologically inspired engineering. It was a vibrant meeting space for brilliant minds who wanted to build a better future.<\/p>\n \u201cI knew right then I needed to go there,\u201d she said. \u201cI needed to find a way.\u201d<\/p>\n But there was a problem. The Media Lab only offered graduate student programs. Mender didn\u2019t have an undergraduate degree. She\u2019d only taken a handful of college courses. Officials at MIT told her that if she could build her own things, they would consider admitting her to the program. So she threw herself into learning how to code, working on starter projects in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Python. It worked.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n In 2018, Mendler posted on Twitter that she was starting a graduate program at MIT to focus on better understanding social media. \u201cAs an entertainer, for years I struggled with social media because I felt like there was a more loving and human way to connect with fans. That is what I\u2019m going to study,\u201d she wrote. \u201cOverall, I just hope that this time can be an adventure, and I have a thousand ideas I want to share with you so please stay tuned!\u201d<\/p>\n That fall she did, in fact, start working on social media. Mendler was fascinated with it\u2014Twitter in particular\u2014and its role as the new public square. But at the Media Lab, there are all manner of interdisciplinary groups. The one right next to Mendler, for example, was focused on space.<\/p>\n In the months before she left Los Angeles for MIT, Mendler\u2019s life changed in an important way. Through friends, she met an aerospace engineer named Griffin Cleverly. Southern California is swarming with aerospace engineers, but it\u2019s perhaps indicative of the different circles between Hollywood and Hawthorne that Cleverly was the first rocket scientist Mendler had ever met.<\/p>\n \u201cThe conversations we had were totally different,\u201d she said. \u201cHe has so many thoughts about so many things, both in aerospace and other topics.\u201d<\/p>\n They hit it off. Not long after Mendler left for the MIT Lab, Cleverly followed her to Massachusetts, first applying himself to different projects at the lab before taking a job working on satellites for Lockheed Martin. The two married a year later, in 2019.<\/p>\n By the next spring, Mendler was finishing her master\u2019s thesis at MIT on using technology to help resolve conflicts. Then the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She and Cleverly suddenly had a lot of time on their hands.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n They retreated to a lake house owned by Mendler\u2019s family in rural New Hampshire. The house had been in the family since just after World War II, and the couple decided to experiment with antennas to see what they could do. They would periodically mask up and drive to a Home Depot in nearby Concord for supplies. They built different kinds of antennas, including parabolic and helical designs, to see what they could communicate with far away.<\/p>\n Mendler gave up a successful career in music and acting to earn a master\u2019s degree at MIT.<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n As they experimented, Mendler and Cleverly began to think about the changing nature of the space industry. At the time, SpaceX\u2019s Starlink constellation was just coming online to deliver broadband around the world. The company\u2019s Falcon 9 launches were ramping up. Satellites were becoming smaller and cheaper, constellations were proliferating, and companies like K2 were seeking to mass produce.<\/p>\n Mendler and Cleverly believed that the volume of data coming down from space was about to explode\u2014and that existing commercial networks weren\u2019t capable of handling it all.<\/p>\n \u201cThe space industry has been on even-keeled growth for a long time,\u201d Cleverly said. \u201cBut what happens when you hit that hockey stick across the industry? Launch seemed like it was getting taken care of. Mass manufacturing of satellites appeared to be coming. We saw these trends and were trying to understand how the industry was going to react to them. When we looked at the ground side, it wasn\u2019t clear that anyone really was thinking about the ramifications there.\u201d<\/p>\n As the pandemic waned, the couple resumed more normal lives. Mendler continued her studies at MIT, but she was now thoroughly hooked on space. Her husband excelled at working with technology to communicate with satellites, so Mendler focused on the non-engineering side of the space industry. \u201cWith space, so many folks focus on how complicated it is from an engineering perspective, and for good reason, because there are massive engineering problems to solve,\u201d she said. \u201cBut these are also really operationally complex problems.\u201d<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n For example, ground systems that communicate with satellites as they travel around the world operate in different jurisdictions, necessitating contracts and transactions in many countries. Issues with liability, intellectual property, insurance, and regulations abound. So Mendler decided that the next logical step after MIT was to attend law school. Because she lacked an undergraduate degree, most schools wouldn\u2019t admit her. But Harvard University has an exception for exceptional students.<\/p>\n \u201cHarvard was one of the few schools that admitted me,\u201d she said. \u201cI ended up going to law school because I was curious about understanding the operational aspects of working in space.\u201d<\/p>\n These were insanely busy years. In 2022, when she began law school, Mendler was still conducting research at MIT. She soon got an internship at the Federal Communications Commission that gave her a broader view of the space industry from a regulatory standpoint. And in August 2022, she and Cleverly, alongside a software expert from Capella Space named Shaurya Luthra, founded Northwood Space.<\/p>\n So Bridgit Mendler, while studying at MIT and Harvard simultaneously, added a new title to her CV: chief executive officer.<\/p>\n Initially, the founders of Northwood Space did little more than study the market and write a few research papers, assessing the demand for sending data down to Earth, whether there would be customers for a new commercial network to download this data, and if affordable technology solutions could be built for this purpose. After about a year, they were convinced.<\/p>\n \u201cHere\u2019s the vision we ended up with,\u201d Mendler said. \u201cThe space industry has a ground bottleneck, and the problem is going to get worse. So let\u2019s build a network that can address that bottleneck and accelerate space capabilities. The best way to go about that was building capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n If you\u2019re like most people, you don\u2019t spend much time pondering how data gets to and from space. To the extent one thinks about Starlink, it\u2019s probably the satellite trains and personal dishes that spring to mind. But SpaceX has also had to build large ground stations around the world, known as gateways, to pipe data into space from the terrestrial Internet. Most companies lack the resources to build global gateways, so they use a shared commercial network. This has drawbacks, though.<\/p>\n Getting data down in a timely manner is not a trivial problem. From the earliest days of NASA through commercial operations today, operators on Earth generally do not maintain continual contact with satellites in space. For spacecraft in a polar orbit, contact might be made several times a day, with a lag in data of perhaps 30 minutes or as high as 90 minutes in some cases.<\/p>\n This is not great. Let\u2019s say you want to use satellite imagery to fight wildfires. Data on the spread of a wildfire can help operators on the ground deploy resources to fight it. But for this information to be useful in real time, it must be downlinked within minutes of its collection. The existing infrastructure incurs delays that make most currently collected data non-actionable for firefighters. So the first problem Northwood wants to solve is persistence, with a network of ground stations around the world that would allow operators to continually connect with their satellites.<\/p>\n After persistence, the next problem faced by satellite operators is constraints on bandwidth. Satellites collect reams of data in orbit and must either process it on board or throw a lot of it away.<\/p>\n Mendler said that within three years, Northwood aims to build a shared network capable of linking to 500 spacecraft at a time. This may not sound like a big deal, but it\u2019s larger than every commercially available shared ground network and the US government\u2019s Satellite Control Network combined. And these tracking centers took decades to build. Each of Northwood\u2019s sites, spread across six continents, is intended to download far more data than can be brought down on commercial networks today, the equivalent of streaming tens of thousands of Blu-ray discs from space concurrently.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cOur job is to figure out how to most efficiently deliver those capabilities,\u201d Mendler said. \u201cWe\u2019re asking, how can we reliably deliver a new standard of connectivity to the industry, at a viable price point?\u201d<\/p>\n With these aims in mind, Mendler and Cleverly got serious about their startup in the fall of 2023.<\/p>\n Over the previous decade, SpaceX had revolutionized the rocket industry, and a second generation of private launch companies was maturing. Some, like Rocket Lab, were succeeding. Others, such as Virgin Orbit, had gone bankrupt. There were important lessons in these ashes for a space startup CEO.<\/p>\n Among the most critical for Mendler was keeping costs low. Virgin Orbit\u2019s payroll had approached 700 people to support a rocket capable of limited revenue. That kind of payroll growth was a ticket to insolvency. She also recognized SpaceX\u2019s relentless push to build things in-house and rapidly prototype hardware through iterative design as key to the company\u2019s success.<\/p>\n By the end of 2023, Mendler was raising the company\u2019s initial funding, a seed round worth $6.3 million. Northwood emerged from \u201cstealth mode\u201d in February 2024 and set about hiring a small team. Early that summer, it began pulling together components to build Frankie, a prototype for the team\u2019s first product\u2014modular phased-array antennas. Northwood put Frankie together in four months.<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal was to build things quickly,\u201d Mendler said. \u201cThat\u2019s why the first thing we did after raising our seed round was to build something and put it in the field. We wanted to show people it was real.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike a parabolic dish antenna\u2014think a DirecTV satellite dish or the large ground-based antennas that Ellie Arroway uses in Contact<\/em>\u2014phased-array antennas are electrically steerable. Instead of needing to point directly at their target to collect a signal, phased-array antennas produce a beam of radio waves that can \u201cpoint\u201d in different directions without moving the antenna. The technology is decades old, but its use in commercial applications has been limited because it\u2019s more difficult to work with than parabolic dishes. In theory, however, phased array antennas should let Northwood build more capable ground stations, pulling down vastly more data within a smaller footprint. In business terms, the technology is \u201cscalable.\u201d<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n But before a technology can scale, it must work.<\/p>\n In late September 2024, the company\u2019s six engineers, a business development director, and Mendler packed Frankie into a truck and sent it rolling off to the Dakotas. They soon followed, flying commercial to Denver and then into Devils Lake Regional Airport. On the first day of October, the party checked into Spirit Lake Casino.<\/p>\n That night, they drove out to a rural site owned by Planet Labs, nearly an hour away, that has a small network station to communicate with its Earth-imaging satellites. This site consisted of two large antennas, a small operations shed for the networking equipment, and a temporary trailer. The truck hauling Frankie arrived at 2 am local time.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s antenna, \u201cFrankie,\u201d arrives early on October 2 and the team begins to unload it.<\/p>\n Credit: Before sunrise, as the team completed setup, Mendler went into the nearest town, Maddock. The village has one main establishment, Harriman\u2019s Restaurant & Bobcat Bar. The protean facility also serves as an opera house, community library, and meeting place. When Mendler went to the restaurant\u2019s counter and ordered eight breakfast burritos, she attracted notice. But the locals were polite.<\/p>\n Returning to her team, they gathered in the small Planet Labs trailer on the windswept site. There were no lights, so they carried their portable floodlights inside. The space lacked room for chairs, so they huddled around one another in what they affectionately began referring to as the \u201cfood closet.\u201d At least it kept them out of the wind.<\/p>\n The team had some success on the first morning, as Frankie communicated with a SkySat flying overhead, a Planet satellite a little larger than a mini refrigerator. First contact came at 7:34 am, and they had some additional successes throughout the day. But communication remained one-way, from the ground to space. For satellite telemetry, tracking, and command\u2014TT&C in industry parlance\u2014they needed to close the loop. But Frankie could not receive a clear X Band signal from space; it was coming in too weak.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cWhile we could command the satellite, we could not receive the acknowledgments of the command,\u201d Mendler said.<\/p>\n The best satellite passes were clumped during the overnight hours. So over the next few days, the team napped in their rental cars, waiting to see if Frankie could hear satellites calling home. But as the days ticked by, they had no luck. Time was running out.<\/p>\n As the Northwood engineers troubleshot the problem with low signal power, they realized that with some minor changes, they could probably boost the signal. But this would require reconfiguring and calibrating Frankie.<\/p>\n The team scrambled to make these changes on the afternoon of October 4, before four passes in a row that night starting at 3 am. This was one of their last, best chances to make things work. After implementing the fix, the bedraggled Northwood team ate a muted dinner at their casino hotel before heading back out to the ground station. There, they waited in nervous silence for the first pass of the night.<\/p>\n When the initial satellite passed overhead, the space-to-ground power finally reached the requisite level. But Northwood could not decode the message due to a coaxial cable being plugged into the wrong port.<\/p>\n Then they missed the second pass because an inline amplifier was mistakenly switched off.<\/p>\n The third satellite pass failed due to a misrouted switch in Planet\u2019s radio-frequency equipment.<\/p>\n So they were down to the final pass. But this time, there were no technical snafus. The peak of the signal came in clean and, to the team\u2019s delight, with an even higher signal-to-noise ratio than anticipated. Frankie had done it. High fives and hugs all around. The small team crashed that morning before successfully repeating the process the next day.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Good Luck Charlie<\/em><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/GettyImages-169610589-1440x1048.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Adam Taylor\/Disney Channel via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nMaking an impact<\/h2>\n
Pop startup<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/GettyImages-157936769-1440x1044.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWizards of Waverly Space<\/h2>\n
Frankie goes from Hollywood<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/antenna_arriving_2am_Oct_2-1-1440x1080.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Bridgit Mendler<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nSolving their RF problems<\/h2>\n