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Sourcery · 2 min · Aug 31, 2026

Northwood uses site diversity to limit the impact of outages

Bridgit Mendler describes software controls to prevent tampering, paired with many sites rather than relying only on guards and gates. Site diversity can preserve coverage when a location goes down.

Bridgit Mendler

Bridgit Mendler is cofounder and CEO of Northwood Space.

Co-founded Northwood Space, building shared satellite ground infrastructure; earlier a Disney Channel actress and singer.

  • Molly O'Shea, Host · Founder, Sourcery

    Ex-Upfront Ventures investor; has interviewed Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey.

About this segment

Bridgit Mendler describes software controls to prevent tampering, paired with many sites rather than relying only on guards and gates. Site diversity can preserve coverage when a location goes down.

From “Bridgit Mendler Gives Us the First Tour of Northwood's New HQ + Factory”, Aug 31, 2026. Watch the full episode

“we have a bunch of sites and we have that diversity of sites so that we can make sure if any one of those sites goes down”
Bridgit Mendlerat 18:44 · Sourcery18:44

Takeaways

  1. Northwood takes a software-first approach to security.
  2. A wider network can maintain coverage if one site fails.
  3. Sites can go down from events like hurricanes, not just attacks.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 2:45Ground infrastructure lagged because the industry split the work5:55
  2. 23:07Northwood wants revenue growth before expanding its scope3:18
  3. 26:20Ground networks use costly redundancy to guarantee reliability2:57
  4. 13:28The Space Force contract is a trial for a larger engagement2:23

  5. 17:11Northwood uses site diversity to limit the impact of outages2:19

  6. 8:36Space companies still need real businesses today2:12Up next
  7. 38:11Northwood is bringing time-critical manufacturing in-house2:23

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 17:14

    slash s-o-u-r-c-e-r-y. So there are about 15 to 16,000 satellites up in space from LEO to MEO to GEO. There is a, and what is crazy is around like 11,000 of those are just Starlink satellites. But there's a component to this, which is national security. There was a viral tweet that went out and it was completely fake. I tried to tell you about this and you're like, oh shit. But there was a viral tweet that went out about hacking Elon space ground stations and about, you know, the sensitive data and interception there. So how do you think about security and privacy and I guess, yeah, national security when it comes to ground stations? And how are you fortifying on both the physical side of this and then also the software side of this?

  2. 18:04

    Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a great question. And it's something that we really think about up and down the stack. It's all the way from the networks, the hardware, the software, to make sure that we are making it basically impossible for anyone to write anything to our local systems or to tamper with our hardware at site. I think we've really taken a software first approach with a lot of the security stack. We have conversations with customers who have historically really hardened up each of their individual sites. Think of like, you know, guards and gates and things like that. We're taking a bit more of the SpaceX approach where they tend towards proliferation. So we have a bunch of sites and we have that diversity of sites so that we can make sure if any one of those sites goes down, you know, not necessarily for

  3. 18:58

    some kind of malicious reason, but let's say there's like, you know, a crazy hurricane that wipes out the area, we can continue to have continuity of coverage. So, yeah, we think about both at a local site level, being able to have basically no intervention possible at site, as well as diversity of sites for being able to cover for any site downtime. I'm sure this has brought you many crazy places. What is the craziest place that