Erwin Hudson, VP of Telesat LEO. Photo: PTC.

Telesat announced that Erwin Hudson has joined the company as vice president of Telesat Low Earth Orbit (LEO), reporting to President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dan Goldberg. Hudson will be based at Telesat’s headquarters in Ottawa and direct the development and implementation of Telesat’s planned high throughput, low latency global LEO constellation.

Telesat has obtained International Telecommunication Union (ITU) priority rights on a global basis to LEO Ka-band spectrum and has developed a patent-pending constellation design and system architecture. In addition, Telesat has procured two prototype LEO satellites that are scheduled for launch later this year as part of the test and validation phase of its LEO initiative.

Previously, Hudson was Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of WildBlue, an early satellite broadband provider later acquired by ViaSat, that began building its U.S. subscriber base using Ka-band spot beam capacity on Telesat’s Anik F2 satellite. Prior to WildBlue, Hudson was a senior executive at Space Systems Loral (SSL) and was director of satellite communications at TRW Space & Electronics.