Todd Ham
Vice President and General Manager, Defense and Space Programs, Public Sector Earth Intelligence, Maxar Technologies
Todd Ham recently took on his new role within Maxar leading the combined Defense and Space Programs team and is heavily focused on what lies in the future.
“In my engineering days I was ⏤ and still am ⏤ a big believer in what I called ‘design for the future; implement for today,’” he said. “That simple approach forces one to consider where you’re going strategically and the architectural or business model flexibility that will be needed to adapt to uncertainty while being practical with how much to spend, now.
“Today, in this role, I challenge myself to provide sufficient foresight so teams can make those design decisions and implementation tradeoffs while also setting the environmental conditions so team members can excel in mission execution.”
Prior to changing roles in late 2022, he focused on helping develop next-generation systems and optimizing Maxar’s internal operations. As a former small business chief operating officer, Ham always is on the lookout for opportunities to generate innovative and agile practices within a large corporation like Maxar.
“In his history with Maxar, Todd has applied a combination of business and technical acumen to anticipate the challenges the business will face and position to address them,” said Tony Frazier, executive vice president and general manager of Maxar’s public sector Earth intelligence. “Combining those skills with his understanding of both Maxar’s systems and operations creates opportunities to delivery substantial value to address customer needs.”
Why Watch
In 2023, Ham is excited to see the progress his team, Maxar and the broader remote sensing community will make in accelerating the delivery of multisource data and intelligence for customers domestically and globally.
Maxar is launching the next-generation WorldView Legion satellites and complementing those with its partner Umbra’s synthetic aperture radar capabilities, as well as radio frequency data from Aurora Insight acquisition, to provide a more holistic intelligence mission value for customers. They’re enabling business systems interoperability and also accelerating delivery timelines for both the data and analytics.