Christopher Richins was three semesters away from a business degree when he telephoned a space company and asked what it needed. Sea Launch’s answer was specific: radio-frequency engineers. He changed his major to electrical engineering that day. A university adviser might have preferred a little notice.
The switch meant another three and a half years of study. Richins kept applying for an internship and kept being turned down, until Sea Launch accepted him in the summer before graduation. A full-time engineering job followed. His route into the industry began with a fairly literal interpretation of career advice: find out what the employer needs, then learn to do it.
“I changed my major that same day to electrical engineering and I’ve never looked back.”
Christopher Richins, 2018
Today, the co-founder of RBC Signals works on the communications connecting spacecraft with Earth. The college decision supplies a useful opening to that story. Richins wanted to lead a multinational space company, and he was prepared to spend years learning the equipment before asking anyone to buy its services.
The phone call before the launch
Sea Launch gave him a job close to the machinery. As an RF communications engineer, he supported satellite launch campaigns from its ship-based equatorial launch site. The assignment put the business ambition into contact with the systems on which a launch depended.
His education eventually covered three distinct subjects: electrical engineering at Brigham Young University, astronautics at the University of Southern California, and an MBA at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. At Darden, he was a Jefferson Fellow. In 2007, he became the first recipient of the John L. Colley Jr. Darden Thomas Jefferson Fellowship.
That mix matters to the kind of company he would build. Satellite communications brings technical decisions and commercial decisions into the same room. The person specifying a service has to understand what an operator needs to transmit, as well as what the operator can afford. Richins had deliberately studied both sides of the conversation.
After Darden came experience at SpaceX and Bain & Company. His subsequent management roles included Arkyd Astronautics, later known as Planetary Resources, Space Angels Network, Expedia and Applause. The list crosses space, consulting and software. It gave his eventual startup a background extending beyond the launch pad.
An expensive problem beneath the satellite
The difficulty that led to RBC Signals appeared while Richins was working at a space startup. The team was trying to build and launch satellites, then confront the volume of data those satellites would produce. Returning that information to Earth required a ground communications system, with costs and operations of its own.
In his account, the available choices were unappealing. The startup could construct its own stations and take on the accompanying complexity. Or it could use established government-owned providers whose prices and operating arrangements did not fit its commercial requirements. A spacecraft project had acquired a second infrastructure project underneath it.
Richins saw a problem that other emerging operators would also encounter. RBC Signals, founded in 2015, offered access to communications infrastructure as a service. The company’s proposition was straightforward: a satellite operator should be able to buy the connections it needed without building every part of a worldwide ground network.
There is a pleasingly earthbound quality to the idea. The space industry produces extraordinary hardware, but its customers still need delivery. A picture in orbit becomes useful to someone on the ground when the information can actually reach them. Richins chose to work on that journey.
Borrowing a few minutes of Earth
Low Earth orbit gives communications a scheduling problem. A spacecraft passes through a ground station’s view, then moves on. During his early pitches, Richins described a satellite as being visible from one spot for perhaps ten minutes at a time. One dish could offer a useful appointment; it could hardly offer a permanent conversation.
RBC Signals assembled access to partner stations, using capacity those facilities were not already consuming. Its initial product launched in February 2016 with roughly fifteen partners. The service connected an operator’s need for communication time with infrastructure that already existed. An idle interval acquired a customer.
The company also incorporated antennas of its own. By late 2019, it was combining spare capacity on existing networks with owned infrastructure, and had introduced RBC Signals Xpress for Earth-observation operators seeking more downlink capacity. The model could accommodate shared access while adding equipment where demand justified it.
A simplified view of the service Richins set out to make easier to buy.
A 2018 agreement with Antrix, the commercial arm of India’s space agency, added communications options and extended potential services toward lunar and deep-space missions. Richins described it as the company’s first partnership with a national program. A network assembled through agreements could gain capabilities as well as geographic reach.
For customers, the value could be quite specific. SpaceQuest already operated a ground station when it engaged RBC Signals to increase daily communication opportunities with THEA and BRIO. The satellites had flown on the December 2018 SSO-A mission. Additional stations helped their operator communicate during commissioning in a crowded post-launch environment.
That example gives the business a useful scale. Owning one ground station did not remove the need for more opportunities elsewhere. Richins’s company could supplement an operator’s equipment, providing additional passes through a scheduling interface. The service had room for customers who already knew their way around a dish.
Where the data goes next
By April 2021, RBC Signals reported agreements covering more than eighty antennas at more than fifty locations in over twenty countries. A newly announced $1.2 million round brought reported investment to $3.2 million. Richins said demand was rising; the company had about a dozen employees, with a presence in Europe and the Middle East alongside Redmond.
Reported April 2021. A historical snapshot of the network.
The figures describe an arrangement of assets, partners and people spread across countries. They also make the service proposition tangible. Behind a customer’s request to send or receive information were particular antennas, particular sites and the agreements allowing them to be used.
Richins’s technical attention extended beyond receiving the radio signal. In 2021, discussing support for Aurora Propulsion Technologies’ AuroraSat-1 demonstration mission, he emphasized flexibility: different frequency bands, different orbits, and stations able to support multiple missions and customers. Software-defined ground systems were part of that approach.
He also emphasized data architecture connected to the cloud. Compute, storage and bandwidth enter the picture once a satellite has made contact. Ground stations must fit the work waiting beyond the antenna. The result is a business whose engineering reaches from a moving spacecraft into the computing environment handling its information.
Aurora’s arrangement offered a concrete application. Instead of making a large capital investment in custom ground stations, the propulsion company could use RBC Signals’ antenna network to communicate with its satellite. Richins’s original problem had become a service another team could purchase.
A school at the end of the connection
In 2020, Richins joined the inaugural Karman fellowship cohort. Its fifteen fellows included astronaut Thomas Pesquet, ICEYE co-founder Rafal Modrzewski and Space in Africa founder Temidayo Oniosun. The program brought people from different parts of the space sector into a year of exchanges and shared commitments.
One published group agenda put an educational destination at the end of a satellite link. Richins, Yohann Leroy, Oniosun and Eileen Tanghal proposed coordinating internet access for at least one school in Africa, alongside three to five educational content providers. The pilot was intended to help establish a wider effort.
The document records a commitment and an aim. Its interest lies in the specificity of the proposed use: a connection, a school and material to learn from. The long chain of communications infrastructure would end with something a student could open. For a career built around access to networks, it was a fitting ambition.
A different chair at the same table
On January 8, 2024, RBC Signals announced a change in leadership. Ron Faith, its President and Chief Operating Officer for five years, became CEO. Richins moved to Chief Strategy Officer and leadership of the board. The founder who had led the company since 2015 was taking another job inside it.
Richins welcomed the appointment and credited Faith’s contribution to the company’s growth. It was a handoff to an existing colleague with operating experience in the business. Richins’s current Karman profile identifies him by the strategy role, giving this chapter of his career a different title.
A later public comment returned to an old theme: making more use of resources already available. In May 2025, he shared the STORM initiative with enthusiasm for underused spectrum. ESA and RBC Signals UK had announced a project to develop a commercial marketplace for spectrum resources, working with Texuna and Dione Consulting.
The project’s stated aim was to make allocations more dynamic and communications access more efficient. It extends a familiar question from antenna time to radio-frequency resources: where is capacity available, and how can someone who needs it gain access?
Richins’s career began with that question directed at an employer. What do you need? He accepted an answer that required years of preparation. At RBC Signals, the question turned toward satellite operators, their data and the equipment waiting below. Space supplied the ambition. The work kept finding its way back to Earth.