Satellite Startup Hires Space Law Expert as Next General Counsel
“The privately held, Herndon, Va.-based company, founded in 2015, announced Wednesday its addition of executive vice president and general counsel Dennis Burnett. Unlike other satellite operators that use pictures to geolocate, Hawkeye monitors commercial signals and radio frequencies to triangulate and track things for its clients,” reports Brian Baxter in Bloomberg Law’s Tech & Telecom Law News.
“If there’s a distress signal coming from a ship, we can locate that on the surface of the earth from space,” said Burnett, crediting Hawkeye’s three “sophisticated, desk-sized” satellites. “They’re one-tenth the cost of a big satellite, so that’s what’s attractive about them.”
“Burnett, who has 40 years of space law experience and has long been affiliated with the International Institute of Space Law, started his in-house legal career in the late 1970s at Communications Satellite Corp. He comes to Hawkeye after the company raised $70 million in an August 2019 fundraising round led by aerospace giant Airbus SE. Hawkeye’s former in-house legal chief, J. Alison Alfers, left in September after more than two years at the company to become general counsel at Cherwell Software LLC in Colorado.”