From Marketing Lunar Landers to Ground Control
KSAT's Miri Casey on turning dense engineering into stories people care about.
Hard tech has a marketing problem. Not a lack of talent, but a language barrier between those building the future and the world that needs to understand why it matters. The best marketers in this space aren't just translators, they're architects of belief.
Staying In Orbit exists to surface those voices. Each issue, we sit down with a marketing leader at a company defining what's next in space, science, and hard tech — and ask them how they think, what they've learned, and where the field is heading.
— Chandler, Founder & Chief Galactic Officer at Imagine Milk
This month we're hearing from Miri Casey, who leads marketing and PR at KSAT Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of the Norwegian ground station network provider that connects satellites and deep space missions back to Earth. She previously ran corporate communications for ispace-U.S. and now works across communications and marketing globally, while navigating engineering and compliance reviews and building consensus among the business leaders to make highly technical work legible. We sat down to hear her approach.
Miri Casey, Marketing & PR Lead @ KSAT Inc.
IM: What's the biggest bottleneck in space marketing—whether that's engineering reviews, export control approvals, or getting time with busy engineers—and how do you get around it?
M: Understanding highly technical concepts and turning them into simple but powerful content for storytelling is the biggest challenge, especially when they involve export control approvals and sensitive proprietary or contractual complexities.
Curiosity and tenacity help me overcome challenges. I love working with engineers because they're patient with someone like me (a marketer who isn't well educated in the specific field) and teach me how their work gets done if you are genuinely curious and eager to understand. You can follow up with the rest of the work through tenacity.
IM: How do you turn a dense technical milestone into something people care about? Walk us through how an engineering update becomes a published story.
M: Understanding the concept and trying to explain it in your own words is a good exercise, and I would start from there. From that exercise, you'll know what you do and don't understand.
Then I would list all the questions and interview stakeholders to understand things from multiple different angles, not only from the technical side, but also the business side, the program management side, and the supporting function side, in addition to regular research on the internet and in books. Then you will start to see the significance or insignificance of the story and how we should tell it.
Watching space movies or documentaries also helps me to be creative and inspired, as well as attending networking events and talking to industry professionals.
IM: Launches slip, landings fail, and schedules move. How do you plan a campaign around a date you don't control?
M: I try to tell stories from a broader perspective, rather than focusing on a specific event or milestone, and try to produce evergreen content so we can repurpose it however and whenever we need. Having a good content repository is essential to maintain a sustainable marketing lifecycle.
IM: What conferences, events, or communities would you suggest for people trying to get into aerospace marketing?
M: Space Symposium is an obvious one, as it's one of the biggest ones in the industry. Personally, for me, connecting with PR or marketing professionals in the space industry is so exciting. You can meet them at places like Space Happy Hours and the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), plus other smaller networking events.
IM: What are you most looking forward to this upcoming year working with KSAT—anything fun and exciting you can reveal?
M: KSAT is investing heavily in lunar programs and infrastructure to support deep space and lunar missions. I'm excited to see some of these developments come to fruition, especially since I previously worked for a lunar exploration company.
In The Imagine Milk Orbit 🚀
🍻 Happy hour with Beyond Reach Labs and KeyCAD — October 6th. We're teaming up with the Beyond Reach Labs crew for a night of drinks and hardware talk in NYC. We’ll be celebrating Beyond Reach Labs' big move to NYC, the release of Flarewing, and Imagine Milk’s launch of KeyCAD. RSVP here.
🎥 AFA wrapped. Next on the road for us is AUSA and NBAA-BACE in Las Vegas! If you need coverage at a show this fall, reach out and we'll get you on the schedule.
🚀 CesiumAstro launch coverage. We’ve been documenting CesiumAstro’s Element satellite planned to launch October 1st on SpaceX’s Transporter-18. Launch coverage can be found here. More to come soon :)
The Honorable John Jovanovic, President and Chairman of EXIM Bank and CesiumAstro Founder and CEO Shey Sabripour sign a $300 million credit agreement, joined by leaders from EXIM Bank, JP Morgan and CesiumAstro at the space and defense company’s future global headquarters and manufacturing complex near Austin, Texas, on Sept. 9, 2026.
