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Tecnológico Nacional de México SATLINK SatLink 2027

Speakers

SatLink is not only about flying: it is also about learning from people who have already pushed technology to its limits. Each edition invites specialists to share with the teams what they have built, flown and discovered.

SatLink 2026

Nicolas Sornin

Nicolas Sornin

Co-founder and CTO of Aéronde (France) · Co-inventor of LoRa

Talk · October 28, 2026 · Instituto Tecnológico de Pabellón de Arteaga (ITPA)

How airships fly — From Archimedes to repairing power lines in the Alps

How an airship floats and how it is controlled. A tour of 240 years of lighter-than-air flight and the physics of lift: one cubic metre of helium lifts about one kilogram, and for airships "huge is beautiful" because lift grows with volume while the envelope only grows with surface. He explained how pressure holds the envelope's shape, why wind is the real enemy and why thrust vectoring, as on the aérOnde, is the way to control it. He closed with advice for building your own airship: be obsessive about weight, start very simple, build an air-filled prototype first, fly early when the air is calm, and have a plan in case a motor or the radio link fails.

Biography

Co-inventor of the LoRa radio technology and co-author of the LoRaWAN protocol: the very network SatLink probes fly on. He founded Cycleo, the company where LoRa was born. After its acquisition by Semtech he was radio product architect, head of the Grenoble R&D center, chairman of the LoRa Alliance technical committee and Semtech's worldwide corporate CTO. Since 2022 he has been co-founder and CTO of Aéronde, a French company that designs, builds and flies crewed electric airships for aerial work, and he is an airship test pilot. A graduate of École polytechnique and École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, he flies gliders, gyroplanes, ultralights and helicopters, and has co-founded five startups.

LinkedInAéronde

Charles Galindo Jr.

Charles Galindo Jr.

Research professor, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla (UPAEP)

Talk · October 30, 2026 · Instituto Tecnológico de Pabellón de Arteaga (ITPA)

Near Space Science: A Stratospheric Laboratory Platform on the Rise

The stratosphere as a laboratory within students' reach. He shared the experience of launching stratospheric balloons at UPAEP, where these platforms are used to test sensors and to study active volcanoes such as Popocatépetl.

Biography

Research professor at UPAEP, where he leads aerospace engineering students in the mission operations of the AztechSat-1 and GXIBA-1 satellites and directs research using high-altitude balloon platforms to monitor Popocatépetl and other active volcanoes in Mexico. A geologist by training, he spent 30 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center: he processed lunar samples, developed synthetic soils for growing plants in microgravity and at future bases on the Moon and Mars, and designed geochemical systems to detect life on Mars. He was principal investigator of the NASA Space Science Day outreach program and, with Tierra Luna Engineering, owned by astronaut José M. Hernández, managed university CubeSat projects and high-altitude balloon experiments.

LinkedInUPAEP