Satellite Titan SES, Pop Star Shakira Race To Aid Quake-Hit Colombians

SES operates the most sophisticated fleet of satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and is now using these spacecraft to beam life-saving broadband connections to quake-hit Colombians 35,000 kilometers below.

image courtesy of MAXAR and SES/Intelsat

When powerful seismic waves generated by the Colombian earthquake started shaking his home, Victor Ariza says he immediately realized this was a titanic temblor, and he quickly began weighing options on how he could mobilize help in the fastest way possible.

While Ariza, a regional director at the satellite titan SES, reported the earthquake via an online app, he was astounded to see that similar reports were flooding the site, sent by quake watchers across the country.

This maelstrom of accounts, he says, pointed to the magnitude of the earthquake, and its follow-up aftershocks.

Ariza told me he instantly contacted the SES leadership to ask if he could offer humanitarian help to the Colombian government and to quake victims on behalf of the Luxembourg-based spacecraft operator, whose fleet of leading-edge sats can beam broadband internet connections to virtually any point on the planet – even disaster-struck regions whose fiber optic cables and telecoms towers have all been decimated.

SES, which has a rich history of spearheading lightning-speed relief operations in the aftermath of earthquakes, hurricanes and even man-made disasters like Russia’s missile blitzes on Ukraine, approved Ariza’s proposal in a heartbeat, he says.

While envisioning a communications rescue strategy, with SES potentially creating an archipelago of hotspot outposts that could give first responders and quake victims the ability to instantly go online and make calls nationwide, Ariza says he was also astonished to see offers of aid rushing into Colombia from around the world.

The global pop icon Shakira, born in Colombia, rushed back to her homeland to console children whose schools had been crushed during the tectonic eruption, and vowed to build ten new learning centers across the region.

Shakira, an incredible philanthropist, messaged the world, via her Instagram account, that while Colombia has been hit by tragedy, an amazing ring of guardians is emerging to help the country through this disaster.

“These past few days, I’ve seen something powerful,” she said, “people showing up for each other, especially for our kids.”

As part of the quest to guide Colombia through a rapid recovery, she said, “the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund is dedicating $500,000, working hand in hand with [her philanthropic foundation] Pies Descalzos, to support children returning to the classroom.”

FIFA, or Fédération Internationale de Football Association, has already teamed up with the NGO Global Citizen to raise $100 million to give kids across the planet access to high-quality education, and part of those funds will be channeled into Shakira’s new Latin American relief mission.

Shakira is a cultural superstar not only across top radio stations and music venues crisscrossing the continents, but also across FIFA and YouTube: her worldwide hit “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa),” the official FIFA World Cup song for a championship hosted by South Africa, has already been viewed an astounding 4.728 billion times, the equivalent of more than half the world’s population, and is a fascinating mash-up of languages, including English and the west African dialect Sango.

The planet pop sensation says the half million dollars offered by FIFA “are being matched by Live Nation, for a combined $1 million contribution.”

“Everyone can join in the effort to help our kids through this crisis,” she says on Instagram. “If you’re a registered nonprofit, or you know of one doing this work, I encourage you to register your interest and share your story with us.”

A continent away, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recounted in a bulletin that the magnitude 7.4 earthquake caused “significant damage, injury, and loss of life across western and central regions of the country.”

The United States “is mobilizing life-saving humanitarian assistance through trusted partners,” he added, while the State Department supports ongoing search and rescue operations.

For philanthropists who want to boost Colombia’s comeback, Secretary Rubio said, “Financial donations to established relief organizations are the most efficient and impactful way to support disaster response.”

“Every financial donation, regardless of size, helps save lives and reduce suffering.”

The State Department is collaborating with a number of time-tested partners on relief missions, including some, like Catholic Relief Services, that are accepting financial support from the public.

Meanwhile, Victor Ariza says while aid is arriving from every corner of the planet, it can also be delivered from the heavens.

He says the European outfit SES, which recently merged with the American colossus Intelsat, now operates the most advanced fleet of satellites in geostationary orbit, and is activating its premier SES-17 spacecraft, which flies 35,000 kilometers above the Earth, to potentially beam internet access that can save lives across remote quake-devastated regions of Colombia.

The SES-27, with massive solar panels that give it a wingspan of 48 meters, could transmit high-speed broadband connections to remote Colombian hospitals and schools, aircraft in flight, and even emergency rescue convoys traversing the Andes mountain system that soars along the Pacific coast of South America.

Victor Ariza says SES’s ultimate goal is to provide recovering schools and medical centers like Hospital Departamental San Francisco de Asís with vital internet gateways to plug them back into the World Wide Web and its globe-spanning networks of doctors and medical libraries and cutting-edge research archived in pre-print servers.

When he began organizing a high-speed communications recovery plan, Ariza says, SES’s longtime partner Sencinet Colombia speedily agreed to join forces on the operation, offering “satellite and WiFi equipment to distribute the [satellite broadband] service, and even their own field technicians to carry out the installations.”

“Terminal hardware, transport logistics, and field installation are provided by the local partner, Sencinet Colombia, at no cost to the Colombian government,” Ariza says.

These rescue mission allies, he adds, aim to weave a web of internet lifelines across Chocó, the epicenter of the earthquake on Colombia’s Pacific coast, “where the rainforest meets the sea.”

To speed aid to Chocó, they have joined up with first responders and engineers heading the Colombian Civil Defense, the agency that’s led the nationwide race to rescue and treat citizens trapped in crumbled homes and villages.

The Civil Defense agency will oversee the drive to rebuild schools and hospitals across isolated regions that can be empowered with new internet connections provided, gratis, by SES and Sencinet.

While Colombian Civil Defense has deployed some of the donated SES satellite terminals to map out and coordinate its rescue and restoration mission around the quake’s epicenter, future deployments of these stations are likely to take place across “other health institutions and schools,” Ariza says.

Across the nation, he says, some 30,000 homes have been destroyed, while more than 3,000 schools and 300 health centers have been crushed or damaged.

The instant broadband connections that SES could beam across the worst-hit sectors of Colombia would speed up the country’s revival and simultaneously help chip away at the “digital divide” that still separates citizens that now have access to the internet and those still trapped outside the borders of the World Wide Web.

The satellite outfit, whose top ranks are sprinkled with tech philanthropists, including CEO Adel Al-Saleh, is already collaborating with Colombia’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies to connect once-isolated communities to the Web.

These low-cost connections, in turn, are providing portals to the global digital market, online universities, Web-based health services and e-books that can freely crisscross national borders.

SES already provides Wi-Fi access to one million Colombians as part of a utopian, pro-peace project called “Zonas Comunitarias para la Paz,” and is continually expanding this digital outreach drive.

SES, and its once-independent partner Intelsat, have been at the global forefront in providing life-saving Wi-Fi connections to refugees, doctors, UN leaders and first responders in high-risk operations like the mission Intelsat led in the hours and days after Russia begin its missile bombardment of Ukraine four years ago.

When Moscow started blitzing Ukraine’s cities and communications towers with exploding missiles, Intelsat swiftly mapped out strategies to keep the country from being bombed into an informational wasteland.

As the first Russian rockets blasted their targets, Intelsat joined forces with the UN partner Help.NGO to rush lifesaving sat terminals into embattled Ukraine.

Help.NGO, equipped with Intelsat ground stations, raced to set up wireless hotspots in makeshift havens across the bombed-out democracy, Brendan Harvey, Help.NGO’s executive director, told me in an earlier interview.

His detachment of internet- and satellite-tech wizards linked up Ukrainians with Intelsat’s broadband beaming spacecraft “in town squares already subject to missile attacks,” he said.

Dave Wajsgras, then-CEO of Intelsat, told me in a separate, sweeping interview last summer that collaborating with Help.NGO’s rapid response teams to provide satellite-enabled internet kiosks in wartime Ukraine represented a high-priority humanitarian mission for the world-leading satellite outfit.

“We believe it’s important to support these types of missions around the world,” Wajsgras said.

“People in Ukraine need support,” said Wajsgras, a prominent tech philanthropist. “They need our help.”

Intelsat’s goal in its alliance with Help.NGO was to throw internet lifelines to Ukrainians—including refugees fleeing the rocket barrages—as quickly as possible.

Help.NGO’s director said his tech squads sprinted to set up internet sanctuaries—sometimes within hours—“in communities hit by rocket fire outside Kyiv,” Ukraine’s capital.

Harvey added that Help.NGO has forged a longtime humanitarian partnership with Intelsat, an alliance that will continue with the combined Intelsat/SES. Over the last decade, they have jointly mounted tech-powered recovery missions across hurricane or earthquake-wreaked regions along the Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean.

Their coalition brings leading-edge mobile technologies, like advanced, compact terminals that can fit into a backpack and connect with SES’s orbiting satellites, to provide high-speed internet connectivity to other critical first responders speeding to rescue victims across disaster sites or conflict zones.

Leaps in miniaturizing satellite transceivers, and in simplifying operations, are in turn cutting down the time Help.NGO technicians need to create each hotspot outpost, Brendan Harvey said.

“We could set up an entire network of terminals very quickly,” he said, at speeds that reduce risks to Help.NGO teams and other humanitarian staff in regions where the missiles are still flying.

The chief executive of SES, Adel Al-Saleh, told me across an extensive interview that the global satellite giant aims to push forward with these humanitarian missions to provide internet coverage to Ukraine’s blitzed citizens and rescue workers.

Al-Saleh said SES would continue the quest to restore internet access across Ukraine, even as the Russian bombs continue to drop.

Joint missions with Help.NGO, Al-Saleh said, will continue into the future.

The techno-utopian Al-Saleh added that the entire team at SES is likewise “very passionate” about ultimately helping extend internet coverage to the 2 billion-plus people scattered across the planet who are still stranded outside the realm of the Web.

“We’re quite serious about supporting the world,” he says, with ongoing campaigns to provide low-cost Web connections that are now expanding across parts of Latin America, Central Asia, Africa and “remote islands across the Pacific.”