Viasat’s ViaSat-3 F1 went up from Kennedy Space Center at the end of a programme years in the making. The company wanted the people in the stands to leave with something of it.

A satellite launch is the most lopsided event in corporate life. Years of engineering, a budget with no comparison anywhere else in the business, everyone who worked on some part of it, and then a morning at Kennedy Space Center that is finished in minutes. Everything handed out on a day like that is competing with the launch itself, and losing. The lanyard, the printed programme, the branded bottle: all of it is documentation of an event nobody present is going to forget anyway.

WLWYB built the ViaSat-3 F1 in miniature. Not a symbol of it, the actual craft: solar arrays running out to either side, the reflector on its boom, the bus in the middle, all of it correct enough that the engineers who built the real one could check it. The build was deliberately short, and that shortness is the design rather than a shortcut. A satellite is an object almost nobody has held, and a build short enough to finish standing up, in a crowd, on the morning of a launch, is one that actually gets built rather than taken home in a bag and forgotten. It went into every guest's launch-day package, unannounced.