Charming and articulate, serial entrepreneur Candace Johnson likes to tell people she was born in space.
It is a humid August morning in 2023, and New Delhi is humming with power.
Inside the Business 20 summit - the business world's heavyweight dialogue with the Group of 20 - suit-clad captains of industry trade handshakes and sound bites. The air crackles with talk of artificial intelligence breakthroughs, chip wars and supply chain rewiring.
Then, a woman with a mischievous twinkle in her eye and a luscious mane of silver hair steps up to the podium. Instead of the usual jargon-laced speech, she breaks into song.
"Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars..."
The hall, filled with power players like the head honchos of Qualcomm and Microsoft, falls into a hush, before erupting into laughter and applause. The voice belongs to space and serial entrepreneur Candace Johnson, well-known for being audacious and unexpected.
The day before, the Chandrayaan-3 - a mission by the Indian Space Research Organisation - had successfully landed on the Moon's South Pole for a mere US$74 million (S$95 million). By singing the Frank Sinatra classic, the 72-year-old American wanted to make the point that space is not just for superpowers: it's for everyone.
"That is exactly what Chandrayaan was all about," she says during a recent visit to Singapore.
A visionary investor in the space and telecommunications industry, Ms Johnson has been called the "Czarina of Space" and "Satellite Lady" for shattering monopolies, building global networks from scratch and consistently betting on the impossible.
In the early 1980s when she was barely 30, she pushed for and became the architect of SES (Societe Europeenne des Satellites), one of the world's largest satellite systems in Luxembourg. She has since gone on to found multiple innovative companies, including Europe Online Investments, the first internet-based online service and satellite broadband network, and Loral Cyberstar-Teleport Europe, Europe's first independent private trans-border satellite communications network.
Her trailblazing contributions to the European and global space ecosystem have been recognised with some of the highest honours, among them Luxembourg's Commander of the Order of Merit and Officer of the Oak Crown, as well as Germany's Officer of the Federal Order of Merit.
Now, she is setting her sights on Singapore, convinced the little red dot has the right stuff to become a leading space hub.
Ms Johnson sits on the council of the SST Think Tank (formerly Singapore Space & Technology), a non-profit set up to drive the commercialisation of the space economy by linking space expertise with industries on the ground. By bridging technology and business, SST integrates space solutions into everyday life, fosters cross-sector collaboration and drives an innovation-led space economy with South-east Asia as its focus.
Charming and articulate, Ms Johnson likes to tell people she was born in space.
When she was five, she received a toy Sputnik - the world's first artificial satellite - for the Christmas tree. "From that day on, I thought everything good came from space."
Her late father Harold Johnson is a key figure in America's early space endeavours. Among other things, he helped start the first satellite systems with the US government, worked at the White House with President John F. Kennedy on the Apollo mission, and launched Westar, the world's first private satellite system, in 1974.
Astronauts and rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun were regular guests at her childhood home in Washington.
She and her three siblings were allowed to sit on the staircase near the living room during their parents' cocktail parties, eavesdropping on conversations that would shape the future.
When she was a child, her best friend had the biggest ham radio, or amateur radio, station in the US.
"He was 60, I was eight. I don't know if I was his best friend, but he definitely was mine," she says. "I would go to his home every Sunday and dial all around the world."
She also remembers her father visiting her fifth grade class fresh from helping to launch "Early Bird" (or Intelsat 1), the first US satellite to provide commercial communications services. He painted a future where satellites would transform entertainment, telecommunications and education and even redefine warfare while fostering peace on earth.
"Of course, the peace on earth part still hasn't happened, but I'm hoping that it will," she says.
Ms Johnson absorbed the language of telecommunications like a native tongue: tropospheric forward scatter (a form of long-distance radio communication using microwave radio signals), code division multiplexing (a technique where various data signals are merged for instantaneous transmission above a common frequency band) and fibre optics.
Given her upbringing, it was a shock to many when she veered off course to study music and ended up with five music degrees from institutions including Stanford in California, Vassar College in New York and the Sorbonne in Paris.
"I've never seen this as a divergence at all," she insists.
"Song is the marriage of poetry and music, right? And telecommunications is when you transmit a message intact to your audience... It is a question of fidelity, trust and communication. Whether you are transmitting a signal or whether you are transmitting a song or a message or a melody, it's the same thing."
It explains why she sees the world as interconnected networks.
"If you imagine a note in a Bach fugue which has all of its characteristics, and then it gets connected to another node which has its characteristics, and then you keep on connecting the dots... at the end of the day, a Bach fugue is the perfect network," she explains.
"It is communicating something of beauty. It is harmonious. And when we have satellite networks, you are creating something that you can use to transmit messages."
This unique fusion of right and left brain thinking has made her "a bit of an oddball", she concedes.
She began her career as an executive producer at a classical music radio station before moving on to become director of marketing at a radio and television company.
At just 29, she played a key role in selling the business for US$3 million, earning US$300,000 from the deal.
Her links to Luxembourg came about when she married its ambassador to the US Adrien F. Meisch in 1981. In addition to holding a doctorate in history from Cambridge, Dr Meisch, who died in 2020 at age 90, was also an accomplished concert pianist. The couple often performed for guests and dignitaries.
The year after the couple got married, then Prime Minister of Luxembourg Pierre Werner was looking for a new economic pillar for his country, which was struggling with crises in its steel and broadcasting industries.
He called Ms Johnson, who had an audacious idea: Luxembourg could have its own private satellite system.
Her motivation was simple: "To right a wrong." At the time, Europe was a patchwork of state-owned telecommunications and broadcast monopolies.
"The fact that this rich continent of cultures was not sharing their culture... I said, we will create a zone that will cover all of Europe," she recalls.
Many deemed the venture impossible. There were no venture capitalists for a project of this scale. The established telcos and broadcasters viewed her as public enemy No. 1.
The project was so secret Mr Werner could not ask Parliament for a budget.
Ms Johnson's adage, however, has always been to never accept no for an answer, "never give up and never go away". So she flew around Europe on her own funds and conducted a market study, securing preliminary agreements from media moguls like Mr Rupert Murdoch and Mr Silvio Berlusconi. When she needed a legal framework for the satellite licence, her father helped her draft regulatory frameworks through late-night phone calls.
The masterstroke came in raising capital. The breakthrough came when a friend - a count who she thought was poor but turned out to be wealthy - invested the first million.
Then Mr Werner gave her a letter which told Luxembourg's powerful banks that if they helped with the satellite project, the government would "look kindly on your finance plots in Luxembourg". It worked, as 10 of Europe's biggest banks, including Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale, put in US$10 million each, figuring it was a small price to pay for regulatory goodwill.
"When we launched our first satellite, we were in the black," she says with a triumphant smile. "And we never, ever looked back."
That same drive is what brings her to Singapore. She sees profound parallels between the city-state and Luxembourg.
"I think that Singapore is in a truly unique geopolitical situation to make a very important impact on the world," she says.
The city-state's strengths in advanced materials, artificial intelligence, robotics and finance, she adds, are the exact ingredients needed for the next era of space. This new era is not just about launching rockets; it is about what she calls "space in space" - building space stations, data centres and logistics networks in orbit.
She envisions Singapore as a "non-threatening" leader and a "common denominator" for its neighbours. "We don't do agriculture, we don't do oil and gas... so all of our neighbours can meet us in this common denominator of space."
To get there, she says, Singapore needs to "think big, think global from day one", and a leader needs to be "bold enough" to declare the ambition. "I'm saying it for Singapore," she declares.
Being a woman in a field dominated by men was never something she dwelled on.
"If you're an entrepreneur, you are alone because you see the future and not everybody sees it. It's your responsibility to make them see it. I'm alone, but I've never felt lonely," says Ms Johnson, who co-founded organisations like the Global Telecom Women's Network to support other women in the industry.
Her relentless drive is fuelled by a profound sense of duty and a unique creative process. She programmes her mind before bed, outlining a problem she needs to solve.
"I wake up and I just write down the solutions that come. My big thing is brainwaves... I try to train my mind to be able to communicate with other times, with other places," says Ms Johnson, who was recognised with the prestigious Sir Arthur C. Clarke Innovator's Award in 2025. Previous recipients of the award include Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Today, Ms Johnson's primary battle is against what she calls the "colonisation of space" - the gobbling up of frequencies and orbital slots by a few large players, squeezing out smaller nations.
"I don't think that people understand that frequencies and orbital positions are being taken away from those countries that will need it the most," she argues passionately.
"And those countries are countries like Singapore, like Malaysia, like Indonesia," says Ms Johnson, who co-founded Oceania Women's Network Satellite (Ownsat) in 2013.
Ownsat is a founding investor in the Kacific Satellite System based in Singapore, where she is a board member. The two entities are bringing high throughput satellite internet to the islands of the Pacific.
Fighting for open skies, she says, is a mission of connection, of righting wrongs, and ensuring that space, in all its wonder, truly is for all humanity.
"I wake up in the morning, and I think I have a personal responsibility to get this done."