Eutelsat OneWeb’s Transitional Constellation
- Caleb Henry
- Dec 18, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
12/18/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry
OneWeb’s original plan was to launch its entire constellation in about 20 months, followed by a rest period where the company would recoup its investment and generate cash flows to support a souped-up Gen-2. That didn’t happen.
Instead, three crises – OneWeb's Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic that same year, and Russia’s theft of OneWeb satellites, dispensers, and money in 2022 – turned what was supposed to be a launch sprint into a five-year marathon.
The unexpectedly long time meant OneWeb’s first satellites were nearing retirement age around the time its last batches were launching.
Two changes followed. First, OneWeb, under Eutelsat’s ownership, opted to push its satellites to their full 7-year design life, buying two years more of service. Second OneWeb decided to adopt a tranche replacement approach instead of full generational overhauls.
The contract announced today with Airbus for 100 “extension” satellites – once considered a longshot despite co-building the Gen-1 satellites – is the first of those tranches. Unlike Iridium and some other constellations, OneWeb’s Gen-1 is not expected to survive much past its design life, meaning Eutelsat will need to replace at least 332 satellites – slightly more than half its LEO fleet – before the new IRIS2 network enters service in 2030.
The question now is how Eutelsat will go about procuring the next 232 satellites it needs to sustain OneWeb. So far, that approach emphasizes incremental upgrades and a more European vendor strategy. The extension satellites evolve the architecture of OneWeb from a 4G baseline to 5G, and lay the foundation for compatibility with IRIS2. They will also be built in Toulouse, France, not the Florida factory Airbus and OneWeb used to build the Gen-1 fleet.
Also left unsaid is which, if any, technologies from Eutelsat OneWeb’s JoeySat “beam-hopping” demonstrator will make it into the extension satellites. JoeySat’s electronically steered antenna and Satixfy-supplied flexible payload enable responsive satcom services poised to make OneWeb more competitive if deployed on a broader scale.
