April. 15, 2026 By Caleb Henry Credit: Amazon Space Symposium conference goers woke up Tuesday morning to news they might have expected at last month’s Satellite 2026 show: Amazon buying Louisiana satellite operator Globalstar. The deal, expected to close in 2027, positions Amazon as a competitor in the emerging Direct-to-Device (DTD) market alongside AST SpaceMobile, Equatys, and rival SpaceX. At Quilty, we believe the deal will turbocharge the Globalstar constellation, while adding some challenges faced by the Amazon Leo broadband fleet.   What the deal does   Amazon gains access to Globalstar’s 24-satellite constellation, existing operations, and most importantly, its spectrum. Globalstar has about 25 MHz of spectrum that can be partially or fully applied to DTD – 8.725 MHz of L-band (plus a 0.95 MHz sliver shared with Iridium) and 16.5 MHz of S-band. Globalstar's spectrum is asymmetric — roughly 8 MHz of uplink paired against 16 MHz of downlink — which caps two-way DTD throughput. Closing that gap likely means acquiring additional L-band, making Iridium's adjacent 1618-1626 MHz allocation a clear target. Iridium hit a 52-week high on the Globalstar announcement.  For decades, Globalstar has been a “spectrum play,” with management pursuing opportunities to sell the company for a hefty sum in exchange for rights to its airwaves. Years of attempts at repurposing Globalstar satellite spectrum for terrestrial applications were underwhelming until 2022, when Apple signed an exclusive contract to leverage 85% of Globalstar network capacity to link iPhones in remote locations. The Apple deal breathed new life into Globalstar, providing funding needed to replenish and expand its aging constellation.   If Apple revived Globalstar, Amazon will turbocharge it. Tuesday’s deal dramatically widens the addressable market for Globalstar by giving it a pathway to an even better constellation, as well as for Amazon, which now targets “hundreds of millions of customer endpoints,” up from “tens of millions” originally . Amazon says it will continue serving Apple iPhone and Watch customers using Globalstar’s current fleet and forthcoming MDA Space constellation (keeping that deal safe), while enabling expansions previously not available to Globalstar, namely:  New customers. Amazon will pursue Mobile Network Operators as customers, something Globalstar was precluded from doing by nature of its Apple deal.   New markets. Amazon targets consumer, enterprise and government customers, marking a notable expansion from early DTD efforts industry-wide that focused largely on consumers.   What’s next?    Closing the deal hinges on Globalstar hitting certain HIBLEO-4 replacement milestones. Miss a separate set of Apple service-continuity milestones, and the deal price drops by up to $110M — a penalty that flows through as reduced per-share consideration. Assuming the merger closes, it's clear Amazon plans its own next-gen constellation built in-house, like its broadband fleet. That brings potential for a dramatic rearchitecting of the DTD constellations in ways that could enable much more compelling service.   DTD satellites have more demanding requirements than broadband, because phones and other devices are designed to connect only to nearby towers, not to infrastructure all the way in space.   DTD operators get around these challenges by designing satellites with significantly higher power and flying them in lower orbits. Globalstar was able to do the power upgrade with MDA Space, but its orbit is high. At 1,414 kilometers, Globalstar sits about twice as high as AST SpaceMobile and Iridium, and four times as high as Starlink DTC. Lowering the orbit is expensive because it requires more satellites. As a standalone, Apple-backed company, Globalstar was planning a fleet of 80 satellites.   While not yet confirmed, we believe Amazon’s acquisition of Globalstar provides an opportunity for a significant rearchitecting of the constellation at a lower orbit, requiring a lot more satellites (hundreds or thousands) but enabling even better service. The exact details should become clearer when Amazon submits its plans to the FCC. Amazon said it will deploy its own next-gen DTD constellation in 2028, designed with “substantially higher spectrum use and efficiency than legacy direct-to-cell systems” to enable voice, data and messaging.   The Challenges   As with the Amazon Leo broadband constellation, launch access will remain a key constraint. Amazon has enough internal demand for launch to justify owning a launch vehicle, but has so far chosen to procure launch services through third parties. Global launch capacity is spread thin, with constellations from the Space Development Agency, Telesat Lightspeed, and Eutelsat/IRIS 2 already straining supply. SpaceX repurposing Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral for Starship and more Falcon Heavies, and less of its flagship Falcon 9s, may further exacerbate the issue. So might Golden Dome.    Manufacturing challenges could also crop up, if the need for new silicon chips has an impact on payload production. Amazon will likely need to establish a new production line for DTD satellites, if not a new factory. These challenges could be eased by sticking to the Gen-1 broadband bus, which would streamline the work of building two constellations.   We don't see U.S. regulatory risk as a near-term obstacle. Yes, Carr publicly flogged Amazon over its broadband deployment timeline, but these are two separate constellations. Amazon's DTD filing will start a new, second FCC clock — six years to 50% deployment, nine to full build — and Carr has already called the Globalstar deal consistent with the FCC's long-term DTD competition vision.  The FCC isn't the only gate, though. In an 8-K filing with the SEC, Globalstar lists three categories of required regulatory approval: antitrust, foreign direct investment, and telecommunications. DoJ antitrust review is standard for an $11.6B merger, but the FDI approvals could be more complicated — Globalstar operates ground stations and holds spectrum authorizations across 120+ countries, and several jurisdictions screen foreign acquisitions of telecom infrastructure. Intervenors add another variable: Iridium petitioned the FCC in late 2025 to expand into Globalstar's L-band, and SpaceX — denied access to the Big LEO bands in 2024 — has every reason to oppose the spectrum transfer.  The broader sector rallied on the news. The party that's not smiling? SpaceX – which now faces a second well-capitalized U.S. competitor in DTD, and lost its best shot at blocking Amazon from ever getting globally licensed MSS spectrum.  Link: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-globalstar-apple

April. 02, 2026 By Quilty Team Quilty Space attended the Satellite 2026 Conference in Washington, DC, last week, participating in panels, meetings, and industry receptions. As usual, the team debriefed after the conference to collect our thoughts and learnings. Here were our main takeaways from Satellite 2026:  The industry had a mood swing. Out: the doom and gloom fatalism that defined the last few years of SpaceX dominance. In: genuine commercial momentum fueling everything new and shiny, from orbital data centers to sovereign constellations, direct-to-device networks, and SES’s MeoSphere. The satellite industry still struggles to compete with Starlink, but has found more reasons to be excited than in previous years.   Launch demand is up. The debate over how many launchers the market can support has given way to a conversation about who can execute first. Demand is high, driven by Amazon Leo, Golden Dome, Eutelsat OneWeb, IRIS2, and more. Rocket companies from heavy lift to small launch are growing their backlogs in spite of SpaceX’s success. The conversation is not “how do we survive or justify our existence in the face of SpaceX competition?” It’s “how soon can we launch and start delivering for our customers?”   One IPO to rule them all. As usual, what SpaceX does has a profound effect on the rest of the satellite and space industry, and the looming IPO is no different. Here, Quilty Space found the industry mood was one of excitement about the mega stock listing. Is SpaceX’s $1.75 trillion valuation staggeringly high? Yes. Has the late integration of xAI and the 1 million-satellite orbital data center filing changed the company in ways that make it even frothier? Also yes. But after years of fearing a cataclysmic event that would send space investors running to other industries (potential LEO bankruptcies in the 2010s, a dearth of exits prior to the SPAC boom of the early 2020s, followed by the underwhelming performance of said SPAC stocks until recently), the industry now has an event that may draw more investors, not less.  The elephant not in the room. Golden Dome made a cameo in nearly every conversation, generating peak hype and almost no clarity. Beyond the obligatory nods to sovereignty and the fate of the PWSA transport layer, we heard “what even is Golden Dome?” more often than “is this seat taken?” Fair question, considering Congress is still trying to pin it down. Strip away the branding, and you’re left with a $185B “ system of systems ” that feels less like a clean-sheet architecture and more like a forced group project. A few net-new bets will likely get funded — left-of-launch, space-based interceptors — but the bulk of the effort looks like a strategic roll-up of existing programs. Efforts like AMTI, HBTSS, Resilient MWT, SDA tracking layers, and the Space Data Network are all being pulled forward, reprioritized, and put on Dome timelines. This is a hard concept to CliffsNote while waiting on your coffee at the (new) convention center Starbucks.  Optical ground stations: main character energy. Optical ground stations popped up in several client meetings at the show — and for good reason. As every new constellation levels up to moving absurd data volumes back to Earth, it’s becoming clear that legacy infrastructure simply isn't built for the scale. Between Blue Origin’s TeraWave pushing optical-to-ground and SES’s meoSphere layering in high-throughput optical crosslinks, the industry is realizing the bottleneck isn't just in orbit. With roughly 1.2 million proposed satellites tied to orbital data centers alone, the physics are hitting a wall. Even the closing fireside chat featured Bridget Mendler of Northwood Space — a startup that just secured a Space Force contract and is spinning up a 180,000-square-foot factory to mass-produce rapidly deployable, phased-array ground networks. Spectrum is finite, and the pressure is shifting toward the optical ground segment to bridge the gap. Good luck, Charlie !  Outside of SES’s MeoSphere constellation announcement, this year’s Satellite conference was light on news, but that didn’t reflect 2026 overall. Major developments are happening constantly, like Blue Origin’s TeraWave announcement, Nvidia’s spotlight on orbital data center demos, and today’s news of a purported Globalstar acquisition by Amazon. With all these happenings in the first three months, 2026 is shaping up to be a very busy year.

Feb. 25, 2026 By Caleb Henry For space companies, the sovereignty pitch has worked surprisingly well over the past year, especially for U.S. firms willing to invest abroad. Germany, after announcing €35 billion in future space spending, is becoming a prominent market for corporate strategic investments. Direct-to-cell startup AST SpaceMobile of the U.S. and Vodafone in the U.K. formed a JV that will build a satellite operations center in Germany . California satellite operator Planet Labs landed a €240M deal with the German government and is expanding satellite manufacturing to Berlin . And Finnish radar satellite company Iceye is building a €1.7B constellation with Germany’s Rheinmetall through a JV that includes a future factory in Neuss, Germany . But the recent hold-up of laser terminal builder Mynaric’s sale to Rocket Lab shows there are limits to the friendliness. The Mynaric acquisition, which was targeted to close in 2025, has stalled out as Germany continues to evaluate its impact. Amid the delay, rising German defense company Rheinmetall has offered a competing bid, a move that could keep Mynaric under domestic control. U.S. and European space industries remain closely tied, with companies often looking to invest on both sides of the Atlantic for a chance at greater market share. For the past several years, European companies have been especially eager to tap into the U.S. to participate in the Space Development Agency’s military pLEO constellation, which strained domestic supply chains. Now, as Europe moves to field its own constellations, IRIS2 through the European Union, and a new German constellation through the Bundeswehr, European supply chains are growing in importance. The same sovereignty winds that turbocharged some deals may take the air out of others. France has been blunt about vetoing space M&A deals based on sovereignty concerns. The most notable recent example is Eutelsat’s rejected ground segment sale to Swedish company EQT . The regulatory split follows French politician Bruno Le Maire’s blockage of satellite analytics company Preligens from acquisition by non-EU players in 2024. Paris-based Safran bought the company that same year. Should Germany block the Rocket Lab-Mynaric sale, it would mark a continuation of that trend and serve as an important bellwether for German aerospace and defense M&A. Germany is home to many small- to medium-sized enterprises in the space sector that could become attractive investment targets as sovereign demand climbs. Will Germany allow that to happen? Laser terminals have emerged as a critical technology for proliferated LEO constellations, and are an area Germany leads thanks to decades of investment. Mynaric struggled to scale up its production and went into the German equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2025. Rocket Lab identified the company as a diamond in the rough. Now it’s up to German regulators to determine who gets to polish it.25 [or, one year ago]. Rocket Lab identified the company as a diamond in the rough. Now it’s up to German regulators to determine who gets to polish it. Link: https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article699846344f25149ec09b0512/mynaric-rheinmetall-erwaegt-uebernahme-von-deutschem-laser-spezialisten.html

Feb. 9, 2026 (updated Feb. 12, 2026) by Chris Quilty and Caleb Henry Following a lull in 2024, satcom operators ordered 11 GEO satellites in 2025 – the industry’s best total since 2016. Orders were about equally split between traditional large GEOs and increasingly popular Small GEO platforms. Only three orders were directed at growth-oriented applications, with the balance representing replacement satellites, government focused initiatives, and a first-of-its-kind satellite leasing order for two satellites.  Thales Alenia Space led traditional manufacturers with three orders for the company’s workhorse SpaceBus 4000, while Maxar (now Lanteris) inked two orders for the company’s 1300-Series satellite. Airbus received one order for its OneSat software-defined satellite – only the second order since 2021 – as the still unproven product line awaits its first launch in 2027. In the Small GEO category, newcomer AscendArc was the surprise leader, winning its first satellite order in September from Kt Sat, followed by a two-satellite order from SLI, a space asset leasing company, in December. Astranis and Swissto12, which together have been awarded 80% of Small GEOs ordered since 2020, each picked up one satellite order.  Small GEOs, which first appeared in 2018, have swept up 20 of 47 GEO satellite orders since 2020 due to their relatively low cost and focused capacity, making them ideal for new operators (Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom), new applications (Astrum Mobile’s first-of-kind Satellite-to-Device platform), or targeted market expansion (Kt sat’s consumer broadband push).  Notably, two Omani entities placed GEO satellite orders in quick succession: government-owned Space Communication Technologies (SCT) purchased a software-defined Airbus OneSat in November 2025, followed two months later by MB Group's Small GEO order with Astranis in January 2026. Ironically, the latter order is scheduled to launch this year, while SCT's OmanSat-1 is projected to launch in 2029. Time will tell which platform delivers the best economic return and staying power in the face of growing LEO competition.

Jan. 21, 2026 by Quilty Space Editorial Board Our initial review of Blue Origin’s FCC filings indicates that TeraWave is a space-based transport backbone, not a consumer or managed-access satellite network. The system is positioned as an alternative or complement to terrestrial and subsea fiber, optimized to move very large volumes of data between fixed endpoints for  enterprise, data center | cloud providers, and government (civil, defense, national security). Classification is key TeraWave is an NGSO Fixed-Satellite Service (FSS) system. FSS, by definition, implies fixed locations, high-gain antennas, scheduled capacity, and infrastructure-style economics, rather than mobile or population-based access. Nothing in the filing resembles a consumer broadband or mobility service: No subscriber counts No population coverage framing No mobility classes or handheld terminals This is infrastructure, not retail connectivity. How the system is structured The architecture is explicitly multi-orbit and layered: LEO (5,280 satellites) acts as the access layer, using Q | V-band links to connect fixed user terminals at enterprise and government locations. MEO (128 satellites) forms a long-haul transport layer, using laserlinks to move traffic across the network. Ground delivery is handled via optical and E-band RF gateways, which aggregate traffic and interface with terrestrial networks. This is a backbone design: traffic enters the system at fixed sites, moves across a dedicated transport layer, and exits near its destination to rejoin terrestrial infrastructure. The press release references optical downlink capacity of up to 6 Tbps. Whether that figure reflects per-satellite performance or aggregate system capacity is not specified, though aggregate capacity is the most plausible interpretation. What is clear is that the architecture assumes: Laserlinks enable high aggregate network throughput The satellites function as routers and transport nodes Who the customers really are In this model, a “customer” is not a person or device. It is a site. Examples include: A hyperscale data center like Oracle A government or defense facility A remote but critical infrastructure node A network exchange point or gateway - connected enterprise site This is why large customer counts can coexist with very low user (100k) density. One site equals one customer, even if tens of thousands of people ultimately use the data behind it. Why this looks like a hyperscaler play The filing repeatedly cites: Cloud migration AI workloads East–west traffic between data centers The cost and fragility of fiber diversity Those are hyperscaler problems, not ISP problems. Oracle is therefore a plausible anchor customer, even though no customer is named. TeraWave looks well-suited for: Data center interconnect Burst capacity during replication events Disaster recovery and continuity insurance Physically diverse paths where fiber is constrained or geopolitically risky That does not make it exclusive to hyperscalers, but it does strongly shape the design. Why this is not an access-network competitor TeraWave does not appear designed to: Replace consumer broadband Compete for managed satcom service contracts Displace GEO or MEO service providers delivering end-to-end services Instead, it functions as transport infrastructure that can sit beneath other services, including terrestrial networks and satellite access systems. Technical ambition = real hurdles The filing describes an ambitious system with meaningful execution risks: Scaled deployment of Q | V-band phased-array user terminals, a capability that has not yet been demonstrated at commercial scale Ultra-high-capacity optical terminals that remain unproven outside limited demonstrations Severe rain fade and atmospheric sensitivity across Q | V- and E-band links Gateway aggregation requirements in the multi-hundreds of gigabits per second Long-haul laserlinks in MEO, with tighter pointing and control requirements than LEO End-to-end orchestration at backbone scale, closer to Tier-1 carrier engineering than traditional satcom These hurdles reinforce that this is a long-term infrastructure build, not a near-term commercial service launch. Final Takeaways TeraWave is best described as a space-based fiber corollary: Fixed sites, not people Capacity, not subscriptions Guaranteed service levels, not "best effort" Backbone economics, not ISP economics The system’s design aligns with hyperscaler and government transport needs while remaining structurally complementary to existing satellite services (e.g. , Amazon Leo). While Blue Origin will likely pursue a vertically integrated approach, the TeraWave architecture leaves room for specialized partners. Optical ground station providers such as Cailabs are natural fits for the system’s optical ground segment, while companies like K2 Space, with platforms optimized for high-power payloads, could plausibly support the MEO transport layer if Blue Origin chooses not to build all spacecraft internally. Perhaps the most consequential implication of TeraWave is on the launch side. A constellation of this scale would give Blue Origin a built-in anchor customer for New Glenn, mirroring the Starlink model of vertical integration. The flip side is that New Glenn capacity in the 2027–2028 timeframe would likely be constrained internally, leaving limited availability for third-party missions. Source: https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-origin-introduces-terawave-space-based-network-for-global-connectivity FCC Filing: ICFS Callsign Summary Page - ICFS Portal

Jan. 16, 2026 by Kimberly Siversen Burke BEAD Provisional Awards for LEO satellite as of Dec. 31, 2025. With California submitting one of the last remaining Benefit of the Bargain  BEAD proposals in December, we now have a much clearer view of LEO satellite’s slim but strategically meaningful portion of the haul. Starlink and Amazon Leo together still account for just under 5% of all awarded dollars (~$1.04B of $20B ) but cover ~20% of total BEAD locations. That imbalance — modest dollars, disproportionate footprint — mirrors the state-level trends we flagged back in September’s Megaconstellation Monthly  and has held steady as late-filing states closed out their proposals. Several caveats still apply. States must complete challenge processes, resolve appeals, and secure final NTIA approval , and many have deliberately held back material portions of their allocations for later rounds. More fundamentally, BEAD’s original $42.5B budget was sized in 2022 against an estimated ~15.2 million unserved locations. That universe has since been reduced to ~ 4.2 million  locations with other private and public broadband deployments flipping unserved locations to served and materially altering the program’s economics without changing its statutory funding envelope. What the Headline Numbers Miss Much of the industry BEAD coverage mistakenly frames outcomes as a technology horse race, tallying “wins” by fiber, fixed wireless, or satellite as if they were interchangeable solutions. But it’s way more complicated than that. Part of the confusion stems from how satellite is treated under BEAD. Fiber awards are classic infrastructure projects: capital construction tied to a specific location. LEO satellite is often funded differently — as service enablement, capacity reservation, or last-resort coverage — and – in some states (like Alaska) – not classified as “infrastructure” at all. Comparing satellite awards to fiber builds on a dollar-for-dollar basis is something we strive to do directionally but misses how states are actually using the technology. States are not necessarily choosing between fiber and satellite conceptually. They are assigning different technologies to different problem sets under scoring frameworks that vary widely by geography, population density, and state policy priorities. Fiber dominates where long-term reliability, speed, and future-proofing justify the higher cost. LEO satellite prevails where immediacy and reach matter more — often in areas where fiber providers declined to bid at all, leaving satellite as the only scalable option on the table. This explains why satellite can win a large share of locations (~857k) with a small share of the funding (~1.04B). Preliminary Pricing Signals Where states have published both award dollars and locations served, you can do the math to determine approximate  pricing for the two LEO players: Amazon Leo: ~395k disclosed locations at ~$750-800 per location Starlink: ~462k disclosed locations at ~$1,500-1,600 per location These are portfolio-level averages, not standardized price points, and they exclude roughly 10 states that disclosed award totals without allocating locations by technology. Even with those limitations, there is a pattern of Amazon Leo bidding materially lower than Starlink. What these numbers do not represent is cost. No state evaluation process has visibility into, or interest in, the internal cost structure of either constellation. Why the Prices Diverge The pricing gap is a function of BEAD scoring mechanics, not satellite economics. Across many states: Price accounts for as little as 10% of total proposal scoring “Cost-effectiveness” is often benchmarked against fiber historical norms, not satellite-specific metrics. Satellite bids are frequently confined to the most remote, lowest-density, highest-cost locations, where fiber is no longer a realistic alternative. In that environment, a higher satellite bid doesn’t necessarily lose out. Where states emphasize reliability, readiness, and demonstrated performance — and many do — Starlink’s mature network gives it substantial latitude. With 9.2 million  active users, published performance data, and proven uptime, Starlink carries no constellation-risk discount in BEAD scoring. For program purposes, it behaves like an incumbent because it effectively is one. Amazon Leo is in a different position. With no established commercial customer base and limited operational history, it must compete on the variables it can control. Price is the most powerful of those levers. Undercutting, in this context, is entry strategy. Low bids maximize selection odds in states where cost still carries weight, but more importantly, every awarded location gives Amazon Leo: A state-certified designation that it can serve that address A foothold in long-term broadband deployment plans Regulatory cover at a time when constellation-milestone waivers and deployment timelines are under scrutiny What is BEAD Subsidizing? A key reason satellite pricing is routinely misread is that BEAD is not funding LEO providers the same way it funds fiber or fixed wireless. For satellite operators, BEAD is not underwriting ongoing broadband service. It is reimbursing a limited, front-loaded obligation. Under the NTIA’s June 2025 restructuring, satellite awards cover three things: a user terminal (dish), standard installation, and reserved network capacity sufficient to serve the awarded locations. What BEAD does not  cover is the monthly subscription. Satellite providers are not required to offer discounted service tiers, adhere to BEAD affordability benchmarks, or guarantee long-term price controls. Households still pay the service fees. In other words, BEAD is buying access readiness, not broadband service. The subsidy ensures a household can be connected, not that it will be connected on any particular pricing terms. That distinction matters when interpreting per-location reimbursement figures and comparing satellite awards to infrastructure-heavy fiber builds. Different Games, Same Field Starlink’s BEAD strategy is best understood as territorial defense. Once a location is deemed “served” by a qualified provider, BEAD funds generally cannot be used to overbuild it with fiber for the next decade. Locking in coverage today constrains competitors tomorrow. Amazon Leo’s objective is market entry with government imprimatur. BEAD offers the fastest route to legitimacy, trust, and a state-validated presence it needs as it ramps toward commercial service. Both strategies are rational responses to the same framework: Starlink bids high because the scoring systems allow it — and because locking down serviceable territory matters more than squeezing margin from subsidies. Amazon Leo lowballs to secure adoption, territory, and regulatory leverage. The Real Prize: Map Control Whether a provider receives $700 or $1,500 per location is, in strategic terms, secondary. What matters is that BEAD awards determine which census blocks are considered solved — and which remain eligible for future subsidy. And in that sense, LEO operators aren’t simply winning broadband subsidies. They’re carving out strategic territory one census block at a time. Because BEAD-funded satellite locations are designated as “served” regardless of whether a household subscribes, the subsidy reshapes the map even if no fiber is ever built and no affordability obligation is imposed The Fate of Remaining Funds Despite a persistent myth, cheaper satellite deployments do not send BEAD surpluses back to the U.S. Treasury. Under federal appropriations law, BEAD funds must be deployed within the program’s statutory boundaries even if the number of eligible locations shrinks or deployment strategies evolve. Unspent balances are rolled into additional award rounds, extensions, or other NTIA-approved uses rather than clawed back — a point reaffirmed in a GAO report  issued on Dec. 16. Until recently, that constraint worked in a state’s favor. Remaining BEAD balances could be redirected toward harder-to-serve locations, affordability initiatives, anchor institutions, or other deployment-adjacent purposes approved by NTIA. States were debating how to spend the money, not whether they would lose it. That was until Trump’s Dec. 11 executive order  on AI. Now, states with “onerous AI laws” are ineligible for non-deployment BEAD funds, which is a $21.21B  pot that states could lose. The administration cannot legally reclaim  the funding since it was already appropriated by Congress, but the NTIA can block access to it. Using broadband funding as a cudgel for federal compliance is an extraordinary use of BEAD policy, so expect some noise about it in 2026. ### Provisional BEAD awards through December 2025 show divergent pricing strategies among LEO providers. Per-location averages are based on disclosed state data only and exclude about 10 states without verifiable satellite location counts. Satellite BEAD funding supports availability and capacity rather than recurring service.

Dec. 11, 2025 by Kimberly Siversen Burke   On Dec. 2, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) awarded the first in a series of awards for the Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) Multiple Award Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) Contract. U pdate (Jan. 2026): Since the initial Dec. 2 award list, the Missile Defense Agency has issued two additional SHIELD roster updates, on Dec. 18, 2025, and Jan. 15, 2026. These tranches more than double the size of the contract vehicle, bringing the awardee list to 2,440 approved companies. The later additions materially broaden the bench, layering major defense primes, established space manufacturers, launch providers, commercial satellite operators, data and autonomy firms, and nontraditional aerospace players on top of the federally focused R&D, modeling, and systems-engineering base that defined the opening tranche. The updated SHIELD roster can be found here . If you scanned the 1,014 companies the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) released on Dec. 2 in its first wave of SHIELD IDIQ  awardees, expecting to see SpaceX, Anduril, or Palantir, and instead tripped over Ho-Chunk Shared Services , you’re not alone. Many assumed the $151-billion ceiling Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD)  contract vehicle would include the first cut of primes assembling the foundational layer of the Golden Dome. Instead, MDA published 24 pages of what looks like a roster of federally focused R&D contractors, systems engineering firms, sensor and payload specialists, software and cyber integrators, digital-engineering and modeling outfits, test-and-evaluation providers, and mid-tier defense companies that typically handle the enabling technologies before a prime contractor cobbles them all together. Now, these 1,014 awardees are cleared to receive task orders under a contract anchored by two product service codes: NAICS 541715  — R&D in physical and engineering sciences PSC AC13  — Experimental development for national defense Those codes are important. They help define the procurement. This won't be the Pentagon’s storefront for space-based interceptors or other marquee hardware. Instead, SHIELD will be the marketplace for everything upstream — modeling, simulation, subsystem prototyping, early-stage sensors, data fabrics, AI/ML pipelines, analysis tooling, and digital-engineering environments that Golden Dome ( and other programs)  will draw from. There are another 40 (more specific) NAICS codes that can be applied for services at the task-order level, but the takeaway is still the same: SHIELD is where ideas are mapped out and pressure-tested, not where full weapon systems are delivered. The list makes a lot more sense when viewed through that lens. If You’re Looking for the Primes, You’re in the Wrong Room The absence of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, and the rest of the defense OGs (and new guard) isn’t really a mystery once you zoom out. These companies aren’t MIA — they’re just entering Golden Dome through entirely different procurement lanes. And those lanes don’t seem to be running through SHIELD . For example, just last month, the   Space Force issued 18  Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) contracts for space-based interceptors. Award values were kept below public-disclosure thresholds ($9 million), and names were withheld officially , but reportedly include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Anduril, and True Anomaly.   Then, on Dec. 7 , Space Force issued another RPP for midcourse kinetic interceptor prototypes with awards planned for this February. So it looks like the SBIs, missile-warning satellites, transport networks, fire-control upgrades, etc., will be procured through Space Force, service-level channels, and MDA’s other acquisition mechanisms, rather than through SHIELD’s R&D framework. Simply put: the primes and many major component suppliers are already in the game. They’re just gathering on another field. That said, the IDIQ doesn’t completely sideline the majors. Heavy hitters like Viasat, Rocket Lab, Redwire, and L3Harris all show up, possibly because their capabilities can still map to the experimental/prototyping layer: Viasat:  Well-positioned for SHIELD tasking for protected waveforms, resilient satcom transport layers, network-of-networks modeling, and C2 interface simulation and verification. Rocket Lab:  Could be tapped for hosted-payload buses, on-orbit sensor-prototype platforms, early GNC development, hypersonic-threat replication testbeds, and rapid rideshare deployment of experimental hardware. Redwire:  Possibly participating through materials R&D, deployable structures, optical bench development, and prototype payload platforms in the SabreSat class. L3Harris:  Fits SHIELD’s needs in digital-engineering environments, next-gen OPIR-adjacent sensor trials, tracking-algorithm development, and early C2 fusion experimentation. These companies may have the horsepower to prime, but SHIELD doesn’t appear aimed at system-level design. Under this IDIQ, they’re more likely to deliver focused experiments and niche prototypes than steer the broader system design. That’s not to say many aren’t also  participating across multiple Golden-Dome-adjacent contracts outside this vehicle. Behind the SHIELD: a Strategic Read Golden Dome is a Trump Administration mandate that – depending on the architecture the Pentagon ultimately chooses – could speed-run into multi-trillion-dollar  territory over its lifecycle. And even through the fog of low disclosure , it’s becoming clear that it will also be more of a stitched-together, multi-agency, missile-defense, mega-consortium than a single monolithic program of record. Flexible umbrella mechanisms – including the MAA  that MDA stood up in early 2025 – will no doubt accelerate experimentation and give the agency more on-ramps to tap non-traditional vendors. But they will also turn award tracking into a full-body contortion exercise for anyone trying to map the architecture end-to-end (I’m already warming up). And that’s why the first real peek under the Golden Dome procurement hood matters – even if the list doesn’t look anything like the one we white-boarded. SHIELD’s opening tranche clarifies that this IDIQ fuels early tech maturation rather than steering the main procurement effort, despite a $151-billion ceiling that once suggested otherwise. It also signals just how intentionally the USG is stockpiling depth before making system-level calls. It might not be the starting lineup. But it’s the lineup that makes starting possible. ###

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 IRIS 2  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 IRIS 2 . 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. SOURCE: https://www.eutelsat.com/en/news/press.html#/pressreleases/eutelsat-selects-airbus-defence-and-space-to-build-oneweb-low-earth-orbit-constellation-extension-3361135

12/6/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry Telesat Lightspeed experienced a cascading series of delays over the past seven years, mainly related to financing, but the project’s recent preliminary design review shows Telesat’s timeline is no longer slipping hard to the right. Telesat Lightspeed’s successful Preliminary Design Review (PDR) took 1.3 years, consistent with other LEO and MEO constellations built by third-party manufacturers. Canada’s MDA Space announced the PDR on Dec. 4, marking the completion of a key engineering milestone that typically precedes manufacturing. Past delays ironically may have helped keep PDR within a normal timeframe, since Telesat kept maturing key technologies like crosslinks and antennas with suppliers before the full 198-satellite contract was signed. A smooth PDR process does not guarantee that a constellation program will proceed without additional delays. Hiccups often emerge during the metal bending phase of development, but for a program whose tempo hasn’t quite lived up to its name, investors will be happy to see Lightspeed progressing at pace. SOURCE: https://www.telesat.com/press/press-releases/telesat-and-mda-space-complete-key-milestone-for-telesat-lightspeed-constellation/

Jan. 6, 2026 by Kimberly Siversen Burke   Starlink growth went full hockey stick. The subscriber base doubled about every 12–15 months post-2022, with the curve snapping upward in 2023 as global coverage, mobility, and government adoption kicked in. SpaceX just published its third annual Starlink Progress Report , cataloging another year of expansion across customers, coverage, and network performance. The update leans on usual markers of progress – subscriber growth, satellite deployments, capacity additions, and improving speeds across land, air, and sea. Zooming out – the 2025 wrap-up is less about subscriber uptake or incremental performance gains than it is about how Starlink is threading itself through everyday connectivity pretty much everywhere. Manufacturing throughput, launch cadence, network architecture, and selectively deployed use cases show a system that now underpins transportation, emergency response, education, healthcare, agriculture, and core communications infrastructure rather than just sitting at the edge of them. SpaceX (and even more so Starshield, which is not mentioned in the report at all – likely to put distance between the two systems) is competing on industrial tempo and institutional embeddedness as much as on performance. SpaceX is building out a system designed to absorb attrition, regulatory friction, and public scrutiny as it scales. At this stage, Starlink’s advantage is not just its massive size, but also its structure – one that competitors with sufficient capital and time won’t come close to approaching without first solving the same manufacturing, launch, and operational coordination challenges SpaceX has already mastered. Below, we highlight some key takeaways from the report along with the Quilty QuickTake on each major metric, so you can skip the alpacas and sunsets. Market Expansion 35+ new markets activated in 2025 4.6M+ new “active” customers added in 2025 9.2M  total customers across land, air, and sea 155+ countries and markets served Quilty QuickTake: Starlink has crossed into utility-scale adoption. Customer counts obscure the ARPU mix, with no visibility into churn, pricing tiers, or the mix of residential, enterprise, government, and subsidized emergency users. By aggregating these segments and omitting ARPU and churn, the report emphasizes scale and indispensability while leaving the underlying economics opaque. Starlink v3 & Starship Coupling 1 Tbps downlink; 200 Gbps uplink per satellite Thousands of spatial beams 100× capacity; >20× throughput ~60 Tbps added per Starship launch (20× increase) Quilty QuickTake: Starlink v3 is less a satellite roadmap than a wager on Starship’s operational cadence. If Starship becomes routine, competitive parity collapses; if it does not, Starlink still dominates on V2.   Community Gateways: Starlink’s Middle Mile 13 community gateways added in 2025 20 total deployed globally Quilty QuickTake: Community gateways mark Starlink’s move upstream into the middle mile . In some regions, Starlink is no longer just the last-mile ISP but the backhaul itself, a shift that nudges the system toward infrastructure-style regulation that SpaceX appears intent on normalizing before it is contested.   Maritime & Aviation 1,400 1  aircraft added in 2025 (up from 450 in 2024 ) 1,000 BizJets across 36 airframes and 5 OEMs 21M passengers; 30 PB of data 150,000+ vessels 20M cruise passengers Quilty QuickTake: Mobility is not just a revenue vertical; it subsidizes network density over high-value corridors. Airlines pay for coverage Starlink needs regardless, while certifications entrench incumbency. Maritime users, in particular, exhibit low churn and high tolerance for pricing, providing durability and margin stability that residential broadband cannot . Direct-to-Cell (DTC) 27 MNO partners 650+ satellites deployed in 18 months 12M people connected 22 countries across 6 continents 100+ compatible devices 30 supported apps “Largest 4G coverage provider on Earth” 65 MHz of spectrum acquired from EchoStar Quilty QuickTake: DTC is advancing faster than regulators can coordinate. SpaceX appears to be betting that once millions of users experience the service, it becomes politically harder for governments to block or unwind it.   The Soft Power Stack 100,000+ disaster-response kits deployed Healthcare: 400+ clinics; 1,000+ doctors; 100,000+ telemedicine sessions annually Education: 5M+ students connected Quilty QuickTake: These deployments are framed as humanitarian, but they also function as market positioning. By embedding Starlink into public services, SpaceX strengthens its case for subsidies, shapes regulatory outcomes, and makes it politically difficult for governments to favor competing networks. What begins as emergency connectivity often ends as long-term dependence, with rivals forced to compete not just on price or performance, but against a narrative of public good. Manufacturing & Vertical Integration 70 satellites/week production rate Bastrop facility expanded by 1M ft² Bastrop PCB volume up 4× 170,000 user terminals/week (~8.5M annually) Washington state facility ~700,000 ft² Starlink v3 entering production in ‘26 Quilty QuickTake: Starlink’s moat is industrial. The constellation assumes constant replacement, rapid iteration, and tolerable attrition, a model that only works because SpaceX manufactures satellites and terminals at near consumer-electronics cadence. Network Architecture & Performance Operating altitude: ~360 km Typical service: ~200/30 Mbps Median peak-hour global speeds up 50% Latency: ~26 ms Optical crosslinks: 2–3× reduction in packet loss; 30–40 ms latency improvement in Asia and Africa; 400 Gbps links beginning in 2026 Quilty QuickTake: Lower altitude improves latency but shortens satellite life, favoring replenishment over durability. Starlink is optimized for turnover rather than permanence, a design choice only viable because manufacturing and launch are tightly coupled. Mini lasers optimized for third-party integration debuted in 2025 with Muon Space, a model likely to expand into government programs in 2026. Scale, Capacity &Deployment Pace 3,000+ (3,600 per Jonathan McDowell’s 2025 report ) satellites launched in 2025 270 Tbps of capacity added in 2025 9,000+ active satellites globally Quilty QuickTake: Starlink can add capacity faster than most competitors can raise capital or secure spectrum. Its scale is inseparable from SpaceX’s launch and manufacturing flywheel, leaving rivals behind not just in satellites, but in industrial systems that cannot be replicated quickly   Agriculture Added Stara and CNH in 2025 to the John Deere collaboration Quilty QuickTake: This is enterprise SaaS presented as rural broadband. Once farm operations depend on connectivity for equipment, logistics, and inputs, Starlink ceases to be optional. Starlink’s recent willingness to share more detailed supply-chain partnerships and user metrics reads like IPO hygiene ahead of a potential listing window. If a public offering is truly in play, we expect disclosure to continue leveling up into 2026. 1.  In our 1H2025 Starlink Financial Analysis , I forecasted 1,295 new tails for Starlink in 2025. Missing that estimate by just 7.5% was a small modeling win that I maintain should partially  offset how spectacularly wrong I was on our 2025 Amazon Leo launch office wager.

Dec. 19, 2025 by Kimberly Siversen Burke   SpaceX received ~$216M in milestone payments in 2025 under its Starship HLS contract . Roughly $3B of a $4.5B potential award has been obligated to date, with ~$2.7B disbursed, reflecting a contract front-loaded with early- and mid-phase milestones. On Dec. 18, 2025, the White House issued an Executive Order titled “Ensuring American Space Superiority.” Its headline goals are ambitious but familiar: returning Americans to the Moon by 2028, establishing the early elements of a sustained lunar presence by 2030, and accelerating the integration of commercial capabilities across both civil and national security space. The order also sharply elevates space’s role in missile defense, threat detection from vLEO through cislunar space, and allied space security cooperation. What makes the order consequential isn’t the vision, but rather the way it formalizes accountability. Tucked into Section 3(b) is a requirement that directs NASA, alongside OMB, to flag major space acquisition programs that are materially off track on schedule, cost, or performance, or misaligned with White House priorities, and explain how they plan to correct course. It’s tempting to read this as a shot across Artemis’ bow. It isn’t. Under any plausible political or institutional scenario, the EO does not place SpaceX’s Starship HLS award  in its crosshairs. SpaceX is too embedded in the administration’s space agenda, and with Jared Isaacman  – a longtime Elon Musk ally and SpaceX customer – now at the helm of NASA, there will be little to no appetite inside either the White House or NASA to penalize SpaceX for schedule slips that are already treated as the expected cost of ambition. Starship isn’t just an Artemis contract – it’s a strategic asset. NASA retains ample flexibility to rebaseline schedules, contextualize delays, and frame progress in ways that keep HLS well clear of any failing grades. What is interesting is the precedent the EO establishes and how unevenly it may be applied when you consider Artemis as an example. Why HLS Sits Awkwardly Inside the EO’s Framework As painful as this is to admit, HLS now drives the Artemis III schedule, not SLS. Even if SLS and Orion were ready tomorrow, there is no crewed landing without a lander. Besides, SLS is a jobs program sustained by congressional districts and protected through key authorization and appropriations committees. Canceling or disciplining it requires Congress to cooperate, something an EO cannot ensure. Now, whether Starship HLS is technically 30% behind depends on which acquisition baseline NASA chooses to use. The EO measures slippage against those baselines, and NASA can adjust them enough to avoid tripping the threshold if it wants to. The higher hurdle to clear is timing. Artemis III has drifted  from its original mid-2020s ambitions into the late 2020s, with government watchdogs  and NASA’s own advisors warning that HLS delays could push a crewed landing back by years . At the same time, the EO hard-codes a goal of returning Americans to the Moon by 2028. Those two realities now coexist uncomfortably on the same page. Even if Starship  HLS never formally crosses the 30% threshold, it’s still straddling the order’s broader intent. The administration is not trying to police schedule math — especially in space, where timelines inevitably push to the right. The order does lock in a political endpoint and requires agencies to account for when risk is retired, deferred, or absorbed along the way. By anchoring lunar return to 2028 and demanding mitigation efforts when programs drift out of alignment, the EO puts pressure on development plans that postpone confronting risk until the very end. Simply put, the EO is structured to ensure Dec. 31, 2027, is not the first time reality intervenes. And unlike SLS  or Orion , which have already flown or are deep into final integration, HLS must still prove out the capabilities that actually make a crewed lunar landing possible. NASA has been explicit about what those capabilities are. Before Artemis III  can proceed, SpaceX must execute orbital cryogenic propellant transfer at scale and complete a full uncrewed lunar landing demonstration. SpaceX has yet to validate either. The refueling requirement is foundational. Starship HLS relies on launching multiple tanker vehicles, storing cryogenic propellant in orbit for extended periods, and transferring it reliably to the lander. This is not a paper milestone or a design review. It is the first-ever operational capability never executed in orbit. The uncrewed lunar demo is equally non-negotiable. NASA requires proof that Starship can autonomously descend to the lunar surface, operate there, and return to lunar orbit, closing risks around navigation, propulsion, thermal performance, communications, dust, and ascent. Taken together, these are not incremental tasks. They are the moments where innovation either survives contact with reality or it doesn’t. Until they are in the program’s rearview, Artemis III remains exposed, no matter how much progress accumulates elsewhere. So, in that sense, Starship HLS is the textbook example of the serial-risk architecture the EO is trying to avoid. If any one of those milestones slips, the entire mission slips. That doesn’t mean the program will get dinged. It does mean that it conflicts with the EO’s risk philosophy. The administration may tolerate that for Starship, but the EO is written to ensure agencies can no longer pretend that kind of risk stacking is sustainable. Selective Enforcement May be the Footnote Here The most consequential effect of this EO is not what it does to Starship HLS. It’s what it does to everyone else. By codifying a formal process to identify lagging programs and demand mitigation, the administration creates a standard it may selectively invoke. If Starship continues to push to the right while other programs are flagged or terminated under similar language, NASA and OMB will be forced to provide increasingly elaborate explanations for why one set of delays is tolerable, and another is not. Starship will get patience. Others may not. That asymmetry is already visible in the unspoken middle bits this EO introduces into the broader space ecosystem, and Artemis is the marquee test case. Why This Could Help Blue Origin This EO might also give Blue Origin a chance to gain ground, even without SpaceX losing any. Blue’s lunar lander is not suddenly ahead of Starship, nor has it become low-risk overnight. What has changed is its institutional utility. NASA selected Blue as a second HLS provider under the sustained lunar exploration track specifically to avoid a single-provider failure mode. Until now, that redundancy largely existed in the future tense — a hedge NASA could point to without needing to deploy. This EO effectively shortens the maturity on that hedge. By forcing NASA to document lagging programs and articulate mitigation strategies, the EO gives the agency political cover to elevate alternatives earlier than planned. Blue doesn’t need to replace  Starship HLS for Artemis III to benefit. It simply needs to exist as a credible, fundable backup option that NASA can point to when explaining how it is managing exposure against a 2028 mandate. In this environment, Blue’s value is not measured by speed or cost. It lies in helping NASA demonstrate prudence under a policy framework that now demands visible, defensible contingency planning. The Takeaway This EO is unlikely to be applied uniformly across government-funded space programs. And that’s partly because Starship HLS occupies a category of its own. Its strategic value to U.S. space leadership, the absence of a like-for-like alternative at a comparable scale, and its deep integration across civil, national security, and commercial space architectures afford SpaceX a level of institutional latitude that few, if any, others will enjoy. That latitude should not be mistaken for a general tolerance standard. The order establishes a review framework that will be applied far more strictly to programs lacking Starship’s strategic value and economic centrality. Other space sector players should not assume that the flexibility extended to SpaceX will be available to them. The resulting asymmetry is deliberate, reflecting an effort to reassert control over which programs get the ball and which get benched. Starship sets a precedent — but not a safe harbor. ###

Timelapse of the 100th Falcon 9 launch from Florida in 2025. Credit: SpaceX December 18, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry For the first half of the 2020s, SpaceX remained the most interesting IPO candidate in the world, and one that looked like it might not ever happen. Founder Elon Musk has not enjoyed running Tesla as a public company, and the short attention span of Wall Street posed a clear risk to Musk’s long-held, capital-intensive goal of colonizing Mars. Press reports now indicate SpaceX could raise $25 billion at a $1 trillion valuation by going public. To the surprise of many, Musk confirmed  reporter Eric Berger’s thesis that SpaceX would IPO soon in order to finance orbital AI data center infrastructure of its own. A successful IPO would trigger another major evolution for SpaceX, which morphed from a pure-play launch company to a vertically integrated satellite constellation operator over the past decade, and is now poised to reinvent itself as an orbital AI company. We won’t know a formal timeline until SpaceX files a Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but in the meantime, here are five expectations from a SpaceX IPO, should one occur in 2026 or 2027. 1.      The world will finally get more than a peek at SpaceX’s finances.  Launch providers and satellite operators not named SpaceX have long sought to rationalize SpaceX’s dominance. They frequently describe Musk’s company as an “irrational competitor” – one that does business in a way meant to crush competition more so than to make a profit. SpaceX’s launch costs have long been the lowest in the world. The same goes for Starlink’s LEO broadband services. Competitors have argued SpaceX’s pricing tactics are a) not sustainable, b) government subsidized, and/or c) enabled by SpaceX’s super high flight rate. While third-party financial models from Quilty Space and others have shown how SpaceX can make its business case close, an IPO will give concrete numbers showing how the business truly works. 2.      Orbital data centers will become the next hot topic. Even pre-IPO, this is already happening. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt implied his purchase of launch startup Relativity Space was inspired by the need for off-world compute. Jeff Bezos has had a team at Blue Origin covertly working on orbital data centers for the past year. Planet Labs and Google are launching two satellites with AI chipsets in 2027 under “ Project Suncatcher ” to examine the potential for a constellation of AI data centers. Musk’s IPO motive confirmation on Dec. 10 poured gasoline on the fire. 3.      Copycats will follow, or try to. SpaceX’s success with launch inspired well over 100 new rockets, only 10 of which have successfully reached orbit in the past five years. Starlink impressed the world, but the capital requirements of broadband megaconstellations ($5-20B) and a limited addressable market (in the tens of billions) dissuaded new entrants. Orbital data centers are a bit different. This is a larger market trend that is expanding into space. Per McKinsey, AI data center demand will grow on average by 33% from 2023-2030, and even at the end of the decade, there will still be a shortfall of 15 gigawatts in the U.S. AI spending dwarfs satellite broadband spending – an estimated $1.5 trillion in 2025, per Gartner , rising past $2 trillion in 2026. That market size, coupled with societal and environmental concerns about terrestrial data centers, has made a move to space look increasingly appealing. A SpaceX IPO with the same motivation will supercharge interest in orbital data centers, with private markets and sovereign governments cultivating new players. 4.      SpaceX will rake in funding for other mega initiatives.  AI data centers aren’t the first, nor are they the only expensive undertaking by SpaceX, so why do the IPO now? If press reports are right, SpaceX stands to raise, in a single event, more than twice what investors have plunged into the company over its 23-year history (approximately $12 billion, per Crunchbase ). With SpaceX spending $17 billion on EchoStar spectrum for direct-to-device services, billions more on the hardware-rich (read: expensive) Starship launch vehicle, and adding orbital compute to Starlink, the company has a lot of bills to pay. Musk is positioning SpaceX at the nexus of two white-hot industries for investors: space and AI. By leveraging this market position, and heading the finance wisdom of raising money when you can versus when you need it, SpaceX can cultivate a pay day like no other. 5.      The SpaceX IPO will impact the rest of the space industry. How exactly is unclear, but there will certainly be a reaction. Quilty Space expects companies that stand to benefit from SpaceX’s success (think K2 Space, space station startups, and others designing for a Starship-enabled world) to get buoyed. Stocks that compete with SpaceX, particularly satellite communications operators, may struggle. SpaceX is unique among the world’s space companies as the only satellite operator with vertically integrated launch, manufacturing, ground segment and operations. Its valuation won’t be a fair comparison to other space companies, but they will be compared regardless. How that plays out will only become clear with time.   Link: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musks-mars-mission-adds-risk-red-hot-spacex-ipo-2025-12-12/

November 25, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry   A common question we get at Quilty Space is to compare Amazon Leo (formerly Kuiper) to Starlink. More specifically, people want to know if Amazon is lagging Starlink, and if so, by how much.   At the surface level, there is a clear gap. Starlink has more than 8 million subscribers running on a network of more than 8,500 satellites. Amazon Leo is pre-service with 150 satellites in orbit.   But things get interesting when comparing both constellations using their ITU filing as the start date. Applying for spectrum with the UN agency is the first step towards realizing a constellation, making it an effective place to start the clock at T-0.   The ITU received Starlink’s first filing, named STEAM-1, on June 27, 2014. It took the operator 6.3 years to go from that filing to the “Better than Nothing” beta service in October 2020.    For Amazon Leo, the ITU first received a filing under the name USASAT-NGSO-8A on March 26, 2019. Amazon Leo announced its enterprise beta service today, Nov. 24, 2025, or 6.3 years after filing.   Technical note: national regulators apply on behalf of their host constellations, so the FCC filled for Amazon, and Norway’s Nkom filed for Starlink. Companies don’t file directly.  From this, we can see that while Amazon Leo got a later start, it is progressing at almost the same speed as Starlink, lagging by a mere four months. Amazon Leo made up significant time in 2025, going from first production satellite launch to beta in seven months, nearly twice as fast as Starlink. And Amazon Leo satellites already feature laser crosslinks, a technology Starlink introduced about two and a half years after its first production launch.  Amazon Leo still has more steps to go until it reaches Starlink’s present status. Major milestones include activating full commercial service and achieving global coverage (including polar). Not owning a launch vehicle like SpaceX remains a challenge. But the operator is moving at a compelling speed, and with the heft of parent company Amazon behind it, is very, very real. To learn more about Amazon Leo and its strengths and weaknesses versus other constellations, check out our report here .  Link: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/amazon-leo/amazon-leo-satellite-internet-ultra-pro

October 17, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry   Over the past 24 months, Iceye has won seven sovereign customers, many of them ministries of defense, for purchases of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites that the company historically built solely for its own constellation. The orders tally 21 firm satellites, plus options for 23 more (20 for Japan, 3 for Poland), excluding Iceye’s €158M domestic deal with the Finnish Defence Forces for an undisclosed number of satellites. Iceye’s latest deal, for four satellites to Japan-based IHI Corporation with options for 20 more, shows how Iceye is capitalizing on areas of geospatial growth. It's the second major foreign deal this year in Japan, following Planet Labs’ order for 10 satellites from Sky Perfect JSAT, Japan’s largest telecom satellite operator. Some satellite industry veterans have voiced concerns about manufacturing deals cannibalizing the EO customer base, as buyers of satellites may have less need to purchase third-party data from Iceye or others. This is a valid concern, but there are still compelling reasons for Iceye to continue with its current strategy. First, Iceye often sets up joint ventures with local partners (Space42 in the UAE, Rheinmetall in Germany), giving the company access to enduring revenue streams as domestic constellations are built. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there’s nothing stopping Iceye’s customers, many of them focused heavily on sovereign capabilities, from buying satellites from another manufacturer if Iceye had refused. While not every country can afford space programs with high-resolution satellites and accompanying ground infrastructure, we expect this trend to continue. Electro-optical imaging companies have signed several notable deals in the past 24 months (BlackSky with the Indonesian MoD,  Planet in Germany , and ImageSat with an undisclosed Asian customer).  Other geospatial companies have noticed this trend (Umbra, Albedo, Satellogic, etc.) and are increasingly offering space hardware deals alongside or in lieu of remote sensing data and analytics. Link: https://www.iceye.com/newsroom/press-releases/iceye-and-ihi-sign-agreement-to-build-an-earth-observation-satellite-constellation

October 7, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry A Firefly engine hot firing. Credit: Firefly Aerospace Firefly’s surprise weekend announcement that it is buying software specialist SciTec shows how aggressively the company is moving to become a full-fledged space and defense company not defined solely, or even predominantly, by launch. The $855 million deal, comprised of $300 million in cash and $555 million in stock, is nearly as much as what Firefly raised in its IPO ($868 million) just two months ago. SciTec adds 475 employees to Firefly’s ~800, growing headcount by roughly 60% and reshaping Firefly into a bigger contender for Golden Dome work. Compared with the other U.S. launch companies that went public this decade – Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit – Firefly’s evolution is the most rapid from a financial standpoint. In its first few months as a public entity, Firefly is outpacing what Rocket Lab spent in four years on M&A. Why the urgency? First, it’s conventional wisdom now that launch as a standalone offering is a hard business, especially absent a large government anchor contract, which Firefly lacks. The total market is only $5-7 billion dollars per annum, which is then divided into smaller buckets defined by launch mass, orbital inclination, and national sovereignty. Firefly already expanded beyond launch in years prior with its lunar landers and Elytra multi-mission spacecraft, but the foray into defense expands its total addressable market by an order of magnitude. Rocket Lab, a peer competitor, demonstrated the effectiveness of diversifying into spacecraft manufacturing and defense over the course of six acquisitions since 2021. Virgin Orbit, on the other hand, adopted the novel approach of making minority investments into potential customers (SatRevolution, Arqit, Horizon Technologies, etc.), which left the company with no tangible revenue-producing assets when its launch business stumbled. As a result, the company was liquidated two years after its IPO. (To be fair, Virgin Orbit was late to the SPAC IPO fad, and the $228M it raised was less than half the company's target, leaving it more cash strapped than comparable launch IPOs). Second, missile defense is hot, and that’s with or without Golden Dome. SciTec is a subcontractor under General Dynamics Mission Systems for the ground segment of the Space Development Agency’s PWSA missile warning constellation, and counts the Missile Defense Agency among its customers. Future spending on Golden Dome amplifies this market opportunity. Third, software talent is an increasingly needed but tough skill set for space companies to obtain, especially in the age of AI. Acquiring SciTech enables Firefly to quickly acqui-hire a talented pool of software engineers rather than manually scraping together the capability through a laborious and lengthy hiring process. SciTec is a cash-flow positive business, and as a software company, likely has margins that surpass what Firefly obtains from its hardware-centric business. The acquisition puts Firefly on an accelerated track to profitability with the workforce and product offerings needed to capitalize on the surge in U.S. missile defense spending. Link: https://investors.fireflyspace.com/events/event-details/firefly-aerospace-announces-acquisition-scitec

October 3, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry DLR antennas in Neustrelitz. Credit: DLR (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) The blessing and curse of European space policy is the continent’s “do it together” approach. By pooling spending through the European Space Agency and the European Union (two separate entities), Europe can do far more collectively than it can as two dozen separate countries. The tradeoff, however, is that countries must sacrifice some of their individual goals for the sake of the group. The collective approach worked well for several key projects, like the Copernicus remote sensing fleet, the Galileo navigation constellation, and various space exploration programs (Gaia, Euclid, etc.). But in recent years, it’s grown clear that Germany was feeling hamstrung on national priorities. On launch, Germany was less enthused  than France about subsidizing Ariane 6 and more interested in supporting domestic startups. On the IRIS 2  constellation, Germany called the program too expensive , and last year dismissed it as “ too French. ” And in June, Germany’s DLR gave a tepid response to the pan-European remote sensing constellation, European Resilience from Space (ERS), now in the planning phases. Alongside these fissures, Bundeswehr the German military, started mulling a national constellation of hundreds of satellites, a conversation that spilled into the open  in April.  Last week, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius pledged €35B ($41B) through 2030 on an array of military space programs. This was followed by Major General Michael Traut outlining high-level plans for this constellation  of hundreds of satellites doing everything from telecom and imaging to RF mapping and missile warning. The final push for this sovereign constellation was not EU friction, but a strained relationship with the U.S. and Russian aggression on the ground and in orbit. Germany’s surging space spending could radically reshape the country and Europe. Already, Germany is the world’s fourth-largest defense spender , following the U.S., Russia, and China, but space was not a major area of investment. Now, per Handelsblatt, space spending is poised to increase sixfold, adding the equivalent of ESA’s annual budget to Germany’s domestic programs every year for the next five years. What does this mean for Germany’s space sector? Already, there is a heavy expectation that German companies will be best positioned to benefit from the spending surge. Spacecraft manufacturer OHB’s stock price doubled after Pistorius’s speech. Creating a constellation of the size and scope described by Gen. Traut will impact all elements of the space ecosystem and will illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of Germany’s space sector. How German can the constellation be, and to what extent will the vision depend on the whole of Europe? Quilty Space evaluated the following areas: Launch.  Launching a constellation of hundreds of satellites will require a serious launch effort. This will put pressure on Germany’s emerging small launch providers like Isar Aerospace, HyImpulse and RFA. Germany has several of the world’s premier launch startups, but all are building small rockets with between 500-1,500 kg of capacity to low Earth orbit. For a raft of reasons (cost, cadence, schedule), no megaconstellation has launched on small rockets. Starlink, OneWeb, Amazon, and Telesat all rely on medium or heavy-lift rockets that can deploy satellites by the dozens. This will put pressure on German launch startups to build bigger rockets, and in the near term, positions Arianespace as the key launch provider. Love it or hate it, the Ariane 6 is the only European launch vehicle capable of quickly deploying a constellation (and it doesn’t hurt that the upper stage is built in Germany ). Satellite manufacturing.  OHB is skilled at building remote sensing and navigation satellites, but the range of payloads required for the future German constellation will demand more skill sets. Satellite communications is not one of OHB’s strengths, and there are no public German radiofrequency mapping companies, suggesting this is also a new skillset requirement. Infrared missile-warning sensors share some technical heritage with weather satellites, but adaptation is non-trivial. If Germany wants to speedily deploy a multi-purpose constellation, it will have to rely on a whole-of-Europe approach while new competencies are built up domestically. This is also true at the component level. Germany is adept at building optical crosslinks and solar arrays, but it will need to industrialize dozens of components (propulsion, reaction wheels, etc.) if it wants a domestic supply chain that can support a megaconstellation. Ground segment.  Germany is home to some prominent teleports, both independent (Media Broadcast Satellite, IABG, Talia, Horizon) and corporate (SES, ABS, Hispasat), that could anchor a future constellation. Germany is also home to the second-highest number of data centers in the world  after the U.S., providing lots of potential host sites for constellation ground infrastructure. The data routing and processing needs of a multi-purpose constellation will be significant, given the large volumes of data generated and the need, especially with missile warning, for low latency. If not done well, this could handicap a constellation, a la GPS-3, MUOS and OneWeb. The leading vendors for ground segment equipment (gateways, not terminals) are in the U.S., Israel, and Spain. Ensuring sovereign ground will require maturing this sector alongside manufacturing and launch.   Link: https://www.bmvg.de/de/aktuelles/weltraumkongress-verteidigungsminister-sicherheit-5996640

September 24, 2025 - Written by Quilty Space Credit: Quilty Space Quilty Space attended the annual World Space Business Week in Paris last week. Our French could use some work, but fortunately, we’re fluent in the language of the space industry. Over the course of the week, Quilty Space noticed several emerging trends based on dozens of meetings and hallway conversations. The following (non-exhaustive) list covers the biggest themes that stood out to us from the conference. DTD is king. Already a perennial hot topic, this year’s DTD conversations were amplified by SpaceX’s $17 billion spectrum deal with EchoStar and the unveiling of Equatys – a Space42/Viasat-backed venture to provide global DTD services with pooled MSS spectrum. Meanwhile, MDA Space, still reeling from the loss of its $1.3B EchoStar order, insisted that its DTD pipeline remains active and perhaps accelerating. While a handful of stocks (most notably ASTS, IRDM, and MDA) sold off on the news, the overall industry buzz toward DTD leans positive, given the potential for billion-dollar orders that are badly needed to support the flood of new smallsat manufacturers, component vendors, and providers that have entered the market in recent years. Ground segment heats up. The traditionally sleepy ground segment is suddenly getting interesting as both the satcom and EO industries adapt to technology, market, and competitive change. In the satcom world, there is a move toward higher frequencies in the millimeter bands (Q/V/E/W) and even optical. Meanwhile, even as LEO broadband and DTD constellations build out hundreds of new gateways, it appears the teleport segment is finally undergoing terrestrial-type consolidation with EQT’s Satport emerging as the likely consolidator. In the EO world, the drive for lower latency has prompted the deployment of dozens of new antennas and sites by traditional ground players. New ideas are abounding, ranging from infrastructure-sharing startups (Skynopy, Infostellar) to dedicated relay constellations by startups (Apolink) and even the industry’s market leader, KSAT (Hyper). The gravity of Kuiper. Amazon’s megaconstellation still faces industry skepticism, but with ~100 satellites on orbit and more on the way, conversations are shifting from “is Kuiper real?” to “will Kuiper do X, Y, or Z?” In the consumer market, Kuiper stands alone in its willingness to compete head-on with Starlink. We're also starting to see inroads into other markets, like aviation with JetBlue. So far, Amazon has held its cards close, but the consensus is that Kuiper will be disruptive to any market it touches and will seriously challenge the multi-orbit business case when multi-LEO becomes a viable option. The ongoing launch supply crunch. Even without Amazon’s 2022 order for up to 83 launches, the heavy lift launch market was destined to face a mid-decade supply crunch due to forklift upgrades of long-serving ULA and Arianespace launch vehicles (Atlas 5, Ariane 5). Both launch vehicles are years late to market, and Blue Origin (a new market entrant) has only managed one launch YTD vs. an original forecast of 8-10 launches. Meanwhile, the situation is only marginally better in the small/medium lift market, where only Rocket Lab (Electron) has yet managed to fly regularly and reliably. There’s always the SpaceX rideshare option, but the thrice-annual Transporter missions are sold out through mid-2027. The supply crunch should ease as new launch vehicles (i.e., Firefly, Relativity, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space) come online over the next two years, but if history is any guide, the supply crunch may last longer than generally anticipated. In-space platforms evolve from tugs to Cadillacs. What started as a wave of Orbital Transfer Vehicles for moving cubesats around has evolved into a stronger, beefier class of in-space vehicles capable of a much wider range of services. Impulse Space is the poster child for this new class of vehicles, announcing GEO transfer missions with Anduril , Astranis and Infinite Orbits during WSBW, all of which need high-velocity support. Others like Firefly (Elytra), ULA (Centaur-5) and Quantum Space/Arrow (Ranger) are also producing vehicles that don't just transport spacecraft between orbits, but host payloads for situational awareness, edge compute and other services. U.S. defense needs and commercial small GEO are the emerging drivers.

September 5, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry Credit: Quilty Space Three years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the global space industry experienced the immediate removal of the flagship Soyuz medium-lift rocket, as well as the less active but still significant Proton heavy-lift rocket. Two months later, Amazon Kuiper purchased upwards of 83 launches across Arianespace, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance, vacuuming up a massive portion of global launch capacity at a time when a supply-demand imbalance was quickly emerging. Completing the trifecta of shortage-inducing events, Arianespace, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and ULA were all in the throes of transitioning from venerable but dated rockets to next-generation launchers, resulting in a ramp down of the tried and true in favor of the untested and new. All took two to three years longer than expected to debut, and have yet to achieve a high operational cadence. SpaceX’s unprecedented scaling from 31 launches in 2021 to 136 launches in 2024 enabled the industry to avoid a launch crisis. But with Amazon poised to consume one-third or more of all new heavy lift capacity for the next 2-3 years, the industry is likely to remain supply-constrained through the balance of the decade. That could pose a problem for some of the many large constellations on the horizon. Additional constellations awaiting launch in that time period include: AST SpaceMobile for an initial 45-60 satellites, with long-term plans for 90-95, then potentially hundreds. Initial satellites are launching mainly with SpaceX and Blue Origin. Eutelsat for 440 interim satellites to maintain the OneWeb constellation. Initial satellites appear set to launch on H3 rockets from MHI. EchoStar’s 100-satellite direct-to-device constellation, for which no launch contracts have been announced. Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation of 156-198 satellites, currently booked on 14 Falcon 9 rockets with SpaceX. The Space Development Agency’s PWSA constellation of several hundred satellites, plus any additional capabilities added via Golden Dome. These constellations and additional speculative fleets (Kuiper Gen-2, Yahsat/Viasat DTD, SES’s next-gen MEO) add to launch demand over the rest of the decade. This presents an opportunity for new players that can provide affordable, reliable and routine access to space. New “constellation-optimized” rockets are on the horizon. Rocket Lab recently completed the launch pad for Neutron in Virginia, Relativity has started printing propulsion hardware for multiple Terran R rockets, and Firefly raised $868 million in its IPO to support the Eclipse rocket, among other projects. All three are expected to debut in 2026. Whether or not the market can support six medium to heavy lift launch providers from the U.S. alone – plus Starship – is an open question, but for the remainder of the decade launch demand is likely to remain high, presenting an opportunity for one or more new players to establish themselves in the pecking order. Link: https://rocketlabcorp.com/updates/rocket-lab-opens-launch-complex-3-a-critical-milestone-on-the-path-to-neutrons-first-launch/

August 5, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry A Quilty Space chart counting the success rate of debut launches for orbital-class Western rockets. The space industry has learned to treat first launch attempts with grace, given the elevated failure risk compared to later missions, as evidenced by the warm reception Gilmour Space received after the 14-second debut of its Eris rocket. From the beginning of the decade to present day, 16 new Western orbital-class rockets reached their launch pads for the first time – more than twice the number from 2000-2019 – but only four successfully completed their missions. And, the names of those who succeeded from the jump are mostly what has been branded “oldspace.” The four flawless debuts of the decade were Avio with Vega C, Boeing with SLS, Blue Origin with New Glenn, and ULA with Vulcan.* The takeaway is clear: experience has its merits. Every player that succeeded on their maiden flight had knowledge from older rockets (mostly orbital, except for Blue Origin, which was solely a suborbital launch provider until this year). Despite the hard times for new entrants, investor sentiment hasn’t waned. Launch startups continue to pull in impressive rounds, like Isar Aerospace’s €150M round in June, Firefly’s $50M investment from Northrop Grumman in May, and Astra’s $80M round disclosed in April. Big names continue to gravitate to the sector as well, like billionaire Eric Schmidt taking the helm  at Relativity Space in March, Turkish defense prime Roketsan’s unveiling of an orbital rocket last month ( slated for 2027),  and Japanese car maker Honda’s surprisingly clean  suborbital reusable demonstrator launch in June. A successful debut launch doesn’t always mean clear skies (see Vulcan’s second launch), and many startups have embraced the SpaceX philosophy of learning as you go (Starship is nine missions in and not yet commercially operational). But at a time when constellations, and soon Golden Dome, have strained global launch capacity, proving success with speed means a lot.   *Arianespace’s Ariane 6 was not counted because it failed to deploy customer payloads despite reaching orbit.

August 7, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry Credit: Quilty Space  Few countries have been as forward-leaning when rolling out universal broadband access as Australia. In 2009, the country set up the National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co., later just NBN) to deploy connectivity infrastructure across the world’s sixth largest nation. While the main focus of that push was fiber and other terrestrial hardware, NBN realized it would need satellites to connect the more than 3 million citizens living in rural or remote regions. And so the ~AUD $2 billion Sky Muster program was born: two high-throughput (HTS) geostationary satellites, launched in 2015 and 2016, bringing a collective 135 Gbps  of capacity, a 30-fold increase in Australia’s satcom supply. Even with that huge leap, Sky Muster was plagued with low data speeds within two years of launch , accompanied by a steady stream of local complaints . The service struggled to keep up with rising data speeds uncomfortably early into the satellites’ 15-year design lives. Sky Muster peaked in 2021 with around 111,000 subscribers, but once Starlink entered the Australian market, it never recovered. NBN kicked off an AUD $750M network upgrade  in 2022 that added fixed wireless tower access to more than 120,000 homes and businesses whose only choice was Sky Muster. Completed in December 2024, the Fixed Wireless and Satellite Upgrade Program (FWSUP) was meant to reduce network congestion, but that effort was insufficient to prevent customer attrition. In 2023, the same year Starlink eclipsed Sky Muster subscribers, NBN began exploring connectivity options  from low Earth orbit providers. At the time, Jason Ashton, NBN Co Executive General Manager for Fixed Wireless and Satellite, framed the evaluation as exploratory, saying LEO connectivity “could be a part of our network in the future.” With this week’s announcement between NBN and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, it would appear the future is now, and the future is LEO. NBN wants Kuiper to cover more than 300,000 locations, and anticipates service in mid-2026. LEO broadband networks have the potential to scale well beyond the size of GEO satellite fleets, allowing operators to steadily increase total capacity. Sky Muster didn’t scale, and improvements in network capacity weren’t enough to keep customers from jumping to commercial LEO solutions. The writing was on the wall for years. Now, Kuiper just needs to get its satellites on orbit and its service deployed. Link: https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/media-centre/media-statements/nbn-co-selects-amazons-project-kuiper

June 19, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry On June 18, Eutelsat OneWeb secured the kind of deal that had eluded the company for years – a large government contract worth up to €1 billion ($1.15 billion) for defense communications services. The French Armed Forces (DGA) contract covers 10 years, and ensures priority access to Eutelsat capacity, especially in LEO, plus funding to upgrade the constellation for military use. The deal is important for several reasons. 1.      Less USG business. Eutelsat’s government revenue, despite growing 10% last quarter to €49.5 million, took a hit when the U.S. military reduced its business with the company, something management attributed to Trump cost-cutting efforts (perhaps DOGE). These and other policy shifts in Washington make it increasingly important for Eutelsat to have government clients outside the U.S. 2.      More domestic support.  Europe and Eutelsat OneWeb have talked extensively about communications sovereignty for the past two years, but actions weren’t matching words. It was blindingly obvious that for a continent at war, and with deep reservations about dependence on Starlink, waiting six years for IRIS² wasn’t a reasonable solution. The French MoD deal is the most visible sign of a European government pushing to make sovereign LEO connectivity a near-term reality. That this came from France was not a surprise, as France owns a 12.6% stake in Eutelsat through BpiFrance. 3.      Feckless UK posture.  Ever since being purchased out of bankruptcy in 2020 by the British government and Bharti, OneWeb sought to craft a meaningful defense deal with the U.K. Ministry of Defense, but the U.K. was largely unwilling to make major commitments after its one-time $500M rescue deal. The British government was, among other things, paralyzed by the idea of playing favorites between local operators (then OneWeb, Inmarsat and Avanti), making it an ineffectual shareholder. Three years after the Russia-Ukraine War started, the British government never sent  OneWeb terminals to Ukraine. Most satellite operators draw a meaningful portion of their revenue from government customers. Quilty Space estimates Starlink generated $2.2 billion in government revenue in 2024 (mostly from Starshield), about 28% of Starlink’s total for the year. Intelsat generated $386 million from government customers in 2024, representing 19%  of total revenue. Eutelsat is in the same ballpark, with government revenue accounting for 17% of Q3 revenue, and 14% of its last fiscal year (€165M out of €1.2B as of June 30, 2024). With French MoD backing, Eutelsat OneWeb now has a substantial domestic anchor customer, providing the company with improved stability as it seeks to finance 440 interim LEO satellites as well as the IRIS² constellation (€4.0-4.2B collectively, per Eutelsat’s estimate). Government revenue alone isn’t enough to validate the LEO business case, but it’s a meaningful part, and one that OneWeb, as part of Eutelsat, can finally count on. Source: https://www.eutelsat.com/en/news/press.html#/pressreleases/eutelsat-and-frances-armed-forces-ministry-reach-landmark-framework-agreement-for-low-orbit-satellite-services-in-the-context-of-frances-nexus-program-3392412

July 15, 2025 - Written by Quilty Space News broke July 10 that a SpaceX Starlink subsidiary called Starlink Satellite Services Corp. (SSSC) submitted an annual financial report in the Netherlands, providing a rare glimpse at the inner workings of the world’s largest satellite constellation. The numbers were surprising: $2.7B in 2024 revenue, up from $1.4B in 2023, and a net income of $72.7M for 2024, up from a loss of $30.7M the year prior. At face value, they suggest Starlink makes far less than we at Quilty, and other analysts like Mach33 and Payload project. So much less, that Starlink would no longer be considered SpaceX’s biggest moneymaker compared to launch. Starlink 2024 revenue estimate Quilty Space $7.8B Payload Research $8.1B Mach33/Ark Invest $6.9B (including Starshield) Is SSSC a true assessment of Starlink’s financial performance? Did Starlink only generate about half the revenue of rival Viasat ($4.5B) or moderately more than GEO and MEO giant SES ($2.3B) in 2024? At Quilty, we believe the Dutch financial document provides only a partial view of Starlink’s financial performance, resulting in an incomplete picture. The first clue is SSSC’s regional revenue breakdown, which places Europe as its largest market and North America fourth, despite the U.S. being Starlink’s largest base of consumer subscribers. For North America to rank so low, SSSC would likely only count Canada (and possibly Mexico). Canada had roughly 400,000 subscribers in 2024. The Quilty Space Starlink model estimates Starlink’s 2024 global consumer revenue at $4.9B, of which $2.7B came from the U.S. market and its then-1.5 million subscribers. The second clue is the company headcount: 14 people. SpaceX has more than 13,000 employees, of which roughly 3,000 work for Starlink. SSSC doesn’t remotely reflect Starlink’s true employee base. Third, SSSC focuses on consumer and enterprise customers, but does not appear to count government revenue, especially Starshield and other U.S. military work. NRO’s $1.8B satellite constellation is notably absent. Starlink also pulled in 97% of proliferated LEO task orders under Space Systems Command’s pLEO IDIQ as of late 2024 (the contract vehicle has a ceiling of $13 billion, giving Starlink even more room to grow in 2025). That too, appears missing in the SSSC filing. In conclusion, SSSC is a holding company created for legal and tax purposes that doesn’t tell us much about Starlink’s underlying financials. Forget revenues and margins, the big takeaway from the SSSC filing is that Starlink itself is presented essentially as an asset-light holding company. The real assets (i.e., the satellites, associated factories, gateways, and user terminals) remain on SpaceX's books. That decision has implications for the value ascribed to Starlink in an IPO scenario, and says a lot about where Elon Musk seeks to accrue value between his space enterprises.  Link: https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-much-does-starlink-make-this-document-offers-a-glimpse

July 14, 2025 - Written by Chris Quilty Credit: Quilty Space On July 11, Firefly Aerospace filed S-1 paperwork with the SEC, becoming the fourth space company seeking to go public in 2025. The announcement, coming just halfway through the year, puts 2025 on track to be the best year for space IPOs since 2021, when 13 companies went public. To be fair, space IPOs have never quite been a thing. Prior to 2021, the peak year for space IPOs was 2016, when five companies went public (four IPOs, one SPAC), raising $124M. By contrast, the two IPOs completed YTD (Karman and Voyager) raised $625M, with Firefly and iRocket (SPAC) yet to be priced. This recent burst in IPO activity is both welcome and long overdue, given the hundreds of space startups established over the past decade. Through the first half of this year alone, ~$3B of venture capital has flowed into the space industry, compared to $460M in all of 2016. Those startups will eventually need an exit path via M&A or IPO. Both markets have been in a three-year drought but have recently shown signs of life. Pitchbook’s 2025 mid-year VC outlook  forecasts valuation growth, increased fundraising, and rising distribution yields in the second half of the year. Equity markets are fickle, but if the IPO window remains open in the second half of the year, we would expect several companies to test the waters, led by the roughly two dozen private companies that have completed large ($100M+), late-stage funding rounds in the past five years.  And don’t look now, but a SPAC market rebound  could prompt a flurry of IPO activity not seen since the halcyon days of 2021. With less roadkill than last time, we can only hope.   Link: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1860160/000119312525158225/d849748ds1.htm

July 17, 2025 - Written by Chris Quilty With today’s completion of the SES-Intelsat merger, the era of “The Big Four” is officially over. That’s just the math. But it’s also a sign of something bigger: the center of gravity in satcom has shifted permanently away from GEO incumbents to LEO disruptors. And SES knows it.   To be fair, the decline of GEO’s dominance has been obvious for years. The unraveling has been accelerated by the rise of LEO megaconstellations, stagnating broadcast revenues, and growing demand for mobility, cloud integration, and low-latency connectivity. One by one, the legacy GEO giants have responded in kind:   Telesat is walking away from GEO entirely in favor of LEO with LightSpeed. Eutelsat absorbed OneWeb to hedge its bets with a multi-orbit move. UAE-based Yahsat merged with AI firm Bayanat to reposition around analytics and sovereign data. JSAT is pouring capital into EO and related verticals. After acquiring Inmarsat, Viasat is now teasing DTD services and other multi-orbit offerings.   SES, Post-Merger: Now What?   SES may have bought Intelsat, but it didn’t buy time. The new combined company is still projecting modest growth of mid-single digits on revenue and EBITDA through 2028. That’s… respectable, but hardly the stuff that lights up earnings calls in a market racing toward LEO disruption and DTD innovation.   The merger prompted a CFO change, but not a shift in strategic posture. Its near-term priorities are clear: integrate Intelsat, cut costs, and reduce leverage. Longer term, SES must chart a strategy that not only fends off emerging LEO competitors but also accelerates growth beyond its current high-single-digit targets.   Building a LEO constellation to compete with Starlink, Kuiper, or Lightspeed is probably off the table ($10-20B commitment). And an SES-owned MEO constellation in Europe is now called Iris2 – a publicly funded initiative that SES may support but won’t control and is unlikely to generate meaningful revenue for the company before the early 2030s.   SES is eyeing adjacent markets: DTD, IoT, optical networks, SSA, quantum, cloud-based satcom, and AI. Some of these could move the needle later this decade, particularly in areas such as government payload hosting and sovereign infrastructure. Others remain speculative or require long-tail infrastructure bets.   Even with a pristine balance sheet, SES can’t match SpaceX’s financial firepower (est. 2025 capex of $5.5B). Still, SES has other powerful levers: valuable spectrum, orbital rights, landing rights across key markets, and a mature global partner network. These assets position SES to compete in high-value segments, like government, mobility, and managed services, where regulatory moats and long procurement cycles tend to favor incumbents. If deployed strategically, they could become powerful growth catalysts. And with tailwinds from IRIS² and growing demand for sovereign-controlled infrastructure, SES is well-positioned to align with European public-sector priorities as well. Add the right set of strategic moves — deeper telecom alliances, targeted vertical integration, or a Ku-band expansion of mPower — and the merged entity could carve out a credible, differentiated position in a market increasingly defined by LEO, software-defined networks, and multi-orbit flexibility.   Which path SES ultimately takes remains to be seen. But we have no doubt that standing still won’t be part of its journey.

11/20/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry ABL Space Systems’ sudden pivot from space launch to missile defense is the latest example of a growing trend among small launch hopefuls for whom the market never quite materialized. The El Segundo, California, company was considered among the most promising startups in small launch, but a failed launch attempt in 2023, a rocket-destroying ground test in July 2024, and a tough capital market pushed the company to abandon space launch Nov. 14 in favor of to-be-named missile defense programs.  Only a handful of prominent U.S. launch startups, namely Relativity Space and Stoke Space, have stayed laser-focused on the space launch market. Per the non-exhaustive chart above, ABL joins a growing list of companies that have either diversified into defense, or abandoned space entirely for defense work. Why does this keep happening?  Most of these companies are now pursuing hypersonics, a $ 6 - 7 B market, making it about the same size as the global space launch market . Since propulsion technology is dual use, it’s clear why startups are drawn to a quick way of doubling their TAM. Then there’s the harsh reality that several small launch startups bet on winning deals with megaconstellations, but those have gone almost exclusively to larger rockets. Given how overcrowded the launch startup space got in the late 2010s, the industry expected most of them to fail, and while many have or will, a larger than anticipated number will live on as part of the U.S. military industrial base.   European launch startups so far have not exhibited the same push towards hypersonics/missile defense, as most of the market is with the U.S. military. Only Avio, which isn’t a startup but was overwhelmingly concentrated on space launch, has made such a pivot, and it did so by expanding to the U.S. market . Australian startups have also either expanded into hypersonics (Gilmour Space), or planned dual use from the beginning (Hypersonix Launch Systems). The latter of which, like Avio, tapped into the U.S. market to jumpstart its hypersonic growth story. The recent expansion of the trilateral AUKUS agreement between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. to include hypersonic testing , may pave the way for British space startups to make similar moves.

May 5, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry First, it was small launch vehicles. Then it was cubesat constellation operators. Now, the latest area of unbridled space-industry expansion is small satellite manufacturing. The past 12 months have seen several developments in the smallsat manufacturing domain, notably: Large capital raises , like Apex Space’s $200M Series C, a $170M Series C for Loft Orbital , and a $110M Series B by K2 Space; Hiring surges  by Berlin Space Technologies  (50% increase in three months), MDA Space  (950 new employees in 2024) and Millennium Space  (quintupling in size over seven years); New factories  across the U.S. and Europe from AerospaceLab  (an 11,000-square-meter “megafactory” in Belgium, and a 3,300 square-meter plant in Torrance, California), Argotec  (11,500 square meters in Turin, Italy), and Terran Orbital (8,700 square meters in Irvine, CA); and A major uptick in space-as-a-service  deals from Planet, Spire and Iceye – three companies that originally built satellites only for in-house needs. Bubble risk?  It’s not clear what is motivating all of this expansion. Yes, U.S. government demand has increased through the Space Development Agency, but the commercial sector, not so much. If this supply is growing without sufficient demand to match it, the industry risks a reset like it saw with small launch and cubesat constellation operators. Both of those had surges in entrepreneurship during the 2010s motivated by grossly overestimated market sizes. At the end of the day, 100+ small launch vehicle startups yielded one disruptor in the form of Rocket Lab. Among cubesat startups, dozens of constellations across Earth observation and IoT connectivity thinned out to two leaders: Planet Labs and Spire. In launch, anticipated constellation demand went to heavier rockets, while in cubesat constellations, end users proved harder to capture than anticipated. What’s different?  A nontrivial amount of the surge in manufacturing capacity is clearly demand-driven. MDA is scaling up to build Telesat Lightspeed and Globalstar, and Millennium is building more satellites for the U.S. government, for example. Among space-as-a-service companies, pivots to use their in-house production capabilities for third-party customers provides meaningful revenue diversification from slow-growing EO markets. That said, commercial demand signals haven’t changed much. The largest constellations, SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, are vertically integrated and off the market. Commercial direct-to-device constellations are on the horizon, but only some will go to merchant suppliers while others are also built in-house (AST SpaceMobile, Lynk). Most EO satellite manufacturers build their own spacecraft, with demand driven primarily by government contracts. Investors should exercise caution before jumping on the satellite manufacturing bandwagon. Or plan on bringing a big checkbook if they do.

Apr 23 - Written by Caleb Henry As the next big LEO constellation, Kuiper’s delays have attracted significant attention, but the question of how serious the delays are has gone unanswered. A comparative analysis of other large LEO constellations shows Kuiper is moving at a pace consistent with early industry precedent. If Kuiper’s April 28 launch date holds, it will take the company 570 days to go from prototype launch to first batch launch. That’s 115 days longer than Starlink, and more than 200 days longer than OneWeb, but faster than the U.S. Space Development Agency by about 70 days. Serial satellite manufacturing consistently takes the industry longer to achieve than early estimates. Starlink hoped to do as many as seven batch launches in its first year but only completed two in 2019. OneWeb aimed for as many as five but finished its first production year with just one launch. SDA planned a one-year gap, but contractor struggles and covid-induced setbacks doubled that time. And Telesat (not included in the chart), launched a prototype for its Lightspeed constellation in 2018, and has still yet to conduct a batch launch – the first is now slated for the second half of 2026. Common reasons for delays include supply chain partners falling behind on parts deliveries, manufacturer redesigns that incorporate data from prototypes in orbit, and chronically underestimated learning curves when shifting from artisanal production into a mass manufacturing operation. Precedent suggests Kuiper’s delays are normal and should resolve themselves as momentum builds. Plus, given the magnitude of Kuiper’s investment – estimated at $16.5-20 billion by Quilty Space, the FCC is fully expected to grant an extension on the company’s spectrum license. All Amazon needs to do now is execute. Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-23/amazon-project-kuiper-space-internet-struggles-to-catch-elon-musk-s-starlink

Apr 24 - Written by Kimberly Siversen Burke In a move that feels equal parts shocking as it is on-brand, SpaceX just flashed its orbital watchdog badge to the FCC in what is being characterized as a “transparent attempt to hijack competition, hinder innovation, and impair national security.” Channeling a DOGE-inspired lawfare vibe, SpaceX is now weaponizing Starlink to form some sort of on-orbit Department of Spectrum Enforcement. DOSE (our acronym, not theirs) is collecting Power Spectral Density (PSD) data over the 2 GHz band across the Northeastern U.S., Western U.S., and Alaska – territory where EchoStar (parent of Dish Networks) holds licenses for both Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) and terrestrial 5G use under the FCC’s (AWS-4)  designation. Simply put: SpaceX just deployed a spectrum spy op to make EchoStar look like a squatter. The goal seems less enforcement than eviction. Basically, if you’re not using your spectrum, Elon will. And the way things are going, the FCC might even DOSE you into forfeiting it. SpaceX is DOSEing up with Data This long-simmering regulatory clash between SpaceX and EchoStar reached a boiling point on April 14 . Through PSD data collected by Starlink satellites, SpaceX illustrated  for the FCC its claim that EchoStar uses just 5% of its licensed AWS-4 spectrum – a figure that, if accurate, contradicts years of buildout milestones. Image Credit: SpaceX FCC Filing (WT Docket No. 22-212; RM-11976; ICFS File No. SES-RWL-20241213-02647)   Starlink’s satellites¹ essentially acted as passive RF monitors, scanning the 2 GHz band over parts of the U.S., specifically, the Northeast, West, and Alaska. Possibly not by accident, the areas surveyed may include some of the most sparsely populated zones within EchoStar’s AWS-4 footprint. Think Jersey City vs. Jasper. Data from this surveillance mission showed that while adjacent frequencies lit up with signal activity, EchoStar’s AWS-4 spectrum remained quiet by comparison. While we would expect spectrum watchdogging  from RF signal mapping players like HawkEye 360, Starlink acting as a space-based spectrum spy was not on our bingo card. Worth noting that SpaceX doesn’t appear to be deploying any new payloads. It’s likely reprogramming and tasking Starlink’s advanced phased array beamforming and digital signal processing technologies  to conduct the passive spectrum audits. EchoStar’s Counterpunch EchoStar clapped back at SpaceX for orchestrating a regulatory ambush and attempting to rewrite FCC precedent through media spectacle. In an April 15 filing  and a statement to Octus , EchoStar accuses SpaceX of its “familiar pattern”  of “distorting the truth while missing the point” and dismisses SpaceX’s PSD scans as irrelevant. EchoStar goes on to explain that AWS-4 buildout obligations are population-based , not geographic: “Perhaps SpaceX is confused because it has never publicly filed a detailed deployment report for the 15,000 MHz of spectrum it received free of charge from the FCC.” Contrast, as they did, with EchoStar’s own track record of investing more than $30B in wireless spectrum licenses and $7.3B+ in capex to build out a nationwide 5G network. The company also pointed to the FCC’s September 2023  determination that Dish Networks met its 70% population coverage requirement and cited third-party certification of EchoStar’s March 2024  nationwide drive tests. With 23,000+ 5G sites online, EchoStar now claims to be the largest Open RAN network in the country. The rebuttal painted SpaceX not as a champion of efficiency, but as a spectrum opportunist trying to kneecap EchoStar’s emerging DTD strategy, just as its first Lyra satellite (launched in January 2025 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-12 mission ) begins operations under an FCC experimental authorization. EchoStar also dismissed SpaceX's criticism of temporary spectrum leasing  as irrelevant, clarifying that the leases were approved by the FCC as part of a 5G milestone extension agreement to foster interim spectrum use by smaller operators and Tribal nations during EchoStar’s network buildout. SpaceX Reloads On April 18 , SpaceX submitted a follow-up letter to the FCC, reinforcing its earlier claims and openly ridiculing EchoStar for offering no meaningful rebuttal to the spectral data presented. Instead of addressing the core issue of underutilized spectrum, EchoStar “attacks the messenger,” SpaceX said, and fails to explain “the measured wasteland in the AWS-4 band.” More provocatively, SpaceX asserted that the FCC has never validated EchoStar’s drive test claims, despite EchoStar suggesting otherwise. SpaceX is now urging the Commission to revisit EchoStar’s buildout filings to assess whether the milestones were meaningfully met or just rubber-stamped. SpaceX also mocked EchoStar’s effort to anchor its AWS-4 spectrum rights to the launch of a single, foreign-licensed NGSO satellite (Lyra-1),  calling the legal logic “bizarre.” If EchoStar admits that NGSO operations are viable in the band, SpaceX argues, “the Commission should allow more NGSO operations in the band.” EchoStar's Latest Salvo: We Built This, Back Off On April 23 , EchoStar returned fire in yet another FCC Filing, accusing SpaceX of inventing an unrecognized standard for compliance to upend decades of licensing framework. The filing warns the Commission that allowing SpaceX’s interpretation to stand would violate FCC precedent, undermine EchoStar’s dual-use MSS + 5G architecture, and trigger harmful interference scenarios the AWS-4 Order aimed to avoid. EchoStar emphasized the FCC's explicit certification of its AWS-4 deployment, reiterated its leadership in 3GPP’s non-terrestrial network (NTN) standardization work, and boasted about an audit that ranked Boost Mobile  — powered by its network — as the most reliable in New York City. Also, National Security and China. Globalstar’s Big LEO Lockdown Meanwhile, Globalstar has been fortifying its own defenses to protect its Big LEO  spectrum from the de facto leader of DOSE. In an April 10  meeting with the FCC’s Space Bureau and Commissioner Carr’s staff (note: not Carr), it pressed for swift approval of its C-3 constellation  without first detonating a rulemaking that would blow open the back door for SpaceX  to share its 1.6/2.4 GHz band. That’s not paranoia. SpaceX already filed a petition  in February 2024 to dismantle Big LEO’s exclusive use. That proposed rulemaking [RM-11975]  is still on the docket. In an April 15  ex parte filing, Globalstar framed the C-3 System as the next evolutionary leap for DTD to bolster its existing SPOT devices, IoT offerings, and iPhone SOS integration. Globalstar warned that even initiating a new Big LEO rulemaking would undermine investment certainty, derail commercial momentum, and jeopardize a framework that “supports the provision of MSS to more people globally than any other satellite band.” If (when?) that petition advances, Globalstar and fellow incumbents like Ligado and Iridium could be the next to stare down a DOSE audit. SpaceX’s Playbook: Just Rewrite the Rules SpaceX isn’t really accusing EchoStar of breaking the rules. It’s saying the rules themselves are broken if legacy benchmarks and compliance metrics amount to little more than performative box-checking. Enter DOSE: a data-driven pretext for broader reform. Sound familiar? DOSE is shaping up to be just what the FCC needs to justify revising the 2 GHz and/or Big LEO licensing framework to enable shared spectrum use prioritized for next-gen NGSO (read: Starlink) systems. Should the Commission agree, it will erode legacy operators’ grip on certain bands and fundamentally shift the balance of spectrum power. This regulatory recalibration is not just about the players, though. It’s about the game. And how SpaceX is nudging the FCC to change the rules in a time when satellites don’t just provide connectivity, they apparently police it. If compliance shifts from paperwork to prove it, then we are ushering in the beginning of a regulatory Hunger Games. And in this arena? The odds feel ever in SpaceX’s favor.   1.       The PSD data in SpaceX’s April 14 filing was collected in Q4 2024, prior to the launch of its v2 Mini Optimized satellites in March 2025 , suggesting the use of its Direct to Cell satellites.

May 21, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry No satellite operator has transformed the status quo quite like SpaceX. When the company began launching the Starlink constellation in 2019, there were roughly 2,000 satellites in space from all of humanity  – every country, company, university and laboratory combined. SpaceX is now launching around 2,000 Starlink satellites every 12 months, and may exceed that rate in 2025. Looking back at the 8,000 Starlink satellites SpaceX has launched (inclusive of one failure) provides a means of analyzing the pace of Starlink’s deployment. Per Quilty research, after the first 2,000 Starlinks – which were slower to launch due to teething production challenges and the covid-19 pandemic – SpaceX has added 1,000 new satellites roughly every six months. The company has maintained this deployment rate even while introducing newer, larger satellite iterations that resulted in fewer spacecraft fitting on each Falcon 9 rocket. While the number of satellites trended down (from 60 initially to 22), SpaceX’s overall launch rate kept increasing. SpaceX’s dramatic increase in launch cadence enabled the company to start deploying a second LEO constellation – the Starlink Direct-to-Cell constellation – with minimal impact on the core broadband fleet. SpaceX began regular launches of Starlink DTC satellites 12 months ago in May 2024, and has averaged slightly under 300 DTC satellites launched alongside every 1,000 broadband satellites. SpaceX’s introduction of DTC modestly slowed broadband deployment – it took eight months to launch 1,000 broadband satellites from March to November 2024, the longest in more than two years – but the company is once again accelerating its launch rate. Introduced in 2024, the “Optimized” V2 Mini reduced mass 22%, enabling 29 broadband satellites per rocket versus 23 previously. By early 2025, SpaceX began conducting more Falcon 9 launches solely with the V2 Mini Optimized. The optimized V2 Mini will likely be the last generation of satellites to fly on the Falcon 9 before SpaceX shifts over to the V3 satellite, which was designed to launch on Starship. But even without Starship, SpaceX has proven that it can launch a world’s worth of satellites in a single year, with room to spare. Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/05/16/live-coverage-spacex-plans-morning-launch-of-starlink-satellites-from-california/

May 30, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry Ever since its unveiling in 2022 , the EU’s Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²) constellation has been a roller coaster of ups and downs. Initially belittled as an underwhelming “me too” project, IRIS² gained purpose after Russia invaded Ukraine and Musk’s antics made Europe uncomfortable relying so heavily on Starlink to connect soldiers on the battlefield. Then the costs came in. Initially estimated at €6 billion , the program ballooned to €10.6 billion while still in the ideation phase. Delays also quickly ramped, as the in-service date slipped from an (overly) optimistic 2024 , to 2026, to 2028, to 2030, and now potentially 2031. Meanwhile, the full constellation of 290 satellites across MEO and LEO is expected to produce only 3.3 terabits per second of capacity , of which  2 Tbps will come from LEO . The LEO portion is the equivalent of two ViaSat-3 satellites in GEO or two Starlink V3 satellites in LEO – but for a multiple of the cost. And while there’s more to a good constellation than raw capacity, the numbers are thoroughly underwhelming. Telesat Lightspeed will have an estimated 10 Tbps  – five times as much as IRIS² from less than 200 satellites. Increasingly costly, bloated, and delayed before the first satellite is even launched, IRIS² is at risk of losing government and industrial support. This begs the question, why is IRIS² in so much trouble? Quilty Space has identified the following reasons: 1.      Too many competing interests. IRIS² is supposed to have service in Ka-band, military Ka-band, Ku-band, and maybe UHF, with “hardgov,” “lightgov,” and commercial service across two different orbits, possibly with hosted payloads. User terminals are supposed to be multi-purpose, multi-waveform, multi-orbit, and phased array. This is a long list of requirements that adds complexity to the satellite design and huge complexity to the ground, slowing the program while driving up costs. 2.      Confused identity relative to Starlink. IRIS² got purpose as a sovereign replacement to Starlink, but the constellation is considerably smaller, its user terminals are poised to be much more expensive, and its launch requirements are too small to generate a flywheel effect like the symbiosis between Starlink and the SpaceX Falcon 9. Europe already has military communications satellites – Sicral in Italy, Syracuse in France, SATCOMBw in Germany, Spainsat in France, and Govsat-1 in Luxembourg, plus the OneWeb LEO constellation. Europe doesn’t need another satcom network, it needs a better one, but it is unclear IRIS² will be that. 3.      Active fault lines.  Despite being a pan-European program, Italy and Germany have already intimated they want national constellations of their own. The French government is a partial owner of the OneWeb constellation through Eutelsat, as is the British government even though the latter isn’t part of the EU. The large number of national interests complicates IRIS² and slows the program down relative to constellations with single owners. 4.      Industrial support.  Although established as a public-private partnership, the government partners (the European Commission and ESA) were unable to secure the desired private contribution because Airbus and Thales Alenia Space bowed out, leaving SES, Eutelsat and Hispasat to hold the bag. Both SES and Eutelsat are stretched financially and operationally due to recent acquisitions, while Hispasat is being acquired by the Indra Group. Over the past 3-4 years, the IRIS² program has cast a long shadow on the European space industry, which is eager for the work but weary of the premise. As progress and momentum have built, IRIS² has become a freight train, pulling the industry in a singular direction. But the industry-led SpaceRise consortium and the European Commission both preserve the right to scrap the current approach if deemed unfeasible. As key supplier data comes in this year and potentially in early 2026, the question is, will they? Source: https://www.spaceintelreport.com/europes-iris2-organization-contractor-selection-likely-cost-and-schedule-are-now-openly-questioned/

June 12, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry A Quilty Space chart showing awardees in Nevada’s BEAD program prior to the June 6 program rewrite. On June 6, NTIA issued a drastic overhaul  of the $42.5 billion BEAD program to include policy priorities of the Trump administration, including, among other things, a technology-neutral approach that puts LEO satellite broadband on a more equal footing with fiber. Historically, U.S. government broadband programs have skewed heavily in favor of fiber, even in remote locations where satellite technology excels.  BEAD, prior to the rewrite, was trending in a similar direction. Of the three states that had finalized their BEAD plans, only two included satellite connectivity in their solutions for connecting unserved and underserved communities. Although Trump rescinded those state plans , they can provide useful case studies for how BEAD was unfolding. Delaware planned  to spend more than $107M connecting 5,721 households and businesses, a cost equaling $18,700 per site. Contrast that with a residential Starlink plan, where the same amount of money could furnish a house with a terminal and fund connectivity (at $120 a month) for more than 12 years. Louisiana’s plan  allocated 95% of BEAD locations to fiber, even while saying it “firmly believe[s] in the technology advancements and innovative evolution of fixed wireless and LEO providers.” Nevada preliminarily awarded Amazon Kuiper $14.5M to connect 4,891 locations, a cost equal to approximately $3,000 per site. Of the 19 companies that won BEAD deals in Nevada, Amazon Kuiper was the third cheapest. The most expensive fiber company, Beehive Broadband, averages $77,000 per site. The vast majority of Nevada’s BEAD awards  still went to fiber. Kuiper accounted for 2.6% of the state’s $553.8M spending plan. Prior to the NTIA rewrite, BEAD in some cases   explicitly prioritized  the use of fiber. And while there are definitely cases where fiber is the superior solution – like connecting apartment complexes – the overwhelming number of awards went to fiber providers, often at cost points multiple times that of satellite connectivity, providing an indication of how BEAD was likely to play out. Elimination of BEAD policies that favored fiber for “priority broadband projects” presents an opportunity for Amazon Kuiper and SpaceX’s Starlink to compete more aggressively for awards. NTIA’s rewrite maintained the requirement for 100 milliseconds or less of latency, which precludes GEO operators Hughes and Viasat from participating. For LEO satellite operators, the stakes for BEAD are high. Just 5% of the $42.5 billion would equal an amount greater than what the Canadian government is loaning Telesat  to help finance the Lightspeed enterprise broadband constellation. An entire LEO constellation could be bankrolled by a fraction of the proposed BEAD funding. Source: https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2025/06/09/ntia-policy-changes-open-door-to-satellite-in-bead-program/

10/15/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry On Oct. 11, SpaceX filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requesting to modify Starlink’s architecture and establish what it calls “SpaceX V3.” The filing pertains to SpaceX’s plans for a 30,000-satellite constellation (specifically, 29,988 satellites), of which the FCC has authorized an initial 7,500 satellites. The filing showcases the incredible speed at which Starlink has moved, having launched nearly 3,000 Gen-2 satellites in less than two years. It also showcases a bit of Starlink's competitive thinking and geopolitical posturing. SpaceX is urging the FCC to approve the new architecture to “remain globally competitive amidst the rise of state-owned and state-backed satellite systems that have been deploying at a rapid clip.” This is most likely a reference to Chinese constellations like Spacesail, GuoWang, and Honghu-3, each of which aims to have more than 10,000 satellites. SpaceX requested several changes, with the end goal of delivering “gigabit” speeds to end users (apparently to consumers, not just higher-paying enterprise and mobility customers) and improving coverage of high-demand areas. The following short analysis examines four key changes that Starlink is requesting now and in recent filings, along with their implications as understood at this time. Key modifications: A potentially dramatic increase in spectrum use. Today, Starlink mainly uses Ku-band for customer-facing services and Ka-band for gateway links. Starlink's modification discusses using Ku-, Ka-, V-, and E-band “for either mobile- or fixed-satellite use cases” where regulations and technology allow. Implication: Starlink may need user terminals in these new bands, not just Ku-band or multi-band terminals. The latter is a rarity today, not that unfamiliarity has ever stopped SpaceX before, in launch or in broadband hardware. A drop in orbital altitude. SpaceX wants to lower its three orbital shells by 45 to 60 kilometers each, shifting from the current 525-km, 530-km, and 535-km shells to 480-km, 485-km, and 475-km altitudes, respectively. Implication: The change would reduce Starlink’s latency slightly, improve de-orbit times slightly, and provide other benefits. SpaceX says the reconfiguration will enable it to “deliver better broadband coverage and service quality for American consumers in areas of high demand” and be more responsive to consumer demand changes. Notably, the change would also give Starlink more wiggle room since the FCC sided with Amazon in requiring a minimum separation distance, meaning Starlink satellites aren’t allowed to go above 580 kilometers (Kuiper begins at 590 kilometers). Lower elevation angle by five degrees. Starlink wants user terminals to scan down to 20 degrees above the horizon (versus 25 today) after the altitude drop. This makes sense because satellites at lower altitudes will zip across the sky even faster, so widening the aperture gives more time for connections. Implication: Not only would a wider scan range offset the lower orbits, but it should (per SpaceX) increase data rates by increasing the number of satellites in simultaneous view at any given time. It's worth noting, however, that this won’t always be possible. The closer the elevation angle gets to the horizon, the greater the likelihood of blockages from structures like buildings, trees and mountains. A change in orbital inclination. By shifting the inclination of future launches by one to five degrees, SpaceX says it can better launch future satellites on Starship from Boca Chica, Texas. Implication: In the past, SpaceX had outlined two different LEO architectures, one based more heavily on Falcon 9 launches, the other more heavily reliant on Starship. The new paperwork suggests Starship is taking a firmer role in Starlink’s go-forward plans. It's worth noting that FCC filings give a window into a company’s future vision but are not a guarantee of near-term actions or actions at all (the FCC’s dockets are filled with V-band constellations that have remained nothing but paper, for example). Therefore, the above conclusions should be taken with a healthy grain of salt. SOURCE: https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATMOD2024101100224&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number

10/9/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry The Defense Department doles out study contracts in the six-to-seven figure range so often they are rarely worth mentioning in the grand scheme of needle movers, but the Space Development Agency’s Commercial Disposal Services awards are different. On September 26, the agency split $1.9 million in study contracts across six U.S. companies – Arkisys, Impulse Space, Quantum Space, Sierra Space, SpaceWorks Enterprises, and Starfish Space – to evaluate on-demand “de-orbit as a service” for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) constellation. Megaconstellations have long been thought of as ideal customers for debris-removal services on account of their large numbers of spacecraft, the high value of their orbits, and the likelihood of spacecraft failures that could compromise those orbits. But the largest of these constellations – Starlink – has been extremely proactive in taking steps that avoid requiring such services. Its satellites are deployed around 250 kilometers above sea level, meaning premature failures are quickly swept up by Earth’s atmosphere. Starlink doesn’t always operate satellites through their full design life, instead piloting them downward for destructive reentries while the company still has them under control. And should a Starlink satellite die in service, its operational orbit of 550 kilometers is low enough that gravity and residual atmospheric drag will pull the satellite down within four years . The PWSA constellation, in contrast, operates at 1,000 kilometers. Satellites that fail at that higher altitude will remain stuck for millennia. For SDA, having a debris-removal service isn’t really optional. Effective space stewardship requires a means to preserve the PWSA orbit, especially in the case of contingencies like unexpected satellite failures. SDA’s effort to cultivate American debris removal companies could also benefit other constellations. Another 200 kilometers above PWSA is where Eutelsat operates the 600-plus-satellite OneWeb constellation (1,200km orbit), and a farther 100km is where Telesat plans to fly 200 Lightspeed broadband satellites (1,300km orbit) . The SDA effort could also cultivate competitors for international debris-removal companies. While SDA, in its justification for the study contracts, said “no such product or service yet exists” to support commercial on-orbit servicing, like “assisted disposal operations,” startups Astroscale of Japan, ClearSpace of Switzerland, and D-Orbit of Italy have been maturing technologies for this very purpose. SOURCE: https://www.sda.mil/sda-makes-commercial-disposal-services-study-awards-under-stec-baa/

10/4/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry Military agencies have long been ideal customers for the satellite industry because of their willingness to pay a premium for resilient communications. This year, and in particular this past month, Quilty Space has noticed an uptick in the use of the term PACE – short for Primary, Alternative, Contingency and Emergency – four ways to ensure connectivity in challenging areas. PACE can include multiple orbits (LEO, MEO, GEO), multiple frequencies (Ka-, Ku-, L-band) and even multiple types of connectivity (satcom, LTE, Link-16). As a concept, PACE has been around for at least a decade, so why the change? The answer is Starlink. To compete with the SpaceX megaconstellation, companies are increasingly turning to the PACE approach as an important differentiator, particularly on the user terminal. Such was the case on Gogo’s Sept. 30 conference call to discuss its $375M+ merger with Satcom Direct. Gogo management described the combined company as “uniquely positioned to win contracts under PACE,” because it can combine LEO (OneWeb), GEO (Intelsat), L-band (Viasat/Iridium) and ATG connectivity to keep military aircraft connected. Starlink user terminals, according to Gogo, lack modems capable of switching between these options. Furthermore, Starlink would likely need to increase the number of antenna elements inside its user terminal to close links to GEO satellites, making the overall terminal larger. Satcom Direct was one of 20 companies that won contracts under the Defense Information Systems Agency’s $900M proliferated LEO IDIQ last year . Since then, IDIQ awardees have increasingly touted their PACE capabilities, including Honeywell , Hughes , Iridium, OneWeb Technologies , SES (DRS Global Enterprise Solutions), and Viasat. Participants in DoD’s Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) program have done the same. Will PACE offer protection to satellite operators competing against Starlink? To an extent, yes. There’s nothing stopping Starlink, which is also on the IDIQ, from creating its own PACE-capable offering, but the company would have to partner with other satellite and/or telecommunications companies to provide such a resilient service. Given the number of customers Starlink has poached in other verticals like consumer broadband, aviation and maritime, industry players are ramping efforts in a corner of the market where the winner can’t take all (not that this means the winner can’t still take most). Source: https://aerospace.honeywell.com/us/en/about-us/blogs/keeping-pace-with-military-connectivity-needs

9/26/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry Every year at the perennial Paris pilgrimage, one or more trends emerge as the dominant theme of the show, and 2024 was no different. Quilty Space attended the weeklong conference, meeting with dozens of companies in satcom, remote sensing, and space hardware sectors. DTD was the dominant theme last year and Starlink’s entry into enterprise market was the talk of the show in 2022. What were our top themes from this year’s show? Key Takeaways: Starlink & Kuiper leave nowhere to hide. In the face of emerging LEO threats, incumbent GEO operators for years pointed to enterprise and mobility as safe havens. That's no longer the case. Starlink’s ability to vacuum up prized customers in 2024 – John Deere for IoT, Carnival Corp for cruise ships, and just a week ago United Airlines for 1,000 aircraft – sent shivers through the industry. Plus, now that Kuiper is on the verge of its massive launch campaign, the satellite broadband business increasingly looks like a battle of titans, with the traditional players caught in the middle. Conversations around differentiated offerings and diversification strategies were abundant. DTD is still hot (on the down low).  How do you top 2023’s declaration of a new $100B industry?  While there weren’t any splashy new announcements at this year’s show, there was a heavy undercurrent of activity at the manufacturing level where vendors claimed multiple bid opportunities. Propulsion is a growing headache. The loss of market access to Russian supplier Fakel, the emergence of a high-demand customer (SDA), and a slew of propulsion failures continues to put pressure on satellite manufacturers to find new, reliable sources of thrusters. Some companies are planning to vertically integrate propulsion, while others ( like Safran ) are standing up whole new factories to meet demand. Among components manufacturers are hard-pressed to obtain, propulsion is arguably one of their biggest pain points. Software-defined satellite costs are on the rise. Once perceived as the GEO industry’s answer to the LEO onslaught, software-defined satellites have fallen years behind schedule and surged in price, with one manufacturer’s cost reportedly doubling its price in just 12 months. It's no secret that Airbus and Thales Alenia Space have been hurting as they absorb satcom-induced losses in their space businesses. That is creating opportunities for U.S. GEO manufacturers that all but disappeared from the market in the years following the covid pandemic. It also adds fuel to the fire of the big vs. small GEO debate. Smallsat manufacturing hopefuls are proliferating. The industry itself is confused by the seemingly endless stream of new entrants creating factories for small satellite constellations. This year saw expanded factories for companies that already have customers, notably MDA Space for Telesat Lightspeed, Terran Orbital /Lockheed for the military’s PWSA constellation, and vertically integrated Amazon Kuiper. At the same time, startups Apex Space, Aerospacelab and Orbitworks (the Loft Orbital/Marlan Space UAE JV) are standing up new factories. Industry patrons are generally impressed by the caliber of new entrants, but year after year the number of factory announcements outpaces the number of new constellations. Launcher competition is sorely wanted. Notwithstanding SpaceX’s remarkable 2-week turnaround after its first failure in years, the industry has a strong desire for multiple regular and reliable launch providers. Launch providers are acutely aware of this (and have been for years). The question now as new vehicles reach their respective launch pads is: can they execute? A successful first flight is one thing, but reaching a steady cadence is another animal. SOURCE: https://wsbw.com/

9/5/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry Supply chain fragility has been a perpetual challenge for the satellite industry, often centering on subsystems and components for which there are very few suppliers. This fragility was on full display during the Covid-19 crisis (e.g., two-year satellite manufacturing delays), but flare-ups continue to surface four years after the crisis peaked. In the case of satellite propulsion, the supplier landscape was the opposite. Quilty Space counts more than 100 different thruster systems marketed over the past five years by more than 80 companies, ranging from international defense primes to small-town shops, to the Cambrian explosion of venture-funded startups that emerged in the mid-2010s. Despite the market’s apparent oversupply, however, the Space Development Agency (SDA), Payload reports, could encounter delays with its PWSA constellation of several hundred satellites due to the slow delivery of propulsion units. What went wrong? As it turns out, electric propulsion (EP) thrusters, especially the Hall-Effect thrusters pLEO operators fancy, are extremely hard to manufacture at scale. Russia-based EDB Fakel was historically the industry’s largest producer of EP thrusters (by an order of magnitude) but has been barred from Western supply chains since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Fakel’s exit from the market prompted OneWeb to source its thrusters from its backup supplier, Massachusetts-based Busek, which is now the only U.S. company to have built more than 100 Hall-Effect thrusters. Meanwhile, dozens of EP vendors have been unable to fill the gap. In the past two years alone, at least four EP vendors have experienced in-orbit anomalies, including Bradford, Enpulsion, Qinetiq, and Phase Four. And while a handful of U.S. companies have developed Hall-Effect thrusters of their own (or licensed the IP), all but Busek are still attempting to scale production nearly a decade later. What are SDA’s options for maintaining its targeted two-year cadence of satellite launches? Possibilities include: · Tapping into vertically integrated constellation operators like SpaceX or Amazon · Invest in promising EP vendors to help them scale · Switch to alternative propulsion technologies such as gridded ion or electrospray · Working with suppliers in allied countries It’s an overstated adage, but space is hard, and when that difficulty is buried in the supply chain it can introduce setbacks for multi-billion-dollar programs. While everyone is focused on the high-profile launch battles, there won’t be many satellites to launch if no one can build propulsion units at scale. SOURCE: https://payloadspace.com/there-arent-enough-satellite-thrusters-for-the-sda-yet/

8/30/2024 - Written By Quilty Space Over the past two years, Starlink has hit the maritime industry like a tsunami, swallowing up cruise line, yachts, and merchant vessels at such high rates that competitors must adapt or die. When it comes to aviation, however, Starlink hasn’t quite taken flight with the same ease. Via Satellite , in interviews with four different airlines that all evaluated Starlink, found a surprisingly tepid response to the service. None went with Starlink, instead choosing other providers like Viasat, Anuvu, and Intelsat/OneWeb. This begs the question, why isn’t Starlink dominating the skies the way it is the seas? Between these interviews and the experiences of other inflight connectivity service providers, three reasons emerge: 1. 1. Starlink’s IFC antennas aren't making the cut. Multiple airlines spoke of a desire for better electronically steered antennas, and the emergence of Starlink hasn’t scratched that itch. According to Gogo CEO Oakleigh Thorne, Starlink’s aviation antennas are essentially repurposed consumer antennas, which struggle to endure the extreme conditions of the airborne environment. 2. 2. No airline passenger access. According to AeroMexico, Starlink wi-fi connects passengers straight to the internet without giving airlines a landing page or other means to interact with their customers. Airlines don’t like that, as it limits touch points for selling other goods and services. 3. 3. Non-committal data rates. For certain industries like oil & gas, defense, and aviation, satellite uptime is way more important than peak data rates. To date, Starlink has proven unwilling or unable to offer Service Level Agreements (SLA) or Committed Information Rates (CIRs) demanded by premium satcom users. Of course, that doesn’t mean all airlines have turned their backs on Starlink; Hawaiian Airlines, Japan's Zipair, airBaltic in Latvia, and Qatar Airways all use the service . But room exists, largely of Starlink’s own making, for other IFC service providers to hold their own. SOURCE: https://interactive.satellitetoday.com/via/september-2024/4-airlines-share-their-perspectives-on-the-ifc-market/

8/21/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry During the heyday of the 2020-2022 SPAC investment bubble, more than a dozen space companies filed to go public, ranging from established players like Planet and Spire to early-stage, pre-revenue startups. Another half dozen space companies rode the same investment wave to a more traditional IPO. The surge in exit activity was a boon for VCs and early-stage investors, some of which were holding long-dated investments with lofty private market valuations. The SPAC vortex welcomed all comers. But not all comers deserved to be public, and many have come to regret their decision. Fabien Jordan, the CEO of the Swiss Internet-of-Things company, Astrocast, framed the issue perfectly in an August 20 LinkedIn post , after his company delisted from the Euronext Growth Exchange almost three years to the date from when it went public . “From a business maturity standpoint, it was too early to list the company as we were still in a pre-revenue phase, but it provided access to sorely needed capital,” he wrote. “Once the initial excitement of the public listing wore off in 2022, being public made it more difficult to access fresh capital.” And the body count is growing. Astra, the flashy small launch provider that went public in July 2021 with a $2.1B valuation, delisted last month. That follows Virgin Orbit’s $3.7B flameout after 15 months as a public company. And just yesterday, German optical crosslink manufacturer Mynaric slashed its midpoint 2024 revenue guidance by 70%, raising liquidity concerns. Another half dozen space companies that went public since 2020 are trading at market capitalizations below $200M – most with diminishing cash reserves.  The moral of the story? Funding space startups, which are notoriously capital intensive with long development cycles, is a tricky business. And the consequences of choosing the wrong path can be fatal. On that point, it’s worth noting that two companies that cancelled their SPAC transactions in 2022, D-Orbit and Tomorrow.io, were subsequently able to raise a collective $194M via late-stage VC rounds. SOURCE: https://x.com/strocast/status/1825980942059528312

8/14/2024 - Written By Chris Quilty It’s been a pretty miserable decade if you’re a GEO operator. The spectrum skirmishes over Ku and Ka-bands kicked things off, followed by a relentless arms race to launch increasingly more powerful HTS satellites. Meanwhile, consumers started cutting the cord, and the video cash cow tipped into decline beginning in the late 2010s. But the real blow came from Starlink’s efforts to decimate the GEO industry, particularly in the maritime sector, where LEO is anchoring itself as the dominant technology. KVH Industries, a top-five maritime bandwidth seller, has shuttered its GEO antenna product line and is now onboarding ~600 new Starlink subscribers each quarter — compared to just ~600 GEO subscribers annually in the past. With that context, Eutelsat’s Q4 earnings report was a breath of fresh air. Eutelsat grew annual revenues for the first time in eight years, and backlog is up for the first time in four years. The catalyst for the turnaround? Aside from new GEO capacity, the biggest growth driver was OneWeb. While Eutelsat does not disclose OneWeb revenues, we estimate OneWeb FY24 revenues at ~€80M, or 7% of revenues. That’s a disappointment relative to Eutelsat’s revised July 2023 target of €125-€225M, due to delays in deploying the ground network that have pushed back OneWeb’s global service launch by eight months to date. This delay will prevent OneWeb from hitting its 2027 revenue target of >€600M, but even achieving half of that would account for 21% (1) of Eutelsat’s revenues and contribute to rapidly expanding EBITDA margins. The takeaway? Eutelsat faced plenty of skepticism over its OneWeb acquisition, but it’s clear now that OneWeb represents the company’s most compelling growth opportunity. As it turns out, there is life after GEO for operators bold enough to bet big on a hybrid network strategy. 1. 1. Assumes legacy GEO business remains flat. SOURCE: https://www.eutelsat.com/files/EC_consolidated_financial_statements_FY24_vDEF_en.pdf

8/7/2024 - Written By Chris Quilty If the GEO satcom industry is to survive, GEO satellite manufacturers will need to up their game and reverse a troubling trend of ever-longer time to bring new GEO capacity online. Starlink progressed through four generations of satellites in the time it took Viasat to bring its first ViaSat-3 online (8.5 years).  Prior to the adoption of high-throughput satellite (HTS) technology, the standard build time for a GEO satcom satellite was three years, and post-launch, a satellite could be brought into operation in as little as two weeks. As communications satellites have grown increasingly complex, however, manufacturing build times have grown by at least two years. Meanwhile, the time to calibrate and bring satellites into service is also growing. Viasat’s announcement that ViaSat-3 is now operational 15 months after launch is an extreme example (exacerbated by an antenna failure), but the trend has been steadily up and to the right over the past decade, growing by about half a year even when factoring in electric orbit raising.  A Quilty Space survey of the highest capacity GEO satellites launched in recent years shows that ViaSat-3 F1 is now the second Very High-Throughput Satellite (VHTS) stuck in calibration limbo for more than a year, following Eutelsat’s Konnect VHTS, which took ~14 months from launch to service. Not every VHTS satellite is experiencing the same challenges. EchoStar’s Jupiter-3 went from launch to service in about five months, and SES activated the SES-17 satellite’s service in eight months. These, too, were novel satellite designs, but the two satellites averaged 5.5 years from order to service start. Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t particularly encouraging. With Boeing in shambles, Maxar owned by private equity, and Lockheed safely in its DoD shell, Northrop looks like the one-eyed giant in the land of the blind. But do they want to take a hard swing at the commercial GEO satcom market?  The prospects over the pond are not much better. Both Airbus and Thales Alenia Space are struggling with new software-defined satellite programs that are two to four years behind schedule and a financial disaster for both companies. Rumors of merger talks are probably not wrong. Perhaps the future lies elsewhere? That would be the thesis behind a new generation of GEO competitors, ranging from small GEOs (Swissto12) to monster GEOs that can only launch on Starship (K2 Space). All bets are on. SOURCE: https://news.viasat.com/newsroom/viasat-3-f1-satellite-enters-commercial-service

7/30/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry inside 30 hours .

7/23/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry The Space Development Agency (SDA) has dozens of satellites in space and hundreds in production as part of its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) proliferated LEO constellation, having organized an impressive team of (largely commercial) manufacturing partners. However, as the agency plans to operationalize the PWSA, there’s been a notable lack of news about user terminals (i.e., antennas and modems) for the connectivity portion of the constellation. PWSA has two layers of satellites, a Tracking Layer for monitoring missiles and hypersonic weapons, and a Transport Layer for communications services. SDA graphics indicate the PWSA will have three communications payloads: -          Link-16 to expand tactical communications for soldiers beyond line of sight -          Ka-band for “direct downlinks to theater-targeting cells,” and -          Optical links mainly for in-space communications, but also for drones. The first set, Link-16, is designed to stitch seamlessly into existing networks, creating little if any need for new user equipment. Optical crosslinks are in a period of aggressive development, thanks overwhelmingly to SDA to creating opportunities of scale. High-speed connections through Ka-band, however, will only be achievable if new user terminals are available for soldiers and vehicles. In particular, SDA should seek to cultivate a suite of Ka-band user terminals, which will need to be flat, electronically steered antennas. User terminals take years to develop, and can even take longer than satellites given the complexity of the electronics systems. Commercial Ka-band megaconstellations are on the way but have not yet flooded the market with user terminals. Amazon Kuiper terminals aren’t ready for purchase. Telesat Lightspeed is still in development. Most available flat-panel antennas are in Ku-band and aren’t compatible with the PWSA constellation, such as Starlink’s dishy, or OneWeb user terminals from Intellian, Hughes and others. While satellite development started first, SDA can play catch up by partnering with companies making flat-panel antennas for commercial constellations. Quilty Space would not be surprised to see mil-Ka variants of user terminals for Amazon Kuiper or Telesat Lightspeed. Manufacturers of Ku-band antennas could also be incentivized to make Ka-band versions that work with the PWSA constellation. If SDA only cultivates satellite manufacturers and not user terminal companies, it will waste billions of dollars and years of time playing catchup. That’s not a situation anyone wants, except perhaps America’s adversaries. SOURCE: https://spacenews.com/space-force-preparing-for-the-age-of-proliferated-low-earth-orbit-satellite-networks/

7/22/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry Press leaks on M&A discussions typically aren’t helpful (remember EchoStar’s attempt at buying Inmarsat? ), but there was probably no good way to hide the fact that Airbus and Thales Alenia Space (TAS) are in early discussions about a potential merger of their space businesses. Both companies’ satellite manufacturing business have been underwater from signing deals for unexpectedly difficult-to-build nextgen satellites. Both companies are also grappling with a ~50% decline in the demand for commercial GEO satellites (the traditional lifeblood of the industry). A tie-up between Europe's two largest space companies would recast the competitive dynamic internally within Europe and externally between Europe and the rest of the world. While it’s too early to say whether the merger will happen, Quilty Space considers the following possibilities if the talks prove true. Pros: A buffer against a turbulent market. Airbus and TAS are Europe’s two largest space companies by pretty much any metric, and while both have won high-profile international deals, they have struggled to deal with market shifts. Single-digit GEO satellite orders are now the norm, and LEO constellation orders are rare and highly competitive. A combined company could fare better than two fighting over a lumpier, less predictable customer set. Scale and consolidation. Each company brings unique capabilities to the merger (e.g., Airbus’ EO business), but there remains a significant amount of overlap. Airbus and TAS have space facilities spread across much of Western Europe. Both have sites in the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany. Some of these sites are undoubtedly to meet the European Space Agency’s geo-return policy, giving each company access to more funding but at the cost of a bloated footprint. This presents a meaningful opportunity for consolidation and related cost savings. Cons: Loss of domestic competition . Absent the success of small to medium enterprises, Europe’s space landscape would lose its most significant continental competitive dynamic. Airbus+TAS against the world could be stronger together, but will Airbus+TAS lose pricing power with only one provider of national satellite programs? If the past serves as prologue, the formation of ULA from the combination of Boeing and Lockheed’s launch businesses in 2005 led to a “Nunn-McCurdy certification” breach within six years when the cost of military launches rose 58% above the 2007 baseline. No near-term relief . An apparent motive for the Airbus-TAS merger talks is both companies trying to offset cost overruns, particularly software-defined satellites (OneSat at Airbus, Inspire at Thales). Nowhere has it been clarified how a merger would resolve the engineering dilemmas that are creating those cost overruns. Is this a short-term solution to a long-term problem? TBD: While a combined Airbus-TAS Space would be a formidable competitor, the tie-up could make room for smaller but growing players like Aerospacelab in Belgium, OHB in Germany, and Sitael in Italy. The European Space Agency and other institutional customers will want to see more competition. Absent a choice between titans, would ESA throw more capital to emerging companies? Not all of Airbus and TAS’s space capabilities overlap. How would a merger consider Airbus’ expertise in launch via ArianeGroup, or TAS’s strength in building space station and cargo modules? SOURCE: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-looking-opportunities-create-scale-space-satellites-2024-07-21/

7/17/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry In June, Earth Observation (EO) company Planet announced a 17% workforce reduction, shedding around 180 employees in the company’s second round of layoffs in just over a year. This news, combined with M arch and June layoffs from Satellogic, has pushed the EO industry into a fresh season of soul-searching.   The not-so-subtle undercurrent driving these layoffs and broader U.S. EO sector behavior over the past three years is that commercial adoption of satellite imagery hasn’t materialized as envisioned. Nowhere was this felt more acutely than at Planet, which boasted the industry’s highest commercial exposure (49% of FY22 revenues) and an espoused goal of growing its commercial sales.  Flush with a $590 million war chest from going public in 2021, Planet staffed up aggressively to capture a market it estimated was worth $75 billion by 2027 .  From 2021 to 2023, Planet added 380 employees (up 48%), far more than BlackSky, Maxar and Satellogic combined. When commercial sales proved slower and smaller than anticipated, Planet was more exposed than its peers.   Satellogic faced a similar challenge, but with an incomplete constellation, nil revenues, and a heavy capex lift, the challenge proved even more intractable. Satellogic’s headcount is down 16% since 2021.   Maxar’s Earth Intelligence headcount is flat relative to 2021, with a 7% fluctuation in the middle years due to changes that had more to do with new private equity ownership in 2023 than the EO market.   Only BlackSky has managed to increase its headcount without a subsequent market or ownership-induced culling. Located in Herndon, VA, just outside of Washington, BlackSky’s market is almost entirely defense and intelligence (D&I), and the company grew its workforce by 33% (~70 employees) based on growth in that market, not the commercial sector.   What can we learn about the state of EO from the hiring and layoff activity over the past several years? The clearest message is that the commercial market for EO remains underwhelming, especially relative to SPAC presentation forecasts. Were EO companies wrong about the commercial market opportunity, or will the commercial market bloom once the industry achieves the right combination of resolution, revisit, price, and analytics?   Regardless, the near-term result is an increased dependency on the U.S. government as the anchor customer. Planet is now headed in this direction, with management indicating on the company’s June 6 earnings call that near-term growth will come from the government. For BlackSky and, to a lesser extent, Maxar, this has already long been the case. Satellogic is headed in the same direction, having begun redomiciling in the U.S. to address the D&I market. We expect future hiring to moderate now that post-SPAC exuberance has worn off and pragmatism has become the norm. SOURCE: https://www.satellitetoday.com/people/2024/06/28/planet-to-lay-off-17-of-its-workforce/

7/1/2024 - Written By Chris Quilty Last week, Airbus announced it was taking a €900 million charge in its Space Systems business. This follows a €600M hit just four months before. What’s going on? Airbus builds three types of satellites: comms, navigation, and EO. While the three product lines are all having problems, comms is its cornerstone – specifically, the OneSat software-defined satellite program. The trend toward a more adaptable, reconfigurable, flexible platform like OneSat marks a strategic pivot in the sector as traditional GEOs get boxed out by Starlink. And, just last year, Viasat, the chief pioneer and advocate of multi-Tbps GEO satellites, canceled its Viasat-4 program. So, is it any wonder that software-defined is looking like GEO's new lifeline? The problem is that software-defined satellites are still just mostly vapor. Sure, Boeing managed to develop a software-defined payload funded by the DoD through the WGS program. But Maxar was too broke to bankroll one. Lockheed is overly focused on government missions and has retreated from the commercial market. Orbital Sciences was acquired by Northrop, and we don’t know what happened there. Shifting to the win column: in 2015, the European Space Agency (ESA) and French space agency Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) awarded Airbus (OneSat) and Thales Alenia Space (Space Inspire) a collective €227M through the ARTES program. The funds were to support their payload development efforts, with the goal of reducing satellite manufacturing costs by 30% while maintaining Europe’s commercial market share. This was a significant boost for Airbus and Thales Alenia Space, and things were looking up. ESA & CNES targeted 2019 for the first launch.  After a slow start, Airbus eventually landed the first software-defined satellite order in 2019 (a three-satellite order from Inmarsat). A flurry of orders followed for both manufacturers. Between 2018 and 2022, software-defined satellites from Airbus and TAS swept up 11 of the 23 commercially competed satellite orders* — an impressive 47% win rate. But while ESA & CNES hit their market share goals, the 30% cost reduction target, and promise of quick delivery times have proven more elusive. The OneSat program is now shaping up to be a billion-euro albatross for Airbus, and TAS is also showing signs of distress after announcing a 15% layoff for the space division in March. More troubling for the industry, the order-to-orbit time for Airbus is now pushing to nine years or triple the average three-year delivery time of a production GEO model (note: before its most recent delay, Viasat was projecting a 2027 service entry for its first-in-line GX 7 satellite).  But Viasat isn’t the only operator feeling the pain from software-defined satellite delays. In total, eight satellite operators have placed OneSat and Space Inspire orders with Airbus and TAS, including: 1. Intelsat. Ordered two (2) OneSats and two (2) Space Inspires. This new capacity is desperately needed to woo IFC customers. 2. Viasat. Three (3) Inmarsat F-7’s represent the company’s nextgen GX broadband service, replacing the I-5’s launched between 2013-2017. 3. SES. Ordered two (2) Space Inspire satellites providing video and data coverage in the EMEA region. 4. JSAT. Split orders for Airbus (Superbird 9) and TAS (JSAT 31), providing data and video capacity for Southeast Asia. 5. Optus. Ordered one sorely needed satellite in 2020 that is optimistically two years late, prompting Optus and customers like Sky New Zealand to look for alternative satellites. The lack of affordable and easy-to-produce – at least by spacecraft standards – software-defined satellites leaves GEO operators in a bind. LEO constellations, especially vertically integrated ones like Starlink and Kuiper, are exerting enormous market pressure on established operators. On a cost-per-bit basis, GEO can be competitive with LEO, but it’s hard to win business when assets are stuck on factory floors. *Excludes small GEOs, radio, video, and C-band orders. Includes mixed-use satellites such as Arabsat 7A and Koreasat 6a. SOURCE: https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-06-airbus-provides-2024-guidance-update

6/27/2024 - Written by Caleb Henry Two large developments this month are positioning European space companies to receive fresh investments with an angle historically perceived as taboo: “Joint Defense.” On June 24, the European Investment Bank, which historically was banned  from giving money to military companies, said it is mobilizing €6 billion  (US$6.4B) for defense projects such as satellites, drones, and cybersecurity. A week earlier, NATO’s Innovation Fund  began deploying its €1 billion in assets with investments in five European companies – three in the space sector: Isar Aerospace (launch), SpaceForge (space semiconductor production), and iComat (lightweight spacecraft structures). NATO also backed four private venture capital firms in the investment round (Alpine Space Ventures, OTB Ventures, Join Capital, Vsquared Ventures).  The war in Ukraine, now in its third year, has challenged traditional thinking around the defense of the European bloc. Defense budgets for individual European countries pale in comparison to the U.S., meaning European space companies could not hope for the level of support U.S. defense primes enjoy. But joint defense opens up new streams for government funding of space technologies (given the fact that U.S. GDP is ~50% greater than the entire EU block, there won’t be parity between spending levels, but it’s still an improvement). Sitting in the offing remains a proposed €100B bond program  championed by EC Commissioner Theirry Breton, the same politician who spearheaded the European Union’s multi-orbit constellation IRIS2. It’s still unclear if EU members will agree to collective borrowing to finance defense missions, but if the precedent is broken, it could be good news for IRIS2, which is currently stuck in limbo due to cost and financing disputes between the EU and private participants. SOURCE: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240617573406/en/NATO-Innovation-Fund-makes-first-investments-to-secure-the-future-of-the-Alliance%E2%80%99s-1-billion-citizens

6/25/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry It remains an open question when SpaceX will introduce Starship and the Super Heavy booster for satellite launches, but the company’s production rate for the Falcon 9 suggests the 14-year-old rocket will stay as SpaceX’s workhorse vehicle throughout at least 2025. Elon Musk, in a conversation with Tim Dodd (aka The Everyday Astronaut), estimated the company will produce “almost 200” Falcon 9 upper stages this year and “probably over 200” next year. Furthermore, while Starship/Super Heavy will keep doing test flights in 2024, it won’t carry satellites or crews. Per Musk: “The payload for all the flights this year is data." Musk’s statements align with our Quilty Space financial model on Starlink, which projects Falcon 9 will continue to perform the majority of launches for the megaconstellation in the first half of 2025. However, the higher number of upper stages slated for production suggests the Falcon 9 will stay in focus for longer – perhaps all of 2025 – while SpaceX continues to iterate on Starship. Quilty Space continues to expect the first Starship launch carrying Starlink satellites to occur in 2025, concomitant with the introduction of the V3 satellites. Musk said the goal of Starship lofting 100 metric tons to LEO (vs 40-50 tons today) will now come from the Gen-2 version of the rocket. No timeline has been given for the Gen-2, which will be about 20 meters longer than the current iteration and feature hundreds, if not thousands, of improvements. How long it takes to stabilize that vehicle for production will influence how rapidly (or not) SpaceX can scale up the V3 Starlink constellation. With a width of 7 meters, the V3 is too big to fit under the Falcon 9’s 5.2-meter-diameter fairing and may still continue to grow in size as engineers tweak the design while awaiting their ride to orbit. Starship, with a 9-meter fairing has plenty of room for growth. For now, SpaceX’s biggest challenge with Starship is ensuring the vehicle can reliably survive the heat from reentry. SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFqjoCbZ4ik

6/24/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry A key challenge for any launch company, especially small ones, is maintaining a steady cadence of orders and launches. A solid order flow keeps the factory running smoothly and profitably. A gap in orders inevitably creates challenges for the workforce, suppliers, and profitability. Rocket Lab, the industry’s leading small launch provider, has been uniquely successful in securing multi-launch agreements as a means of avoiding production troughs. Since 2021, Rocket Lab has secured an industry record six (6) multi-launch agreements ranging from three to five missions. Rocket Lab’s most recent deal, with Japanese SAR operator Synspective, was also its largest, at 10 launch missions. Rocket Lab’s success at securing these multi-launch agreements is especially impressive given the need to compete against SpaceX’s Transporter rideshare missions. Announced in 2019, Transporter was originally positioned as a quarterly rideshare mission to an SSO orbit, but SpaceX recently added twice-per-year launches to high-inclination orbits (Bandwagon). Since launching the program, SpaceX has completed 11 rideshare missions (10 Transporter, one Bandwagon), launching 823 of satellites at a list price of $5,500-6,500 per kilogram, the industry’s cheapest launch to LEO by a wide margin. Fortunately, price isn’t the sole determinant in selecting a launch provider. Depending on the operator, schedule, reputation (i.e., reliability), and the ability to launch to unique orbits can often rank higher than price. Several of Rocket Lab’s customers have cited the ability to access less popular orbits as a reason for ordering Electron. This is especially important for customers that operate constellations of 50 or less satellites. These smaller LEO constellations must rely on the precise placement of satellites rather than sheer numbers to achieve their desired coverage. Speaking of which, two days after signing the Synspective deal, Rocket Lab launched five ~30 kg satellites for the French IoT operator Kinéis, which had also signed a five-launch deal. In a 2021 interview, Kinéis CEO Alexandre Tisserant said the company needed precise orbits and that using a rideshare service would have required so much more fuel it would have forced a redesign of the spacecraft . That’s plenty of reason to fly a bespoke mission on Electron. SOURCE: https://synspective.com/press-release/2024/launch-agreement-rocketlab/

5/22/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry The European Space Agency is taking a page out of NASA’s playbook. On May 22, ESA announced €25M ($27.1M) contracts to two companies, German startup The Exploration Company and incumbent Thales Alenia Space Italy, to create cargo capsules meant to transport resources to and from future space stations. While ESA’s announcement doesn’t mention it, the agency’s cargo program is the spiritual successor to NASA’s Commercial Cargo Program. The U.S. civil space agency had great success cultivating commercial replacements for the Space Shuttle, restoring cargo transport in 2012, a year after the shuttle retired. For ESA, the new program could end a gap in cargo capability that began in 2014 after the retirement of the Automated Transfer Vehicle. The initial ESA contracts are development funds meant to aid the companies in demonstrating their vehicles with missions to the International Space Station between 2028 and 2030. Precedent suggests ESA's timetable is feasible, but aggressive. It took SpaceX six years (2006-2012) and Orbital Sciences (now Northrop Grumman) five years (2008-2013) to complete their first cargo runs to the ISS. ESA’s contenders have 5.5 years to reach the ISS, with the real possibility that if they are late, the ISS will have de-orbited. Both companies have some experience with cargo vessels – TAS Italy through its contributions to Cygnus and ISS modules, and The Exploration Company through its founder Hélène Huby’s involvement in the Orion capsule. We were slightly surprised to see ESA only select two winners when it previously described the program as open to three. It appears that two other contenders didn’t make the cut. ESA didn't name them, but most likely they were ArianeGroup’s SUSIE (Smart Upper Stage for Innovative Exploration) and RFA Space’s Argo . That’s not necessarily the end of the road for either. NASA originally chose a company called Rocketplane Kistler for cargo missions but swapped them for Orbital Sciences when funding delays became apparent. For ESA, it’s probably a source of comfort to know there are other contenders besides the two it chose, should the agency need backups. Ultimately, Europe’s cargo program is good news for commercial space station companies. A diversity of suppliers should yield lower costs while also providing redundancy in case one or more vehicles have anomalies. Now, we just need those space stations to launch. SOURCE: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/ESA_signs_contracts_for_commercial_space_cargo_return_service

5/29/2024 - Written By Caleb Henry Telesat’s LEO constellation, Lightspeed, has gone through fits and starts over the past eight years that make gauging its progress difficult, but this week the program took a veritable step forward with the announcement of three new suppliers. Over the past 24 hours, MDA Space disclosed the following hardware vendors that will each build components for Lightspeed’s 156-198 satellites. • Burloak Technologies  of Oakville, Ontario, will supply 50,000+ 3D-printed metal parts  • Rakon  of Aukland, New Zealand, will build an undisclosed number of Master Reference Oscillators  • Tesat  of Backnang, Germany, will provide 792 optical crosslinks   It’s not clear what percentage of Telesat Lightspeed MDA will outsource, as manufacturers vary widely in their approach. At present, it appears Lightspeed will have more outsourced hardware than Amazon or Starlink, but less than OneWeb Gen-1. Telesat also has a 2023 contract with SpaceX for 14 Falcon 9 launches starting in mid-2026, and an agreement with Google-spinoff Aalyria for advanced networking technology. The company will likely need to select suppliers for a few more key elements (if it hasn’t already), such as propulsion units and solar arrays. Telesat’s selection of MDA as prime contractor for Lightspeed in August 2023 was a head-turning moment given the fact that Telesat had selected Thales Alenia Space as the prime two years prior. And just as MDA purchased the digital payload division of SatixFy to reinforce its position with Telesat, Thales Alenia had acquired Beyond Gravity’s opto-electronics business line (in 2016) partially to win the Lightspeed order. Having an enthusiastic prime contractor was not enough to show the program truly advancing, but a diversified supplier base tips the scale. SOURCE: https://www.tesat.de/news/press/941-tesat-selected-by-mda-space-to-deliver-oisl