Opinion

Many satcom companies have suffered severely from the COVID-19 crisis. Some have succumbed to the virus, especially those servicing the aero industry have been under stress, while others have been able to find new business opportunities in the coronavirus darkness. Restricting the traditional conferences and seminars, the pandemic has also made it hard for players...

The recent beta launch of SpaceX’s Starlink service and the reemergence of OneWeb from bankruptcy has continued to fuel excitement into Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations. In addition, Telesat will be merging with its major shareholder Loral Space Systems to accelerate fundraising for its own LEO constellation to bring a third competitor into play. I believe...

Imagine a world where wealthy and emerging nations alike have the means and opportunity to launch thousands of small satellites into space, each lacking navigation and control systems – and think about the havoc that could ensue. In the already-cluttered Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) environment, adding thousands more small satellites with no ability to maneuver through...

2020 has been quite a year in the satellite industry. We saw the fall and rise of OneWeb. We saw Intelsat go into Chapter 11, and then subsequently buy Gogo. We saw a Viasat CEO not called Mark Dankberg. Even without all the pandemic related disruption, there was plenty to keep us busy and to...

The satellite business has developed a bandwidth obsession.  Really, it’s nothing to apologize for. After decades as one of the most capacity-constrained communications technologies, the industry has lately been enjoying an explosion of effective bandwidth on orbit. First it was Geostationary High-Throughput Satellites (GEO, HTS), then Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO), then the coming rush of GEO...

Software-defined networks, commonly known as SD-WAN, have the potential to improve the efficiency of applications with profound impact on the way data is transferred to and from remote locations. Until recently, SD-WAN has been more of a buzzword than an embedded business practice. Like the cloud, Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT), SD-WAN risks...

It is not easy to build a successful Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation. Aside from the technical and regulatory challenges, there are many business and financing issues as well. These issues have already caused LeoSat to fold, sent OneWeb into Chapter 11 and kept Telesat in announcement mode for over three years now. Let’s dig...

At the start of this year, we could not have imagined our last edition of Via Satellite would be the end of such a tumultuous year for all of us in the industry. I am sometimes at a loss for words to describe all that we have gone through this year, on a personal and...

When Poland joined the European Space Agency (ESA) eight years ago, the country also kicked off a dedicated incentive scheme to benefit Polish space entities that lasted through 2019. Now, according to ESA’s data, base there are more than 400 Polish entities registered in the program. But Poland’s activity in the European space sector is...

In the space industry, it has become mundane to alarm on potential issues of crowded orbits. A concrete translation of this factual evidence is the multiplication of Space Traffic Management (STM) initiatives in the past years, across continents, whether on the civilian or military sides. Orbits are directly impacted by one of the most stringent...