Featured Stories

In this week’s On Orbit podcast episode, we hear firsthand about the impact the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship is making. Patti Grace Smith was a pioneer in the aerospace industry who served as the head of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. She broke many barriers as a Black woman and was an...

John Deere is going through an early access program for certain customers to test the company’s new agriculture connectivity solution with Starlink. Via Satellite spoke with Michael Kool, John Deere senior product manager of Connectivity, at the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa, this week to get an update on the Starlink rollout. Announced in...

SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 was grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Thursday morning after the rocket experienced its second mishap of the year the day before. SpaceX will be forced to pause future Falcon 9 launches, including its next scheduled Starlink mission, until the FAA completes its investigation. Following a routine Starlink satellite launch from...

Imagine you are a European satellite operator looking to sell your capacity and land signals into a given region or territory. You’ve got the necessary ground segment and orbital resources in place, your mandatory International Telecommunication Union (ITU) filing secured and coordination in progress. If you were looking to wholesale the capacity only in Europe,...

We’ll always need GEO, even in a world that’s gone head over heels for LEO. It’s a matter of physics: The Geostationary Orbit (GEO) has unique characteristics. Because a satellite in GEO stays at a fixed point in the sky relative to any location on the ground, it’s the simplest orbit to communicate with, in...

With the arrival of the multi-orbit era and airlines making decisions on how they will use satellite connectivity going forward, the market for in-flight connectivity (IFC) has entered an exciting phase. The past year has seen a flurry of IFC deals with satellite operators as airlines invest in fleet upgrades, new aircraft, and passenger experience....

Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) disruptive potential has consumed the terrestrial world, especially with the arrival of large language models like ChatGPT that are rewriting the nature of work and what’s possible from an efficiency standpoint. Excelling at processing and analyzing large data sets, AI is poised to be similarly transformative in space in areas such as...

The European space startup scene has been going strong in the past few years despite global financial headwinds. But accessibility of growth-stage funding and too much red tape remains an obstacle for many fledgling space firms. Investment in space tech has dwindled globally since 2021 due to high inflation, rising interest rates and growing distrust...

Five years after launching its Transporter program, SpaceX now enjoys a monopoly on smallsat rideshare with heavy launchers, with the lowest price point on the market and an average launch every 90 days. Although this business line is a minor revenue stream for SpaceX, it brings several other advantages, such as maintaining pressure on emerging...

The space sector is brimming with potential, stimulated by advancements in technology, expanded international partnerships, and increased awareness of the benefits of accessing space. The growth of the lunar economy, in particular, is expected to spur innovation and technological advancements: there are over 400 lunar missions anticipated by 2032. As we push the boundaries of...