SpaceX launches SES’s third and fourth O3b mPOWER satellites. Photo: SpaceX

SpaceX launched the second batch of O3b mPOWER satellites for SES on Friday evening. 

The Falcon 9 mission took off from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 40 at 6:12 p.m. This is the third and fourth satellites for the constellation, and the second out of three launches. The first batch launched in December. 

The Boeing-built satellites will bring orders of magnitude more capacity to the market than its predecessor, O3b. While the first O3b constellation has 10 beams per satellite, the new software-defined constellation has 5,000 beams per satellite. These beams can each scale capacity from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps through a single link to a single location. Boeing and SES also designed the constellation as an extension of cloud services, and SES has extensive partnerships with Microsoft.

The constellation is set to begin service in the third quarter of 2023. 

“Today we are closer to delivering our promise of a new era of connectivity. Our team has been working with more than 30 technology partners to prepare the O3b mPOWER space and ground segments to offer the differentiated and high-perfomance services that our customers need to run their operations,” said Steve Collar, CEO of SES. “We have already rolled out and tested O3b mPOWER terminals over the existing O3b constellation, and are delighted to hear positive customer feedback about their increased reliability and performance, as well as the ease of self-installation, activation, and maintenance.”

SES just signed a capacity expansion deal with CNT, a telecom provider for the Galapagos Islands, from 1.5 gigabits per second to 2.5 gigabits on the O3b constellation, with plans to migrate to O3b mPOWER.