ReOrbit CEO Sethu Saveda Suvanam, left, with Uzma Group’s CEO, Dato’ Kamarul Redzuan bin Muhamed. Photo: ReOrbit

Finnish startup ReOrbit secured its first GEO order to build a communications satellite for Malaysian energy and tech company Uzma Berhad, in a development the company hopes will open the door to further GEO business. 

The satellite is based on ReOrbit’s flagship GEO platform, which recently passed an internal system design review. Smaller than traditional GEO platforms, it weighs less than 1 ton. ReOrbit CEO Sethu Saveda Suvanam told Via Satellite the company expects to deliver the satellite in three years. 

Customer Uzma is a Malaysian company that operates in the oil and gas sector and has shown a strong interest in satellite technology. Uzma also has a deal with Satellogic for its own imagery satellite to offer geospatial services in Southeast Asia.

ReOrbit takes an interesting approach for a satellite manufacturer and focuses on the software stack, procuring all hardware. The company describes its technology as “software-enabled,” designed to reconfigure capacity on orbit. 

“We are probably the only company across the board, where we don’t manufacture any hardware, but we build satellites,” Saveda said. “We have a stack of software that acts as the backbone of our system architecture and we procure hardware externally that exactly suits the customer requirements, cost, time, specification. It’s a very New Space, agile approach.” 

Saveda hopes this GEO order from Uzma will lead to more business in the GEO market, which is seeing disruption from startup players like ReOrbit, Astranis, and Swissto12. 

“When it comes to communications, GEO is the ‘holy grail’ at least in terms of value. We are going to go after GEO — GEO satcom is our flagship product,” Saveda said. “But we don’t want to restrict ourselves to just GEO and we also don’t want to restrict ourselves to RF communications.” 

ReOrbit is also looking at multi-orbit solutions and has an ongoing project with the European Space Agency for an optical satellite. The mission is UKKO, which will demonstrate space-to-space and space-to-ground data transfer for Earth observation (EO) on a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite. 

“We are inherently building a satellite so that it enables any communications, including RF and optical,” Saveda said. “Our flagship is GEO, but we are looking at MEO and LEO as well.”