Astranis ships four MicroGEO satellites to Cape Canaveral for a dedicated Falcon 9 launch. Photo: Astranis

Astranis delivered four satellites to Cape Canaveral ahead of a dedicated SpaceX launch later this month. Astranis announced Tuesday that SpaceX is targeting December 17 for the Falcon 9 mission. 

The four Astranis MicroGEO satellites onboard will support a number of customers. Two satellites — NuView Alpha and NuView Bravo — will support in-flight connectivity for Anuvu. These will be the first dedicated satellites for Anuvu, which leases satellite capacity. 

The third satellite, AGILA, is the first communications satellite to be dedicated to the Philippines, for regional satellite service provider Orbits Corp. Astranis is also building a second satellite for the Philippines. 

Also onboard the launch is a multi-mission satellite named UtilitySat. It will provide services for Mexico’s APCO Networks, which also ordered two future satellites from Astranis. Astranis said UtilitySat “will serve a number of customers throughout its life on orbit,” but has not announced additional customers yet. 

This is a critical launch for Astranis after the company after its first MicroGEO satellite, which launched alongside ViaSat-3 in April 2023, had an issue with a solar array which stopped the satellite from fulfilling its primary mission. 

“This is a huge milestone for Astranis. We’re going from one to many satellites. And this is the first time anyone has ever launched 4 satellites together like this,” CEO John Gedmark said in a release. “These are our most advanced satellites yet. With a number of improvements that will generate increased capacity and affordability. We couldn’t be more excited to deliver for our customers, providing dedicated broadband networks in a way they can’t get anywhere else.” 

Astranis reported a number of upgrades to the MicroGEO model used in these four satellites including a new gimbal gimbal for the electric propulsion thruster developed in-house, a deployable main reflector that boosts the throughput per satellite, and additional redundancy to the Astranis software-defined radio. 

Because the Astranis satellites are smaller than typical GEO satellites, this mission has the interesting distinction of being the first time a single satellite manufacturer has flown four of its own satellites on a single launch to GEO.