Top Operators Bring a Laser-Like Focus to New Markets

SATELLITE 2024’s Opening General Session on Tuesday brought together satellite industry leaders in a lively — and slightly heated — discussion on global broadband connectivity, technology, and what’s next for legacy operators amid competition from Starlink.

Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, touched on several developments — including updates with Starlink, the recent John Deere deal, and Starship’s test flight — in addition to announcing SpaceX’s next frontier: plug and play lasers.

“We are going to roll out a capability, we call it ‘plug and plasers’ — [to] commercialize our lasers to put on other satellites systems,” Shotwell said. “We'll roll that out with our new Polaris Dawn mission coming up this summer on Dragon capsules — so we'll connect Dragon to the internet. I'm really looking forward to having communications to bases on the Moon, and Starlink around Mars.”

Shotwell referenced connecting the Dragon human spaceflight capsule to the internet, after SpaceX recently live-streamed its Starship rocket test using Starlink terminals attached to the vehicle.

On the Starlink front, Shotwell said SpaceX is not focusing on spinning it off as its own public company at this point.

“We're not focused on an IPO for Starlink right now,” she said. “We're really focused on growth, getting the network right. We're not achieving the latencies that physics would allow us to do. So we're really going to focus on the product and the service for now, and then we’ll consider something.”

Eva Berneke, CEO of Eutelsat Group, spoke to the operator’s progress with its OneWeb merger, while stressing Eutelsat’s priorities: maintaining continuity, moving toward next-gen solutions, and embracing multi-orbit strategies.

“We are now six months into the merger with OneWeb [and] we're getting into an integrated organization and also looking at what are the right CapeX plans going forward,” said Berneke. “The most important thing for us is to maintain the continuity for our customers. We have a fairly significant very significant backlog of what was $700 million and that keeps on growing.”

Berneke said that the plan for OneWeb Gen 2 constellation has been scaled back slightly in order to reduce risk on new technologies.

“How we develop Gen 2 is extremely important,” she said. “We want to make sure that we have that continuity, we also need to make sure that we deal with the technology risks that we're seeing in the market. If we want to bring all the nice gadgets into our next-gen, we might want to do it in a more stepwise approach. To try to get everything on board on a single new platform and do it as a big bang is taking too much technology risk.”

Astranis takes a different approach compared to the other Geostationary Orbit (GEO) operators, building smaller, MicroGEO satellites. The company’s first satellite Arcturus had a malfunction but has since been relocated to support Israeli satcom operator Spacecom. Astranis is now preparing for four satellites to launch later this year.

“This is obviously a big year for us,” said Astranis CEO John Gedmark. “We think Arcturus performed extremely well as a first-of-its-kind new class of satellite. We learned a lot, and we had a number of systems that went extremely well and are working perfectly. We had a vendor-supplied component that we had challenges with [and] we learned a lot from that. We'll be launching four satellites on the dedicated Falcon Nine later this year and then another five satellites not too long after that.”

Gedmark added that Astranis plans to launch more satellites to GEO in the next couple of years than the rest of the industry combined.

Telesat CEO Daniel Goldberg addressed the size of its planned 198-satellite Lightspeed network compared the larger scope of other LEO constellations.

“Is 198 satellites enough? Yes, certainly to get started,” said Goldberg. “With 198 satellites we’ll have terabytes and terabytes of fully global, highly capable, affordable, secure, resilient broadband connectivity. Certainly 198 gives us a very capable network that will allow us to bring a phenomenal value proposition to the different verticals that we're focused on.”

However, it “doesn't have to stop at 198,” Goldberg added. “We certainly have the regulatory headroom to grow the constellation significantly from there.”

In addition to the capacity and growth, the topic of meeting broadband demands – especially among consumers in underserved areas of the world – was perhaps the biggest area of consensus. Speakers agreed there’s still a huge need for more than one or two service providers to offer connectivity – as well as room for more industry consolidation.

While two of the operators represented onstage – Intelsat and SES — made headlines last summer for abandoning talks of a potential merger their leaders were open-minded, yet vague, about future partnerships with other players.

“There are two sets of players — the scale or the legacy players, New Space players, and then of course, there's Starlink,” said David Wajsgras, Intelsat CEO. “I think Starlink has done a tremendous job in disrupting the industry and raising everybody's game here. It got a lot of us thinking about what we need to do from a capability and technology perspective and what we need to do from a scale perspective. For Intelsat, we're always looking at ways to improve our customer delivery, improve our stakeholder value. At some point in time, [consolidation] might make sense for us.”

Adel Al-Saleh, the new CEO of SES, suggested the industry could benefit from greater alignment with the right partners.

“I think the industry is a little crowded from my perspective as a newcomer, [considering how much] capacity is coming on board,” said Al-Saleh. “We are in a very good position from a balance sheet perspective, investment-grade, and having the ability to invest. Absolutely, we're looking at different options. You don't have to think always big. You can look at specialty plays where we need to strike federal or vertical integration. So the opportunities are there.”

The first signs of tension arose addressing the elephant in the room: SpaceX’s dominance. The most visible recent example of this is when SpaceX announced a deal with equipment manufacturer John Deere in January to provide satellite connectivity to tractors and other agriculture machines — a deal that, at another time, might have gone to a traditional operator.

“It's not a one size fits all,” said Wajsgras, suggesting that there’s room for multiple players in land mobility. “We are invested and developing everything from inexpensive terminals to very high-end, very powerful terminals. We think that's definitely helped jumpstart what we're trying to do and land mobility. We’re [also] finding that there is a lot of interest and demand for multi-orbit capabilities. [We are] partnered very closely with OneWeb and in these offerings, we're going forward with multi-orbit solutions. We think that's going to resonate very well.

Berneke, meanwhile, said SpaceX’s John Deere deal is opening up a market that wasn’t there a few years ago. “If you start thinking about connecting devices, whether it's in the agricultural sector, whether it will be cars — we’re getting more and more connected.”

But Goldberg said that while SpaceX is growing that market, they’re also “cannibalizing” some of the business that traditional satellite operators have been engaged with for some time.

“Watching the success that Starlink has had in the market kind of validated the reason why we [Telesat] got on this little path [to LEO] a few years ago in the first place. It just became evident to us that our customers were wanting a lot of the things that Starlink is delivering right now — low latency services, more distributed networks and more affordable bandwidth prices,” said Goldberg.

As the session closed out, an audience question addressed another elephant in the room: the future of GEO, asking what the role of GEO satellites will be, 10 years from now.

“I’ll give a top one — video distribution,” said Goldberg. “Geostationary satellites have always had a massive competitive advantage in terms of point-to-multipoint video distribution and I don't think that's going away anytime soon. I think the industry will change, consumer patterns will change, but for the foreseeable future, there will still be millions and millions of households around the world that receive traditional linear video and point-to-multipoint [via] Geostationary satellites.”

Wajsgras agreed, saying Intelsat recently won a contract which will be announced in the next few months “to consolidate content from our satellites, through our teleports moving on to the cloud for distribution via streaming,” he said. “So the small [to] medium market is developing and advancing. It is going to evolve I think, in a positive way over time.” VS