Aerospace giant Airbus has hired Goldman Sachs to advise it on forming a European space and satellite company to compete with Elon Musk’s dominant SpaceX, according to Bloomberg News. Discussions are in an early stage to create the company with support from French aerospace company Thales and Italy’s Leonardo. The range of services for the […]
UK comms regulator Ofcom has granted an earth station network licence to Amazon Kuiper Services Europe SARL for its ‘Kuiper’ non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellite system. This decision means Kuiper will be authorised to provide satellite connectivity services such as high speed, low latency broadband to customers in the UK. Satellite services transmit data to and […]
Eutelsat’s share price meltdown continues and not helped by a group of unhappy residents of the UK’s Falkland Islands. Local reports say that the Falkland Islands government “wants its money back” from an agreement which it entered into with local telco SURE and which provides national and international fixed line, mobile data and broadband services […]
Last week a Vodafone engineer, Rowan Chesmer, somewhere in the middle of Wales and very much in a dead zone for cellular connectivity, used an AST SpaceMobile satellite to send a video call to Vodafone CEO Margherita Della Valle and British astronaut Tim Peake. The demonstration led to some enthusiastic celebrations from AST themselves and […]
AST SpaceMobile has announced that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted the company Special Temporary Authority (STA) authorising testing service in the US. This approval enables AST SpaceMobile’s first five commercial BlueBird satellites, operating in low Earth orbit today, with unmodified smartphones in AT&T and Verizon premium low-band wireless spectrum supporting voice, full data, […]
During last week’s 17th European Space Conference, launch company Arianespace announced it had won three new contracts. Arianespace was awarded contracts to launch PLATO, Sentinel-1D, and a pair of second-generation Galileo positioning satellites. The two Galileo craft will share a launcher. Arianespace now has a backlog of 30 Ariane 6 launches. Eighteen of them are […]
US pay-radio operator SiriusXM has brought into use its latest satellite SXM-9. The craft was built by Maxar Space System at its Palo Alto facility. SXM-9 has completed its orbital testing phase after being launched on December 5 2024. “SiriusXM is committed to cutting-edge technology and enhancing the proprietary satellite delivery systems that help power […]
A negative report from ratings agency Moody’s cannot have helped, but January 29th saw Eutelsat shares drop in value to an all time low of €1.805 per share. January 30th was no better with another fall to €1.79. The falls give the Paris-based satellite operator a market capitalisation of just $850 million. Its actual enterprise […]
Vodafone is prepared to go head-to-head this year against Elon Musk’s Starlink in the ‘battle for space connectivity’. AST SpaceMobile (AST) connectivity for the UK and the rest of Europe is likely to start later in 2025. Vodafone is currently using five AST SpaceMobile satellites for its test phone calls but AST will expand its […]
Arianespace will fly its next rocket mission (VA263) with Ariane 6 on February 26th. Its cargo will be a French military satellite (the CSO-3 high-res optical satellite). It is Ariane 6’s first commercial, fee-paying flight and follows on from the test debut flight on July 9th 2024. The current plan is for launch to take […]