Elon Musk’s SpaceX has quietly registered the service trademark ‘Starfall’ through the tiny Polynesian kingdom of Tonga. The application was made on May 19th and recognised by the US Patent & Trademark Office on October 9th. The filing covers launch, on-orbit & re-entry services, spaceflight travel, in-space manufacturing services, custom manufacturing and processing of pharmaceuticals. […]
The Jeff Bezos-backed Project Kuiper rival to Starlink is readying its KF-03 batch of 24 satellites for launch today [October 9th], subject to the usual last-minute weather and technical considerations. According to weather officials, there’s a 55 per cent chance of favourable weather conditions at the time of the launch. Officials are monitoring weather conditions […]
The news that Scotiabank telecoms analyst Andres Coello had downgraded shares in AST SpaceMobile to ‘Sell’ surprised the market. On October 8th came the news that US cellular giant Verizon was firmly confirming it would start offering AST’s cellular service from space. AST’s shares surged 17 per cent as a result. “Through our definitive commercial […]
FCC chairman Brendan Carr is not everyone’s favourite legislator, but his latest proposal looks like winning favourable support from the industry. He wants to create a ‘Space Assembly Line’ in order to ‘fast track’ applications and to demolish barriers to entry for the space and satellite sector. However, good as this idea is, he also […]
First, the good news: AST SpaceMobile has opened an $800 million ‘At The Market’ offering of new shares to a cluster of banks. The money is now available as needed by AST and if fully drawn down is equal to about 3 per cent of the shares issued. It means that AST is sitting on […]
Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales (67 per cent) and Leonardo (33 per cent), has today unveiled its Space Smart Factory in Rome with a ceremony attended by Italian President Sergio Mattarella. The factory — one of Europe’s largest intelligent, digital, reconfigurable manufacturing facilities — is located at the Tecnopolo Tiburtino high-tech innovation […]
A study by global tech strategists Juniper Research has found that global satellite provider revenue from fixed satellite broadband will increase from $10 billion in 2025 to $20 billion (€17.1bn) in 2030. This revenue growth will be enabled by rapid investment in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) technology, which allows satellite providers to improve the latency […]
Scott Wisniewski, AST SpaceMobile’s (AST) president used a Bloomberg Businessweek TV interview on October 2nd to explain in some details how tests of its satellite to ground transmissions were going. Wisniewski said that AST’s signals would cope with “one wall” of a premises or inside a car. He told Bloomberg that a user simply would […]
Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell has told EarthSky that one or two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth every day. McDowell’s website, Jonathan’s Space Report, is widely regarded as a definitive source on spacecraft that go up … and eventually come down. The lifespan of low-Earth orbit satellites, such as Starlink, is only about five […]
Pierre Lionnet, Research & Managing Director at ESD Eurospace, says that Russia is planning to launch 900 satellites into low Earth orbit and to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink. The system, called Rassvet (or perhaps Rassviett) already has six craft in orbit. Lionnet says the satellites are built by a newcomer in the sector, Byuro 1440 […]