The satellite industry is going through something of a renaissance, and as in all turbulent times a wide array of new voices are making themselves heard. Some of those are established industry figures doing things in new ways, others are introducing wholly new capabilities and business models.

“At the World Bank, I was in charge of large infra projects to promote access to basic services. That’s water, it’s sanitation, it’s electricity, and today it’s access to connectivity,” Charles Delfieux explained.

Delfieux, the Chairman at space start-up Constellation, is enthusiastic about the opportunities for using spaceborne infrastructure to augment cellular connectivity on a global basis. Although there is a caveat:

“I would say we are more designing telecommunication infrastructure rather than space infrastructure,” he commented.

His telecommunications infrastructure will sit roughly 375km above our heads, but there is a point in what Delfieux says.

Model Aspirations

While the space industry is developing new capabilities faster than ever, not all of them are complementary to the existing telecoms providers. The likes of StarLink and Kuiper’s constellations could compete directly with mobile providers as direct-to-device services. This is not Delfieux’s model, however. Instead, they will work with established MNOs to use their mmWave spectrum.

“We are developing a broadband constellation that brings a high-speed, low-latency service through flat panel antennae generating some transmit and receive gains,” Defieux explained.

“If you want to deliver broadband services – typically 50-100 megabits per second – you need enough bandwidth for that. To access sufficient bandwidth to generate broadband services, we are basically tapping higher frequency radio spectrum from the operator.”

Historically there certainly has been concern from service providers about the ability of spaceborne services to deliver the kind of capacity, speed and cost which they would require. This is changing, though.

“The convergence between terrestrial and space connectivity in terms of performance and price is unprecedented. We see for the first time in the history of telecommunications that space is opening new market opportunities for the operators,” Delfieux noted.

Constellation as a business has just secured full funding for their first stage of development, which is all about opening up these low-cost, high-capacity service propositions through the use of very low Earth orbit stations.

“Since we are lower than our competitors, we can rely on a more favourable link budget. That in turn means smaller size and cheaper end terminals, everything else being equal. Likewise, we are also providing great latency for time sensitive applications.”

“The second main reason why we have a very low Earth orbit is what we call environmental sustainability. We designed our satellites for seven year lifetimes, then our propulsion system onboard the satellites returns it into the atmosphere within a few weeks or a few months to burn up. So we basically deploy our satellites at what we call a self-cleaning orbit, meaning that we exponentially reduce the risk of generating orbital debris.”

The ultimate aim is, then, to have a large number of small satellites… but to what end? It seems as though these could be used as nodes for compute and storage, if they’re a bit bigger and more power hungry, or else they could be relatively simple devices to route and forward traffic as efficiently as possible.

“For the time being, we are focusing on having a cost and power efficient system to route efficiently the traffic and send it back to the closest possible gateway,” Defieux commented.

“We might beef up the capacity of the payloads to add substantial onboard storage capabilities in the long term as we keep sophisticating the design and the capabilities of our of our satellite, but not today in the current design.”

With a seven-year lifespan for the constellation it does provide more flexibility for the company; unlike the large, expensive GEO satellites, the company should be able to deploy new capabilities relatively quickly.

An Ambitious Timeline

These are high aspirations, even if quite modest for a new satellite constellation. So what’s the roadmap from here?

“There are three consecutive stages,” Delfieux explained. Stage one is taking place over the coming 18 months or so.

“Deploying of our first payload as a hosted payload. We are not jumping right away to a complete satellite. We first design, configure and test our payload. We develop our first cheap or low cost prototype user terminal gateway; then we can carry traffic end-to-end and test connectivity using our first payload and the end user terminal gateway on the ground.”

Constellation is targeting 2026 to deploy two complete prototype satellites into orbit as a proof of concept.

“Then the third step of our roadmap is to deploy the constellation, the mass production of our of our satellite and user gateway. So all the hardware and software that we need to develop for the project being mass produced and deployed over the horizon of 2027 to 2029.”

Delfieux is targeting global services, of course, but has already started talks with some operators. However, he remains tight-lipped about who those are.

Overall the vision seems eminently reasonable, even though the timeline is ambitious. There are many companies in the satellite ecosystem who are trying to do much more. Building with and for the established terrestrial players may offer a valuable complement to terrestrial services. It will be interesting to keep an eye on how this develops.

Image AI generated courtesy of Pixlr