The Great Streaming War of the early 2020s is finally over. Like so many wars, this one ends with many losers, but no clear winner. And we, the viewing audience, are left with too many choices and too much cost. Let’s briefly recall why the Streaming War was fought. Not long ago, SVoD (streaming video […]
It isn’t so very long ago that electrical propulsion for satellites was a very new kid on the block. Boeing’s Xenon-Ion Propulsion System (XIPS) was introduced on the (then) Hughes 702 versions its high-power versions of its popular HS-702 craft and used for final orbital insertion. December 1999 saw the launch of an HS-702 with […]
EchoStar is sitting on a war chest of $1.7 billion in cash, and wants to invest in an expanded fleet of wide-band satellites to augment its existing 28-craft fleet of Lyra narrowband satellites. The news emerged in EchoStar’s post-result analyst call when CEO Hamid Akhavan said: “We are in the design and engineering phase of […]
Back at the true beginning of the multichannel era there was MTV, and then there was CNN. CNN’s founder Ted Turner, on the news network’s first day of transmissions in 1980, said that barring satellite problems “we won’t be signing off until the world ends”. He added that the channel would then play the old […]
SES CEO Steve Collar, speaking to analysts following on from the satellite operator’s Q1 results on May 4th, said the European Union’s third global satellite constellation, IRIS², was a “strategic project” for SES. Nevertheless, he admitted that while enthusiastic there were still many known unknowns and it was too early to be more specific. “We’re […]
Analysts at Quilty Space report that OneWeb’s Gen-1 network will be slightly smaller than originally anticipated. A tweet from OneWeb’s CTO confirmed that the company’s last launch, a May/June Falcon 9 mission, will carry only 16 OneWeb satellites. That means the final Gen-1 satellite count will be 634, or 14 less than the original plan […]
The fact that the IRIS² satellite consortium includes just about every major name in the European space business provides a strong clue as to the project’s overall importance. IRIS², with a nod to the Greek goddess of mythology and messenger of the gods and also in its own EU-speak, Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security […]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX scored three perfect launches over the past few days. However, it has emerged that Arianespace has lost an important contract to launch a satellite for Viasat. It has also emerged that Musk is budgeting to spend $2 billion on his Starship development programme. SpaceX’s three recent launches (46 Starlinks on April 27th, […]
SES will announce its Q1 results on May 4th. Analysts from Berenberg Bank say that for the past six quarter-years the satellite operator has disappointed with at least two of its key deliverables. But the bank is still sticking to its ‘BUY’ rating, albeit with a slightly reduced price target for SES share price (of […]
The Space & Satellite Professionals International (SSPI) organisation, in a revealing podcast, looks at the role of Luxembourg in space and satellite activity. Luxembourg is the home of SES (founded in Luxembourg in 1985) and the tiny country has more recently has been the official domicile of Intelsat. In its Better Satellite World podcast, SSPI’s […]