AST SpaceMobile is being rebranded to AST Networks. That was the one positive slice of news to emerge from its end-of-year results. The company’s overall news didn’t help confidence with investors and its share price crashed 13.6 per cent on April 1st and another 24 per cent on April 2nd. AST undoubtedly has a great […]

Ottawa-based satellite operator Telesat has reported it is under further pressure from its declining DTH video business but maintained its formal guidance for this year’s revenue and profit targets. However, the disappointing results sent its share price tumbling 11 per cent despite some optimism for the company’s transition to a LEO operator. April 1st brought […]

During March the FCC approved some SpaceX applications and firmly denied others. But on March 28th it approved a request from SpaceX that was filed a few days earlier on March 25th. The application is for “experimental” (“Special Temporary Authority”) test transmissions direct-to-cellular devices from Starlink satellites. The approval kicks in on April 15th and […]

SpaceX engineers had a busy March 30th. They successfully launched Eutelsat’s latest satellite (36D) from Cape Kennedy and managed another launch a couple of hours later which carried their own first batch of Starlink broadband satellites for the weekend. But a planned third launch (from California) was scrubbed because of bad weather. The third launch […]

SpaceX has been asking the FCC for permission to share spectrum already allocated to Globalstar and Dish Network AWS-4 spectrum. The FCC has dismissed SpaceX’s application. The SpaceX application had included deployment of 7,500 Starlink ‘second-generation’ satellites with equipment operating in the 1610-1617.775 MHz (Earth to space), 2483.5-1500 MHz (space to Earth, and in the […]

Ligado Networks is in trouble. It is suing various US government Agencies for $40 billion (€37.1bn) of compensation and claiming that the Agencies “roadblocked” Legado’s FCC-licensed L-band frequencies and spectrum because the US government wanted the spectrum itself. The L-band spectrum was granted to Ligado by the FCC in 2020 with permission to roll out […]

The European Space Agency (ESA) has secured €900 million in funding for the European Commission’s (EC) IRIS2 proposed mega-constellation (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite). ESA is the multi-orbit project’s technical manager. ESA delivered a briefing on March 27 and its director of telecommunications and navigation, Javier Benedicto, explained that the final bid […]

In “early April” the European Space Agency (ESA) expects to integrate the second booster stage onto the giant Ariane 6 rocket in readiness for the craft’s crucial inaugural flight from French Guiana. The debut flight is scheduled for between June 15th – July 31st. This pre-flight work is important and it is crucial that the […]

Satellite operator SES has opened a new 43,000 sq ft central operations hub in Virginia which will be the operator’s main US location. The new site is based in Bristow, near Manassas in Prince William County. SES already has a giant satellite ‘dish farm’ at Manassas, Virginia. As SES’s central operations hub in the US, […]

SpaceX is asking the FCC for permission to operate some of its mega-constellation of satellites at much lower orbits of 340-360 kms altitude in order to better serve its ‘direct-to-phone’ service. SpaceX, in its FCC application, sayid: “Operating at lower altitudes will also shorten the physical link between the ground and the satellite, enabling lower-latency […]