OW24: Beam Me Up, Before This Integration Calls Me a Fossil

Orbital Whispers: June 7 – 13, 2025

This week in the satellite world wasn’t about who launched the most satellites, who beamed the fastest TikToks from orbit, or who threw the biggest launch party with Elon-themed cocktails. No, this was SES Satellites’s week. Not in a “oh, how lovely, they did a thing” kind of way, but in a fully-armoured, crown-polishing, empire-expanding strut down the orbital red carpet. If the satellite industry were a TV series, SES just went from recurring guest star to main character with a suspiciously long monologue.

So, buckle up. If you thought space was the final frontier, this week proved it’s more like a well-catered battlefield with VIP lounges and surprise mergers. From June 7 to 14, the satellite communications industry didn’t so much evolve as throw itself headfirst into a zero-gravity power struggle.

Let’s start with the fireworks no one noticed: the quiet lighting-up of O3b mPOWER satellites 7 and 8. With eight of thirteen now operational, SES’s MEO constellation is the one doing everyone else’s homework and collecting royalties. Middle Earth Orbit, long ignored in favour of the lumbering predictability of GEO and the jittery hype-beast energy of LEO, has finally stepped up. It’s now the orbit for grown-ups. Stable, scalable, low-latency, and, here’s the clever bit, fully integrated into terrestrial cloud ecosystems. SES is anchoring it to Microsoft’s Azure. That’s an infrastructure coup going head to head with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Then came the real power move: SES’s $3.1 billion acquisition of Intelsat cleared its first major court. The UK’s Competition & Markets Authority signed off, and on June 10 the European Commission followed suit, unconditionally. That gives SES a sweeping control of over 100 GEO and 26 MEO satellites, creating Europe’s heavyweight challenger to Starlink, Kuiper, and OneWeb.

But here’s the catch: across the Atlantic, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are still in the wings. The deal remains under US antitrust review. SES has filed over 160 days ago and is still waiting on the DOJ, no slam-dunk yet. So yes, they’ve conquered Europe’s leagues, but must still clear the US gatekeepers.

Even so, the optics are strong. SES is forging a multi-orbit empire: reliable, terrestrial‑tethered MEO, GEO wide‑reach, and pending nod to absorb Intelsat’s legacy and spectrum assets. That’s strategic territorialism in the sky. But until DOJ says “go,” consider SES Europe’s satellite czar, with one cautious eye on Washington.

Integrating SES and Intelsat is less like a wedding and more like trying to graft a bear onto a giraffe and hoping for a racehorse.

Of course, not everything is roses and seamless bandwidth. Behind the curtain lies a soup of complexity: merging legacy systems that talk different languages, harmonising decades-old spectrums, and slapping together boardrooms full of engineers who think “interoperability” is something you learn on the job. Integrating SES and Intelsat is less like a wedding and more like trying to graft a bear onto a giraffe and hoping for a racehorse. The chances of a smooth rollout? Possible. The chances of minor chaos disguised as “transition challenges”? Certain.

But even so, let’s call it what it is: a masterstroke. While others posture with constellation counts and tweet about terabits per second, SES has bought itself a monopoly of maturity. It’s building a tiered global platform that knows how to whisper into government ears and install satellite dishes where the Wi-Fi fears to tread.

So, yes, this week, orbits went to war. But SES? SES won by not looking like it was even trying. And if that doesn’t earn them a cheeky orbital salute, nothing will.

Space Norway’s partnership with Starlink landed this week with all the subtlety of a smug arctic fox strolling into a telecom trade show wearing a SpaceX hoodie. They’re now officially a Starlink reseller, yes, that’s right, the cold-weather specialists are flogging Musk’s low-earth broadband to maritime and enterprise clients like it’s fresh seal meat.

Now, let’s not downplay the hustle. For a regional outfit that usually plays second fiddle to the big orbital bands, this is a sharp move. They’ve effectively strapped themselves to Starlink’s vast LEO grid, the kind designed to keep livestreams running through meteor showers and geopolitical crises alike. For passengers aboard a ferry somewhere in the Baltic, it means a buffer-free Netflix experience at sea level while your roaming plan quietly implodes.

But beneath the warm glow of marketing synergy, there’s a delightful little bureaucratic tightrope act. Because let’s face it, Europe loves a bit of regulation. And Space Norway’s sudden access to a U.S.-controlled LEO network will have a few data protection mandarins squinting at maps and muttering about jurisdictional boundaries.

The real drama will be in the licensing paperwork, somewhere deep in Brussels, where someone’s about to ask whether a satellite streaming reruns over the Skagerrak breaches digital sovereignty. Or at least interferes with a local fishing net.

Down in Australia, where the internet has traditionally arrived via submarine cable and the hopeful sacrifice of a few routers, Vocus has decided it’s had enough. They’ve opened the door to Telesat’s Lightspeed LEO constellation, allowing a landing station to set up shop in New South Wales. It’s the satellite equivalent of inviting a Formula 1 team to park their cars in your garage, flashy, high-performance, and likely to wake the neighbours.

“Yes, I trust the future, but only if it comes with lasers and redundancy.”

What Vocus is doing here is strategic betrayal of terrestrial loyalty. Why stick with the plodding reliability of undersea cables when you can bounce your data off low-orbiting hardware at the speed of light? It’s the kind of move that says, “Yes, I trust the future, but only if it comes with lasers and redundancy.”

Of course, there’s a delicious fragility to the whole thing. If the landing station blips, half the continent’s ping could go from “competitive gamer” to “dial-up nostalgia” in seconds. Nobody’s panicking yet, least of all the kangaroos, who remain blissfully unplugged. But if Vocus suddenly becomes the gatekeeper to low-latency everything, we may be watching the next great broadband saga unfold from the outback, snacks optional, signal pending.

Jan De Nul Group and Castor Marine have decided it’s time to get clever. Their latest deal adds hybrid LEO and GEO coverage across Jan De Nul’s fleet, effectively turning each ship into a floating satellite sandwich. One orbit for speed, another for reach, and both just in case the crew needs to live-stream while laying subsea cables.

On paper, it’s elegant. Why rely on a single orbit when you can tap two? It’s the maritime equivalent of having both an autopilot and a stunt driver on the same bridge. But here’s where the seabreeze turns sour: integration. Every vendor swears they’re “interoperable,” but mixing satellite systems is more like trying to DJ two weddings with one speaker. You end up with dual billing, redundant pings, and engineers quietly Googling “LEO failsafe on a GEO fallback loop.”

That’s not growth, it’s a feeding frenzy.

Then there’s the money. The maritime SATCOM market is pegged at $5.4 billion this year, projected to hit $13.2 billion by 2034. That’s not growth, it’s a feeding frenzy. Fleets are spending like it’s a poker game and someone just whispered “Starlink-compatible” under their breath. But the stakes are high: spectrum overlaps, licensing gridlock, and the ever-present risk that someone wires a billion-dollar system to the wrong port and ends up streaming reruns to a tugboat in Kiribati.

So yes, hybrid is hot. But as always, when you mix technologies, cultures, and ocean weather, someone’s going to get wet. And it won’t be the bandwidth.

The LEO market is currently behaving like a teenager with a credit card and no parental supervision, wild, overconfident, and absolutely convinced it’s immortal. Analysts peg its value at $11.8 billion this year, with a trajectory set to hit $20.7 billion by 2030. That’s nearly doubling in five years, which in space economics translates to “somebody’s getting rich and somebody’s getting sued.”

Behind the champagne and pitch decks lurks a quieter truth: this is very likely a bubble.

Yes, innovation is flying fast, everyone’s launching constellations, laying down landing stations, and calling it disruption. But behind the champagne and pitch decks lurks a quieter truth: this is very likely a bubble. Not the cute, Instagrammable kind either, the kind that inflates with hype, floats past regulatory complexity, and bursts the moment someone in Geneva asks where the spectrum licenses actually are. Still, the investor party continues, as long as the numbers stay up and no one checks the receipts too closely.

Meanwhile, in a quieter, more calculating corner of orbit, China is making moves with Guowang, also known by its equally inspiring alias, Hulianwang. They’ve launched satellites 30 through 34, inching toward their ambition of 13,000 units. No press parades, no glossy YouTube countdowns. Just precision, cadence, and the unmistakable whiff of long-game thinking.

Guowang is here to establish orbital influence without the Spotify playlist. The constellation’s steady expansion is a geopolitical statement. If Starlink is the brash showman, Guowang is the monk with a blueprint, and it’s stacking its pawns one by one. When the world starts relying on low-latency communications across rural Asia, Arctic trade routes, or quietly militarized islands, guess who’ll already be in orbit.

Viasat landed a tidy little task order from the Pentagon. Just a modest $13 billion ceiling, with an opening act of $3.5 million. It’s the kind of deal that sounds enormous, looks strategic, and comes wrapped in just enough ambiguity to keep a small nation’s budget office awake at night.

Because when the Pentagon calls, you don’t ask for clarity, you ask how many zeros they want on the invoice.

It’s not so much a contract as it is an open invitation to spend big, slowly, and with occasional Congressional eyebrow raises. Because when the Pentagon calls, you don’t ask for clarity, you ask how many zeros they want on the invoice.

The contract centers on LEO-based Ku-band services. Which means we’ve officially crossed the threshold: low-earth orbit is no longer a playground for broadband enthusiasts and mobile influencers. It’s now military-grade, task-ordered, and expected to deliver encrypted bits to remote locations at precisely the wrong time of night. But of course, this is Pentagon procurement, where optimism meets procurement fog and perfectly good plans evaporate under the weight of their own appendices. The technology might hold, but whether the scope does is another matter entirely.

Meanwhile, over in Spain, the air is thick with orbital tradition. Hisdesat’s Spainsat-NG1 launched in January, with NG2 on deck for this summer. These are the high-born satellites, mil-Ka band, anti-jam, encrypted-to-the-core assets designed to whisper government secrets across continents while shrugging off interference like a duchess ignoring a scandal.

Unlike LEO’s fast and furious pace, these things are designed for longevity and suspicion. They’ll be orbiting long after LEO constellations burn out and reboot under different branding. If a satellite could wear a monocle and lecture the room on protocol, it would be one of these. Because while the tech may be modern, the attitude is aristocratic: calm, cold, and always watching.

SpaceX, never one to miss a good orbital flex, cranked out three Falcon 9 launches in a single week, June 8, 10, and 13, like it was tossing satellites into the sky on a schedule tighter than a tax audit. Oh, and they casually notched their 500th launch on June 4, because apparently running a private space airline is now just Tuesday’s admin.

Of course, behind the launch cadence lies the unspoken truth: every single one of those rockets still carries risk. Rockets are many things, loud, impressive, physics-defying, but they’re not exactly error-tolerant. One stray gasket or software hiccup and suddenly your multi-million dollar payload is confetti in the upper atmosphere. Yet SpaceX keeps it coming, like a high-stakes casino dealer who never blinks, and somehow keeps pulling aces.

This is the part of the industry no one wants to tweet about, but everyone depends on.

On the other side of the industry, earthbound but equally vital, BAE Systems quietly pocketed a $1.2 billion contract to churn out maritime antennas for hybrid GEO/LEO connections. No countdowns, no flame trails, just a well-dressed British engineering firm being handed enough money to outfit the entire Royal Navy in custom signal hats.

This is the part of the industry no one wants to tweet about, but everyone depends on. Satellites are sexy; antennas are indispensable. That humming grey dome on a ship’s bridge? It’s the reason all those fancy orbital bits don’t end up as very expensive space decoration. And this contract is leverage. BAE now has a firm grip on the hardware that will define how global fleets communicate. Quiet power, grounded tech, and just enough British stoicism to make it all look perfectly reasonable.

Final thoughts for the week of June 7–14? Picture a room full of satellites, some strutting, some sulking, all elbowing for relevance, while regulators squint at spreadsheets and investors throw cash like it’s Monopoly night in low orbit.

LEO grabbed the mic and screamed about speed, MEO casually reminded everyone it exists and is actually quite good at not dropping calls, and GEO, the elder statesman, sipped tea under a VSAT parasol and muttered about uptime and “the good old days.” Meanwhile, maritime operators armed their fleets with enough hybrid equipment to make a warship blush, and the defence sector quietly backed a few billion into low-latency military links with all the subtlety of a covert arms deal.

Governments handed out contracts like festival wristbands, mergers took two steps forward and one cautious glance at the DOJ, and ground gear quietly proved it’s still the thing holding this entire mess together. If you looked closely, you could see the outline of a very modern industry pretending it’s all under control, while frantically duct-taping constellations to strategy decks and calling it synergy.

It’s progress, yes, but the sort that comes with disclaimers, hidden clauses, and someone in a boardroom whispering, “what do you mean it’s not interoperable?” Popcorn, as always, advised.

Until next week, may your antennas stay pointed, your delays brief, and your orbital ambitions absurdly outsized. In a world where perigee, apogee, and bureaucracy dance a frantic jig, that’s the only sane takeaway.