OW27: Beam Text, Fund Constellation

If Eutelsat Weren’t Bailed Out

No Bailout, No Backbone, No IRIS².

But Sure, Let’s Keep Calling It Strategic. Eutelsat doesn’t get its bailout. OneWeb Gen2 grinds to a halt, not with a bang, but with half a dozen missed calls from suppliers and a few unpaid invoices that start circulating in the wrong circles. Engineers stop showing up. Launch windows close without ceremony.

Everyone involved insists it’s fine, just a temporary delay. “Routine recalibration,” someone says, while quietly moving the goalposts into next quarter’s budget.

The European Commission, faced with this quietly spreading dumpster fire, keeps issuing press releases as if words will orbit on their own. The phrase “strategic autonomy” gets louder, mostly to drown out the sound of industrial partners backing away from the project.

Behind closed doors, timelines slip into “living documents,” which is Brussels code for no one knows what’s going on, but no one wants to be blamed for noticing.

Airbus doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t need to. It’s already calling the meetings, adjusting the slide decks, and suggesting “consolidated oversight” while pretending this is about helping. What it’s actually doing is taking the keys off Eutelsat’s still-warm desk and locking the door behind it.

Telespazio watches the power shift and decides this is the perfect time to be helpful. Italy’s involvement becomes “mission-critical” overnight, mostly because everyone else is too distracted to say no. Proposals land on desks with polite wording and very aggressive implications. There’s no need for a takeover when the other side is sinking.

Thales avoids the circus entirely. It stays in the basement, wiring up secure systems no one understands and fewer people control. Whether the constellation flies or not doesn’t matter. The encryption will still need maintaining. The defense bits will still get funded. Thales stays indispensable by staying uninvited.

The rest of IRIS² turns into set dressing. Timelines don’t slip, they evaporate. Stakeholder meetings become therapy sessions with action items. Half the partners pretend to coordinate. The other half pretend to listen. Nobody’s building anything meaningful, but the budget burn continues on schedule.

Outside Europe, nobody laughs out loud, but it’s close. Starlink doesn’t bother responding to inquiries. They’re busy launching another batch. China quietly ramps up G60 and starts offering export packages. Somewhere in Washington, someone updates a slide titled “Why Europe Will Buy From Us Anyway.”

Investors feel the chill. Risk analysts stop using phrases like “transformational opportunity” and switch to “pending clarity.” Dual-use startups drop all references to IRIS² from their pitch decks, then pretend they never used them. Strategic partners stop returning calls. The quiet part becomes the business model.

And yet, on paper, everything still exists. The constellation is still “moving forward.” The anchor operator is still “engaged.” The project is still “a cornerstone of European space policy.” Because admitting anything else means someone has to take responsibility, and Brussels doesn’t do consequences, it does continuity.

France, seeing this mess unfold in slow motion, steps in not because it believes in Eutelsat’s future, but because watching IRIS² come apart in public would be politically worse than setting fire to a few hundred million euros.

The goal isn’t to fix the problem. It’s to postpone the explosion until there’s a better press cycle.

When Solar Storms Do Quality Control Better Than Engineers

Forget testers, reliability teams, and quality assurance, turns out Mother Nature has a better handle on fixing satellite hardware than Boeing’s design crew.

SES threw down a $472 million insurance claim for power‑module failures in satellites 1–4—planes of silicon that apparently overheat more than my old laptop. But hold on: along came solar storms, blasting away stray protons and restoring whatever fried circuits had been play‑acting as satellites.

Voilà, crisis averted? Well, kind of. Now insurers are saying: “Sure, your satellites failed, but when space weather miraculously resurrected them, did that really count as a defect? Or equal parts divine intervention and coin‑flip science?”

SES has managed to extract a mere $58 million so far, less than 13% of their ask, while Boeing hustles more “fixed” satellites off the assembly line. Satellites 7–11 even carry redesigned modules. But does the fix save performance, or just delay the next epic fail?

Amid all this, SES is trumpeting a threefold capacity leap by 2027, thanks to software-defined spot beams, selling the future while the present blips fritz. They also snagged a platinum sustainability badge, because nothing says “we care about space debris” like scrambling to fix your existing constellation with two bonus units.

So here’s the ultimate irony: Boeing’s engineering goof opened the door for solar storms to moonlight as expert technicians. SES’s insurers are now debating whether space lightning counts as warranty coverage.

Meanwhile, we wait for satellites 9 and 10 to lift off, complete with allegedly bulletproof power systems that haven’t technically been tested in space yet.

Welcome to the wild, wild frontier of satellite broadband, where physics outranks quality control any day.

Netflix & NASA Because Binge‑Watching Rockets is the Future

In a move that absolutely no one asked for (but, sure, here we are), Netflix has teamed up with NASA. Apparently, watching Earth pass beneath the ISS from your couch is the new must‑see event. Forget “Stranger Things”, it’s “Stranger Cosmos.”

Rebecca Sirmons, NASA+ bigwig, can barely contain her excitement: streaming rockets now equals a “Golden Age.” Sure, because nothing screams innovation like rerunning oxygen depletion in space, live.

The cherry on top? NASA+ stays free elsewhere. So while you’re paying Netflix, NASA still pretends it’s Superman, giving away the same “ad‑free” stuff through the app.

And guess what? NASA never got any money from this. They’re basically donating their content to appear trendy.

Meanwhile, Netflix is patting itself on the back: “Look how live and bold we are!”, even though live boxing and WWF were blazing that trail months ago. Rocket launches are just the latest toy in their ‘look‑at‑me’ box.

But brace yourselves: the first big Netflix-blockbuster space event arrived July 3, when the Progress 92 cargo ship launches, and you definitely want popcorn for that one.

In short: NASA needed an audience, Netflix needed content, and we’re stuck watching both pat each other on the back while we wait for lift‑off.

Exciting times, or at least popcorn‑worthy.

And then some …

Viasat goes from selling bandwidth to inspiring children,

because STEM now saves satellites

In a truly heart-tugging pivot, Viasat announced on July 2 that it’s launching the “Space for Good Challenge 2025”, a global STEM contest for kids from the U.S., U.K., and India. The mission? Have students solve sustainability issues in space, because obviously teenagers are the best defense against orbital debris and policy failure.

It’s part CSR, part cosmic TED Talk, and all conveniently timed PR. Winners get scholarships; losers get a lifetime of watching MILNET eat everyone’s business model.

Inmarsat’s NexusWave hits 1,000 orders

Because who doesn’t want Ka, LTE, LEO, and alphabet soup

On July 1, Inmarsat (now a proud branch of the Viasat Space Tree) bragged that their NexusWave platform smashed through 1,000 vessels ordered in six months. This multi‑orbit, omni‑pipe, quad‑stack Frankenstein lets ships combine Ka‑band, LEO, LTE, and L‑band like some kind of sailor’s streaming buffet.

Because who needs bandwidth discipline when you can glutton your way through every frequency band available like it’s an all‑you‑can‑beam brunch.

ESA reveals LEO‑PNT launch plans

Finally, satellites for people who hate latency and love acronyms

ESA, in its quietly confident, impeccably European tone, revealed plans to launch its first two LEO‑PNT demo sats in December 2025. These GPS alternatives promise low-latency nav data with 10 satellites, because apparently 31 GNSS birds weren’t enough. Will this finally fix positioning for delivery drones, robot vacuums, and the occasional hypersonic glide vehicle? Sure. Maybe. Let’s just hope Rocket Lab doesn’t confuse “LEO-PNT” with a protein shake.

Salt Telecom beams first Euro SMS via Starlink

because who needs towers when Elon texts from orbit

On July 1, Swiss telco Salt sent a glorious, emoji-free SMS via Starlink’s Direct‑to‑Cell system, making it the first European operator to fire texts into space and back without changing your phone or needing a stepladder.

It’s a small message for man, a giant step for Elon’s mobile world domination plan. Use case? Alpine hikers, blackout‑plagued villagers, and anyone wanting to text “LOL” from the Matterhorn.