OW31: Spectrum Slaps, Lunar Leases and Maritime Maybes

Center Stage

Viasat, the ITU, and the Art of Getting Slapped in Public

Let’s be honest. When Viasat strutted into Geneva hoping for a little love from the ITU, a quick nod to extend those juicy Ka-band rights, it didn’t expect to get smacked in the diplomatic face with a cold, regulatory “no.” Yet here we are. The company’s carefully laid plans to control spectrum at 28.2 degrees West just got tossed in the bureaucratic recycling bin by an agency not known for impulsivity. This is a full-blown reminder that spectrum squatting has its limits, especially when your business model relies on keeping satellite real estate you haven’t fully developed or launched on.

This was supposed to be Viasat’s “hold the line” moment, the kind of frequency chess game that veteran operators win with a few polite letters, some regulatory grease, and a sly grin. Instead, the ITU reminded everyone that delaying deployments while others wait in line can come with a price. Imagine organizing a picnic on public land, never showing up with food, then being shocked when someone else lays out their blanket.

This move may not bankrupt Viasat, but it sends a message in bold font: planetary spectrum rights are not lifetime memberships. It’s a subtle gut-punch, the kind that doesn’t knock you out but makes you question every life choice since 2018. And while Viasat retools its PowerPoint slides for earnings calls, rivals are already sharpening elbows to claim whatever’s left.

So here’s a memo to constellation players: the era of “use it or lose it” just graduated from footnote to headline.

OFF BROADWAY

EchoStar Stares into the Abyss, Blinks Just in Time

EchoStar, aka the corporate hydra formerly known as Dish, decided to flirt with financial collapse this month by not paying $114 million it owed until the absolute last legally allowed day. In classic satellite soap opera fashion, the payment was made just before the default buzzer sounded, avoiding a catastrophe but confirming that EchoStar now operates with all the strategic confidence of a cat walking on a hot stove.

This is the same company still under FCC scrutiny for spectrum hoarding and buildout failures. Yet they insist everything is fine, issuing statements with the desperate optimism of a guy duct-taping a wing back on mid-flight. Maybe they’ll survive Q3. Maybe they’ll hit back with a streaming satellite rebrand called “DishNow+ButReallyThisTime.” Maybe we’ll all just pretend this was a calculated risk.

Let’s just say this: if your business strategy involves crossing your fingers and checking your watch as the repo man circles the parking lot, you are no longer disrupting anything except your investors’ digestion.

Gilmour Space Tries Launching a Rocket, Gravity Disagrees

Over in Queensland, Australia, the team at Gilmour Space tried to shake things up with the Eris rocket, Australia’s first homegrown orbital launch vehicle. It was supposed to mark a new era of sovereign launch capability. What we got instead was 14 seconds of slightly controlled vertical panic followed by a hard and very sudden return to Earth. And not in the graceful, parachute-assisted kind of way.

Still, let’s give credit. The rocket launched. It ignited. It didn’t blow up in a cinematic fireball. That alone separates Eris from the worst-case scenarios. It’s like watching someone jump on a trampoline for the first time, there’s bounce, there’s promise, there’s an ambulance in the background just in case.

The hybrid engine design clearly has some maturing to do, but Gilmour gets points for ambition and for not hiding behind excuses. They’re already talking next steps. Which is good. Because it turns out orbital mechanics don’t really care about national pride or press releases. They want functioning rockets.

Crew-11: Netflix, NASA, and the Quest for Eyeballs in Space

NASA decided that launching humans into orbit just wasn’t dramatic enough anymore. So for Crew-11, they decided to invite Netflix to the party. The mission, which was supposed to launch July 31 but got weather-scrubbed to August 1, will ferry astronauts from the U.S., Japan, and Russia to the ISS. But now it comes with streaming rights and cinematic ambitions.

This is the space agency’s latest experiment in public engagement, and possibly its most cynical. After decades of playing it straight, NASA seems to have realized that if you want the average person to care about orbital science, you’d better package it between bingeable content and slow-motion rocket shots set to inspirational synth music.

If this works, expect SpaceX Crew-12 to come with a merchandise line and a musical score by Hans Zimmer. If it fails, well, at least they tried to make astronauts influencers before TikTok banned orbital videos for violating gravity guidelines.

SES: Making Money, Buying Satellites, Still Pretending to Like GEO

SES had a good week. A real good week. H1 revenues came in near a billion euros, and even with the slow suffocation of the Media segment, they grew Government and Mobility contracts like weeds in a LEO garden. But what got everyone’s eyebrows arched was the announcement of GovSat-2, a new military bird ordered with the Luxembourg government.

Now, let’s not kid ourselves. GovSat-2 is about proving that geostationary platforms can still party, like it’s 1999, if you spike their punch with dual-use applications and secure payloads. SES is hedging every bet it can, investing in MEO with mPOWER, talking D2D futures, but it hasn’t quite given GEO the retirement letter.

The real trick is in the tone. SES talks about “scaling multi-orbit value creation” the way a washed-up rock band talks about “going acoustic”, it’s not an admission of failure. But everyone knows the real heat is in LEO. SES just hopes you’ll appreciate their deep catalog while they prep for their next reinvention.

Lunar Real Estate Agents

It’s one thing to build satellites. It’s another to get into lunar habitat design. But that’s exactly what Thales Alenia and the Italian Space Agency are doing with their new contract to create the first human habitation module for the moon. This isn’t some model-home demo. It’s a serious, 10-year-plus station meant to support NASA’s Artemis lunar campaign.

Italy’s taking its talents interplanetary, and Thales is bringing the CAD files. The module will need to survive decades on the lunar surface, host astronauts, withstand solar radiation, and not break the budget. Which means it probably won’t be made of IKEA panels or feature espresso machines… at least not in the first batch.

It’s a serious moment for European space design, one that signals ESA members are not just supporting Artemis, they’re co-owning the infrastructure. The moon is getting crowded. And Italy, with its long history of architecture and style, just called dibs on a pretty sweet crater.

Möonståd, with Zero-Glörb Mëatbålls, Hej!!

GEO and LEO Walk into a Boat Bar

Eutelsat and its long-time partner Station Satcom announced a new deal to combine LEO (via OneWeb) with GEO capacity for maritime customers. In less marketing terms: they’re trying to sell connectivity to ships that don’t want to choose between latency and uptime.

It’s a smart move, the kind of strategic layering that could become standard. You use LEO for low-latency video calls with the boss and GEO for boring back-end telemetry and file transfers. Multiorbit connectivity on the high seas is fast becoming the maritime version of a hybrid car, stylish, sensible, and likely to break down in exactly two hard-to-reach places.

But it shows that maritime is once again the proving ground for new business models. If this works, the Eutelsat-OneWeb saga may get a second wind. If not, it’s just another deck party where the satellite drinks are overpriced and the signal drops every time the band plays your favorite song.

Cobham Satcom Makes Everyone Pretend to Know What MSSA Is

Cobham Satcom quietly joined the Mobile Satellite Services Association this week. A perfectly reasonable move, except for the part where everyone Googled MSSA mid-press-release. Spoiler: it’s an industry body aimed at harmonizing the use of L- and S-band for mobile satellite connectivity, especially as direct-to-device chaos brews.

What matters here isn’t the acronym soup. It’s that terminal makers like Cobham are getting proactive about shaping the future of D2D, IoT, and mobile satcoms, before someone else does it for them. Because if there’s one thing worse than regulatory delay, it’s a standards body waking up and realizing Qualcomm already wrote the spec.

Cobham’s move is defensive and strategic. Defensive because if you’re not in the room, you’re on the menu. Strategic because whoever shapes the D2D interface wins the hardware contract wars of the late 2020s.

Japan Thinks IRIS² is a Good Idea, So Now It’s Official

The Japanese government has thrown its not-exactly-sumo-yet weight behind IRIS², the European Commission’s LEO constellation project-slash-geopolitical counter to Starlink. Support came via a vague but enthusiastic set of talking points about cooperation, digital sovereignty, and resilient connectivity.

Translation: “We like what you’re doing, and we might want a piece of it, but we’re not putting cash on the table quite yet.”

Still, Japan’s nod is more than symbolic. It shows that IRIS² has some global credibility, despite being late, fragmented, and still mostly a PowerPoint constellation. With Japan potentially involved, the project gets a bit more than European inertia. It gets Asian industrial power and a bit of diplomatic polish.

Whether that’s enough to make IRIS² relevant remains to be seen. But at least now, when they show the investor slides, there’s a flag besides the EU’s in the corner.

The Week the Satellites Got Real

This past week wasn’t a crescendo of triumphant launches or billion-dollar deals. It was a slow, grinding, utterly revealing week. One where Viasat got humbled, SES doubled down on relevance, and Gilmour got a taste of gravity’s personality disorder. It’s the kind of week where financial defaults lurk, spectrum gets yanked, and lunar habitats quietly inch toward being more than sci-fi fantasy.

The space industry didn’t win this week. But it matured a little. Or maybe it just got tired of pretending not to be vulnerable.

Either way,
the sky remains crowded,
the orbits chaotic,
and the business models slightly less ridiculous than they were last quarter.
Just slightly.

Counting down to next week: 604800, 604799, 604798, …