OW32: When Satellites Lie

Welcome back to Orbital Whispers’ week in review, where we strap a seatbelt on the space hype machine and then press all the buttons anyway. This issue opens with GPS spoofing, the party trick that keeps pilots guessing and ports blinking, a reminder that “position” is really just a polite opinion wrapped in RF. We will pull at the threads, from cheap jammers to expensive denial, and ask why the people who swear they have resilience keep stepping on the same rake.

It is also Shareholders Week, that sacred festival where executives read poetry to analysts and call it guidance. Expect cheerful charts, selective amnesia, and the recurring promise that next quarter is the one that counts. We will translate the safe words on those calls into something closer to English, then decide who actually earned their applause and who rented it by the hour.

Round it out with the Grapevine, our basket of space gossip that probably annoys at least three PR teams before breakfast. Bigger buses chasing bigger ambitions. Constellations that want to talk to your phone without melting it. GEO comebacks with a side of heartburn. Defense money sniffing around LEO like it just discovered latency. A rocket with something to prove to the in-laws. Kuiper learning the fine art of calendar yoga. An IPO that thinks speed can pay the bills. Pour coffee, bring skepticism, and let’s go ruin a few press releases.

GPS Spoofing, PNT Gaps, and LEO Myths

Modern navigation looks certain until a nearby transmitter starts telling prettier stories than the satellites. The sensors nod, the display smiles, and the ship quietly drifts into fiction. This is what happens when weak signals from space meet bored humans with radios.

You want the real-world version, not the brochure, well here it is. Picture a Black Sea departure where the chart says Romania, the GPS swears California, then Kyiv, then West Africa for variety. VSAT throws a tantrum. The solution is not a miracle firmware patch. Someone kills the GPS feed into the controller and pins a static position into the iDirect. Suddenly polarization behaves, the RF stops wobbling, the link holds. Apparently the modem just needed to stop believing bedtime stories.

The LEO showdown on that run doesn’t flatter everyone. OneWeb gets the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. When the jamming ramps up, packets go missing like dessert at a crew buffet. Two antennas, Intellian and Kymeta, different badges, same faceplant, same moments. No hidden champion. The surprise comes from the service everyone insisted would be a nonstarter in a war-adjacent sea. Starlink refuses to care and keeps working. The client orders a dual Starlink install on the follow-up visit and discovers that happy customers still exist.

Why it played out that way is not mystical. Terminals that lean on GNSS for pointing and timing swallow spoofed positions and start hunting the wrong satellites. Gateways that sit within reach of local interference add more ways to lose a link. A network that routes traffic through space instead of pleading with ground stations nearby shrinks the number of things a jammer can bully. None of that makes a system immortal. It does make it stubborn when the spectrum gets ugly.

In the meantime…

The peanut gallery didn’t stay quiet. An aviation veteran mentions the obvious trick from the sky. Feed the satcom with IRS or INS so a lying GPS fix doesn’t steer the terminal off target. Drift exists. So does sanity. A stable inertial position for alignment beats a spoofed fix that confidently points the array at nowhere. The Black Sea crew did the maritime version with a static position and proved the point without writing a white paper.

The broader scene hasn’t been shy either. Jamming in that region is a group activity. Spoofing turns receivers into storytellers. Sometimes you get simple power noise smothering the band. Sometimes tones target the front end with a little finesse. Sometimes telemetry gets tickled so the downlink misbehaves. The hotspots follow maps you can draw with a crayon labeled conflict. Detection teams wave machine learning at the mess, mix constellations, vary antennas, and try to keep the lights on.

Maritime is not alone. Aviation filed so many interference reports that regulators stopped pretending this was a temporary mood. Plans appeared. Training got updated. Procedures stopped assuming the sky is honest. Meanwhile, Europe flipped on authentication for Galileo. Receivers that implement it can at least know the nav message wasn’t forged. That won’t cure every lie, but it changes the default from blind trust to verified maybe. Treat it like wearing a lifejacket. You still avoid the rail.

Insurance will get its say the minute steel touches sand. Wordings that try to exile “cyber” look fearless until a claim handler has to prove malicious intent in a sea of RF chaos. One clause casts a wide net. Another demands evidence that electronics were used to cause harm. Those few words turn into a courtroom treadmill while adjusters compile binders and lawyers pretend radio forensics is tidy. Brokers sell buy-backs that magically restore what exclusions took away. Shocking development. Markets love charging for certainty that used to be implied.

Back on deck, the path forward is irritatingly practical. Receivers that can authenticate Galileo when available. Terminals that do not lose the plot when GNSS gets drunk. Networks that can carry traffic across the sky without begging every local gateway for mercy. Timing sources that don’t vanish when someone parks a jammer on a hill. Crews trained to spot spoofing where it actually appears, on their own screens, not on a laminated poster in a break room.

The Black Sea story wraps it up neatly. GPS is not a deity. It is a fragile whisper that misbehaves when people decide it should. One network shrugged off the noise because of how it is built. Another stumbled because of how it relies on ground help and clean GNSS.

A satcom installer fixed a snarled link by refusing to accept nonsense coordinates.
A slick new product promises to industrialize that workaround.
Regulators wrote plans, vendors ship updates, insurers practice their poker faces, and the rocks wait patiently.

You can keep praying to a single receiver or you can treat PNT like a system that deserves resilience. The sea will grade your homework without mercy.

Shareholders’ Week in Orbit

Viasat dropped its Q4/FY25 letter and patted itself on the back for “foundations” and “lower capital intensity,” while activists immediately asked why the faster-growing defense/advanced tech arm is still shackled to consumer broadband. A split is on the table in investor chatter, and timing around the next update has folks circling the date. Translation: cost discipline message up top; sum-of-the-parts whisper at the bottom.

EchoStar lit a flare. A US$1.3B initial contract to MDA Space for a direct-to-device LEO network using Open RAN, with ~100+ satellites in the first tranche toward a 200-sat initial build and commercial service penciled for 2029, price tag being floated near US$5B if they fill it out. That’s a moonshot layered on top of the post-DISH recombination, but it plants a very loud flag in NTN/D2D.

SES brought receipts, Intelsat deal closed in July, H1 results reiterated outlook, and the O3b mPOWER fleet keeps stacking birds (9 & 10 delivered/launched) to steady MEO capacity after the early hiccups. Management keeps leaning on government/mobility strength and synergy math from the merger to calm nerves about competition. The European multi-orbit champion story is no longer a pitch deck line; it’s the balance sheet.

Eutelsat’s full-year print said “LEO traction” with OneWeb revenue up to ~€187m (about 15% of group), margin still heavy, and a planned ~€1.5b capital raise to keep the strategy oxygenated. They’re touting sovereign wins and IRIS² roles, but everyone remembers last year’s OneWeb ground-network delays that clipped guidance, so the market wants execution, not poetry.

Telesat Lightspeed stays on the rails: financing assembled, MDA Space building the buses in Montreal, 14 Falcon 9 launches booked, first launches targeted for 2026 and global service by 2027. Fewer than 200 sats is the efficiency angle they keep hammering.

AST SpaceMobile have stacked fresh financing and locked commercial agreements (AT&T in the US, Vodafone in Europe), but the FM1 timing keeps slipping, which dampens the “near-term” drumbeat. The prize hasn’t changed, broadband to unmodified phones, but the schedule keeps reminding everyone that space is hard.

Iridium is steady, cash-generative, and very much a “defensive compounder” vibe, Q2 print, guidance tweaks, and a reminder that government subs and specialty IoT still pay the bills while others chase consumer fantasies. Less sizzle, more contracts.

Not a single Kuiper mention was given.

Funny thing … Amazon’s slides never uttered “Kuiper,” as if low-Earth orbit suddenly became shy. The earnings release tossed it a breadcrumb, “increased Project Kuiper’s satellite internet fleet … with two successful launches”, and then sprinted back to AI and Prime. Meanwhile, everyone outside the room watched those Atlas V flights loft fresh hardware (two batches in April and June) while the FCC’s milestone clock keeps ticking toward the 50%-deployed requirement in 2026.

The grapevine

Italy is going to Mars!

Picture Rome, signatures dry on fancy paper; in Texas, welders chase milestones; somewhere in between, an Italian sensor dreams of Martian weather while a student team argues over lettuce in micro-g. Italy isn’t waiting for a committee to certify the future. It’s stepping onto the first commercially offered road to Mars because first hands on real cruise-phase data tend to win careers, grants, and customers later.

Caveat: fuel transfers in orbit are not a vibe; they’re a brutally precise ballet. Until SpaceX proves propellant transfer at scale, Mars dates are more mood board than calendar. If you build instruments, software, or life-support bits in Italy (or you want to), this is your timing window. Early teams learn the ops that everyone else ends up buying. Today it’s a sensor on a Starship; tomorrow it can be your badge that gets you hired, funded, or partnered.

Bigger pair of Pants

Muon Space is acting like a company that found a bigger pair of pants and now insists it was bulking all along. The new MuSat XL bus looks like an admission that micro was fun until customers wanted actual capacity. Hubble Network showing up as a buyer tells you the Bluetooth-from-orbit crowd thinks the training wheels can finally come off, at least on slide decks.

The capital raise helps, obviously, but the signal here is less about money and more about ambition creep. If they can turn cute demos into boring service-level agreements, that is the real glow-up. Until then, the most reliable link might still be between the founders and their investors’ optimism. One to watch, preferably with a spectrum analyzer and a strong coffee.

Open-RAN Trophy

EchoStar’s “world’s first” Open RAN direct-to-device constellation announcement reads like a trophy claim made before the race starts and possibly before the track is paved. The phrase is catnip for telecom folks who still wake up thinking 5G will do their dishes, while the rest of us know the devil sits inside 3GPP annexes and battery budgets. Open RAN in space sounds liberating until you remember space prefers things that are closed, hardened, and not allergic to radiation.

MDA as prime is a solid grown up in the room, although even grown ups must answer the questions that matter, like whose spectrum, which bands, and what exactly a normal phone will see when it looks up. If it flies and connects handsets without turning them into hot rocks, great. If it ends up as an elaborate roaming partner for a handful of models in a few places, also believable. Either way, the press release already had a great time.

Smoke from the Garage

Astranis flipping on service for Anuvu with two GEO birds feels like a victory lap taken while glancing at the smoke coming from the garage. Live capacity in orbit is the part customers care about, not the drama of an errant utility satellite that refuses to cooperate with the narrative. GEO remains the neighborhood where engineering mistakes go to be immortalized, so the upbeat tone deserves a translator: things are working today, please focus on that.

If they keep beams stable and throughput predictable, the industry will forgive the detours, at least until renewal talks. The bigger story is whether this model scales without needing a fresh apology every quarter. For now, credit where due, paying traffic beats vibes.

Missile defense potluck,

Telesat pitching Lightspeed as a tile in the Pentagon’s “Golden Dome” feels like Canada bringing a polite casserole to a missile defense potluck, then realizing the table is full of budget knives. Dual use is back in season, since geopolitics keeps producing new use cases and Congress loves a program with a noble noun. If Lightspeed gets anchored to real defense money, the project’s financing math stops looking like an Olympic sport.

Of course, interoperability and latency in a defense mesh are not solved by enthusiasm, and secure gateways do not assemble themselves. The charm of this play is that Telesat tends to ship what it promises, just not always on the timeline that press offices prefer. If Washington wants resilience and Ottawa wants returns, this could be the rare alignment where both get something they like.

Live long and prosper

Vulcan heading for its first National Security Space mission is the aerospace version of meeting the in-laws, with the Space Force playing the parent who has seen it all and still expects punctuality. A direct injection to GEO with Centaur V is a flex that will either silence a lot of barstool analysts or give them fresh material for months.

Performance is nice, reliability is the religion, and repeatability is the tithe. Clearing this hurdle puts real weight behind the idea that competition in heavy launch is not just a slide labeled “Q4”. It also turns scheduling from a theoretical art into something that looks like a service. If the countdown behaves and the telemetry looks tidy, the next conversation becomes cadence, not credibility.

Rockets have feelings too

Amazon’s Kuiper push keeps discovering that rockets have feelings too, especially on days when weather, hardware, or the launch gods decide to impose character development. Calling twenty-something demo spacecraft a glide path is not wrong, it is just the sort of glide that depends on SpaceX’s runway and air traffic control.

The acute irony is watching a company famous for logistics outsource its most crucial logistics to a rival, then try to look indifferent about it. Everyone knows the real exam is operational satellites with retail-grade reliability. If they hit orbit cleanly and start talking user terminals that do not look like yard art, momentum follows. Until then, every scrub reads like a calendar invite that keeps moving to Friday afternoon.

Scalable, resilient, and billable

Firefly showing up with an upsized IPO priced with confidence suggests public markets have decided that “small, fast, and fiery” now translates to “scalable, resilient, and billable.” Investors are betting that engines, responsive launch, and Tactically Useful Things are more than a cool photo of a hot nozzle.

The hard part starts when quarterly reports replace swagger and contracts have to march from press statements to recognized revenue. If their cadence rises and the spacecraft line pulls its weight, the story writes itself in green ink. If not, gravity turns into a metaphor for valuation. Either way, the company now has the most unforgiving customer of all, the ticker tape that never blinks.

THE END

That’s it, go and have a coffee now, think about it and come back with something really smart,. We’ll be waiting