Let’s talk about the quiet little knife fight happening in the world of space defense. SES, you know, that company that makes “multi-orbit networking” sound like it belongs in a Scandinavian furniture catalogue, just dropped SIMON™. Yeah, that’s Secure Integrated Multi-Orbit Networking, which is basically a shiny name for a system that hops between orbits like it’s late for three different meetings.
SES is pitching this thing like it’s The Godfather Part II of space comms: resilient, elegant, dodging signal jamming, spoofing, and orbital debris like it’s being graded by the Geneva Convention. It’s sleek. It’s polished. It’s built to impress anyone who thinks resilience means writing a white paper about resilience.
Then there’s CALVIN. Cheap Access Low-cost Versatile Instant Network. I mean, come on, CALVIN sounds like something you name a goldfish. But don’t let that fool you, this one’s quietly winning hearts. Not with elegance. Not with PowerPoint decks. But with the kind of blunt-force practicality that gets things done.
See, CALVIN doesn’t dance between orbits. It doesn’t even care about the choreography. It just shows up with volume. If SIMON is a symphony orchestra, CALVIN’s the guy with a boombox duct-taped to a drone. No finesse, just presence. A lot of it. And while no one’s officially connecting CALVIN to any massive, globe-spanning commercial constellation, everyone in the room knows which elephant is floating in orbit.
But here’s the fun part: publicly, they’re “complementary.” Like kale and Pop-Tarts. Like a Tesla and a monster truck. That word is code for: “We don’t want to piss off either vendor because they both brought muffins to the funding meeting.”
Behind the scenes, though? It’s war. SES wants you to trust the astronaut with the PhD. The CALVIN crowd wants to flood the zone with so much coverage that you don’t need strategy, you just need signal. The question isn’t who wins. It’s who gets blamed when something goes offline during a blackout in the South China Sea.
Because in the end, the next great space conflict might not be about who fires first, but whose acronym survives the budget cycle. And if we’re picking our future based on who had the better branding consultant, maybe we’re already screwed.
And here’s a thought: if the fate of national security now depends on which acronym survives a PowerPoint shootout, maybe the real enemy is bureaucracy… or at least the intern who names these things like they’re pitching Netflix reboots.
SIMON or CALVIN … what’s your pick ?
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