| Today begins the SATELLITE 2024 Conference & Exhibition in Washington, D.C. Throughout the week, SpaceNews will be covering the important announcements, events and other developments from each day to keep our readers abreast of the key news coming out of the decades-old and widely attended conference. | |  | | WASHINGTON — Manufacturers of traditional geostationary communications satellites insist demand for their products is not going away thanks to technological advances and interest in multi-orbit solutions. During a panel at the Satellite 2024 conference here March 24, executives with several manufacturers acknowledged demand for their satellites had dropped significantly from historical levels of 20 to 25 orders a year but that the market itself was not dying. "GEO's not dead," said Chris Johnson, chief executive of Maxar Space Systems. "By no means is it dead, but it has evolved." SEE FULL STORY | |  | By Jason Rainbow
WASHINGTON — Astranis said March 18 it has sold a small geostationary broadband satellite slated to launch in 2025 to Orbith, a remote connectivity provider based in Argentina. The Californian manufacturer has now announced customers for all five satellites in Block 3, its third batch of spacecraft due to launch together on an undisclosed rocket. Orbith currently leases capacity from satellite operators to connect customers across Latin America, but says availability and prices have held back the company's growth in countries such as Argentina. SEE FULL STORY | |  | By Sandra Erwin
WASHINGTON — The National Reconnaissance Office is pursuing a hybrid approach to its future architecture of spy satellites, leveraging both traditional large satellites and newer small satellites in low Earth orbit, a senior agency official said March 18.
Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the NRO, said in a keynote speech at the Satellite 2024 conference that the NRO sees value in leveraging new commercial capabilities for certain missions where small satellites can meet requirements at lower cost. But the agency also continues investing in bigger, more capable satellite buses and launch vehicles for its most critical needs.
The upcoming launch campaigns reflect this hybrid approach. Within days, the NRO plans to send a small satellite into low Earth orbit aboard a Rocket Lab Electron small launch vehicle, and then will loft one of its largest-ever satellites on a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy vehicle. SEE FULL STORY | |  | By Sandra Erwin
WASHINGTON — After years of delays, Maxar Technologies is finally on the home stretch to launching the first two satellites of its next-generation WorldView Legion Earth-imaging constellation. The company announced March 18 that the first two of six planned high-resolution WorldView Legion satellites have arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, paving the way for liftoff as soon as April aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This marks a crucial milestone for the WorldView Legion program, which has suffered repeated setbacks since Maxar started developing the spacecraft in 2017.
SEE FULL STORY | | | Millennium Space Systems is an end-to-end mission prime contractor delivering advanced small satellite constellations for operational National Security Space missions, including mission engineering, design, qualification, build, integration, test, launch integration and support, and mission operations.
 | |  | | By Jason Rainbow
WASHINGTON — Turion Space's debut satellite should be ready to start imaging objects in space by May after nearly a year of commissioning in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to CEO and cofounder Ryan Westerdahl.
The three-year-old Californian space situational awareness (SSA) startup first opened the door to the imaging sensor on its 32-kilogram Droid.001 spacecraft a couple of months ago, Westerdahl said, following its SpaceX launch in June.
"We wanted to make sure we had good control of the satellite before doing it because we didn't want to damage the optical sensor," he told SpaceNews in an interview, "like for example if all of a sudden the satellite was staring at the sun."
SEE FULL STORY | |  | | By Jason Rainbow WASHINGTON — Spanish defense contractor Indra has teamed up with local air navigation services provider Enaire to order two satellites next year to test their proposed air traffic surveillance and communications constellation. Their joint venture, Startical, said March 18 it has ordered a 20-kilogram satellite from GomSpace and a 110-kilogram satellite from Kongsberg NanoAvionics — the first of more than 270 spacecraft planned for low Earth orbit. Startical said the GomSpace satellite would be deployed in early 2025, followed by NanoAvionics around the middle of the year, but did not disclose launch details.
SEE FULL STORY | |  | By Enrico Ottolini
The imminent market entry of several direct-to-device (D2D) LEO satellite constellations standardized to use telecom protocols by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the global organization that develops the standards for terrestrial and non-terrestrial cellular communication, has sparked a wave of excitement around the world. In particular, these systems can play a huge role in the global south, serving to connect the roughly 3 billion currently unconnected people living and working outside of the coverage of terrestrial cellular networks.
But how can companies offering D2D LEO satellite services succeed in this new and very challenging market? It will prove particularly difficult, especially considering that, for the first time in history, this will truly merge terrestrial cellular and satellite services.
Although the major companies in this space will together cover a substantial part of the whole 5G service spectrum, their focus on competing with each other is hindering their ability to address the needs of enterprise clients for a complete and bundled 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) service portfolio to provide seamless coverage extension of their TN connectivity solutions. This issue could keep companies from remaining competitive, especially if they miss out on business in new markets.
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