| Welcome to day three of the SATELLITE 2024 Conference & Exhibition in Washington, D.C. In this update, Lockheed Martin put out a call for strategic partners that can help it maintain leadership in the satellite industry, Intelsat announced that it bought more LEO capacity from Eutelsat's OneWeb constellation to the tune of five times its previous usage, and more. | |  | | WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin is looking to team up with more commercial space companies as it aims to stay ahead of the curve in areas like intelligence, surveillance, communications, and small satellites, a senior executive said March 19.
"We're looking for strategic partners," said Robert Lightfoot, president of Lockheed Martin Space. "We're interested in talking with anyone who has an advantage in those areas from a space perspective."
Lightfoot spoke with SpaceNews at the Satellite 2024 conference. The $67 billion aerospace and defense giant wants to work with commercial companies with expertise in intelligence and surveillance payloads, as well as communications payloads for satellites, as it looks to meet growing government demand for resilient space-based capabilities. SEE FULL STORY | |  | | By Jason Rainbow
WASHINGTON — Geostationary satellite operator Intelsat has bought at least five times more capacity from Eutelsat's OneWeb low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation to strengthen its multi-orbit broadband strategy.
The companies announced March 19 that Intelsat has made a firm commitment to buy $250 million worth of LEO capacity over six years starting mid-2024. Intelsat also has the option to acquire an extra $250 million worth of capacity under their deal, which would extend the length of the contract by a year to 2031.
The agreement marks a major step up from Intelsat's commitment in March 2023 to buy $45 million worth of LEO capacity, which has barely been put into service amid delays in fully deploying the ground infrastructure OneWeb needs to provide full coverage this year.
SEE FULL STORY | |  | By Jason Rainbow
WASHINGTON — Swissto12 is expanding production facilities in Switzerland this year as it races to get more business in a growing small geostationary satellite market.
The 3D printing specialist announced plans March 19 to add 1,200 square meters of production space to an existing 4,500 square meter site at its headquarters in Renens, Switzerland.
The expansion involves taking over more floors at the building and includes a large clean room to support the production of its dishwasher-sized HummingSat spacecraft and radio frequency subsystem products. SEE FULL STORY | |  | By Jeff Foust
WASHINGTON — The launch industry is negotiating a transition into new families of launch vehicles, working to bring additional capacity into the market while seeking out competitive advantages against a growing number of competitors.
A panel at the Satellite 2024 conference March 18 features two companies that recently completed the first successful launches of new vehicles and four others working on new launch vehicles, in some cases while operating existing ones.
"Right now we're in transition," said Mark Peller, vice president of Vulcan development at United Launch Alliance, citing the successful inaugural launch of Vulcan Centaur Jan. 8. "We've wrung out the Vulcan system and now our focus is getting up to a steady launch cadence."
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 Jeff Foust
WASHINGTON — The European Space Agency has awarded three contracts worth a quarter of a billion dollars to develop a pair of navigation missions, including one to test the feasibility of a low Earth orbit satellite constellation.
ESA announced the award of the contracts for its FutureNAV program March 19, with a combined value of 233.4 million euros ($253 million). The contracts cover two missions, called Genesis and LEO-PNT.
"With Genesis and LEO-PNT we are responding to rapidly growing needs for more resilient and precise navigation and ensuring Europe leads global satellite navigation," Javier Benedicto, ESA's director of navigation, said in a statement about the contracts.
SEE FULL STORY | | | | |
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