The first stage of the rocked touched down at Vandenberg's Landing Zone 4 about eight minutes after lifting off. Credit: SpaceX
Eutelsat spokesperson Katie Dowd said the company now has 654 satellites in orbit for the constellation, which already had enough in LEO to provide global coverage but has been held up by ground infrastructure delays.
SpaceX launches 20 spare satellites for rival OneWeb LEO constellation
TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched 20 spare OneWeb satellites Oct. 20 to strengthen the resiliency of French operator Eutelsat’s rival low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband network.
Eutelsat said it had successfully contacted each satellite following lift-off on a Falcon 9 rocket at 1:13 a.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California
- The satellites are identical to the rest in OneWeb’s first-generation constellation, which Airbus U.S. Space & Defense mostly built at its mass production facility in Merritt Island, Florida.
According to Dowd, the company expects to start de-orbiting Gen 1 OneWeb satellites in the next couple of years as its first batch of LEO spacecraft near the end of their design lives.
“We have the option to prolong the life of Gen 1 to assume customer continuity as we examine options for Next Gen,” she said via email.
- The Falcon 9’s first-stage booster successfully landed at Vandenberg less than eight minutes after lift-off, marking the 357th time SpaceX has recovered an orbital-class to date.
Eutelsat and other legacy geostationary operators aim to leverage the flexibility and resiliency of a multi-orbit network to compete with Starlink for enterprise and government customers.
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