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Internet from a small satellite in geostationary orbit? Sure, why not Ars Technica

A space startup says it has successfully deployed and tested a satellite the size of a kitchen stove in geostationary orbit and has begun providing internet services in Alaska.

Earlier this month, the ‘Arcturus’ satellite, built by a company called Astranis, was launched as a shared payload on a Falcon Heavy rocket, separating hours after liftoff and successfully deploying its solar arrays, the boom and a subreflector.

After gaining control of the satellite, Astranis began sending commands and updating flight software before lifting Arcturus into orbit and placing it in a geostationary position overlooking Alaska. Once there, the satellite connected to an Internet gateway in Utah and communicated with multiple user terminals in Alaska, where Astranis will provide high-speed bandwidth to an Internet service provider, Pacific Dataport.

Proving it works

This was a milestone for Astranis, founded in 2015 by John Gedmark and Ryan McLinko, to see if largely home-built microsatellites could deliver high-speed Internet from geostationary space at a low price. This marked the first demonstration that Astranis’ small satellite technology actually worked in space and could survive the harsh radiation and thermal environment previously dominated by much larger satellites costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It’s pretty amazing to see a big test like that, and everything going so smoothly,” Gedmark said in an interview. “Honestly, it was pretty cool. It was like when Ironman lights up his suit for the first time and he lights it up, and you know some pretty cool stuff is going to happen.”

Astranis differs in several ways from low-Earth-orbiting constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink, in which hundreds of satellites zoom overhead in the night sky. Astranis satellites fly at an altitude of 37,000 km and remain over a single area of ​​the world, where they can provide continuous service. There are modest latency issues from this altitude, but Astranis has now demonstrated that small and relatively cheap satellites can provide connectivity.

The company aims to provide backhaul capabilities and other services to telecom providers in remote areas: For example, instead of running expensive fiber cables to remote cell towers, a small dish on each tower could pick up a signal from a satellite Astranis. The military is also very interested in the potential to move these small satellites to forward operating bases where they could provide continuous connectivity.

“We now have a new way to connect very remote places,” Gedmark said. “This is a new tool in the toolbox for all kinds of connectivity challenges that the US Space Force and other parts of government have.”

Zoom in

To date Astranis has raised $550 million and is well capitalized for growth with a team of 300 people. The company has already built four more satellites, one of which will serve a customer in Peru, two for airline Wi-Fi and one for an unspecified customer that will launch on a dedicated Falcon 9 mission later this summer or in early autumn.

Now that the company is confident that its tailored technology is working, it plans to scale up production to two satellites a month, Gedmark said. The 1 meter by 1 meter satellites, which have a mass of around 400 kg, will be built to meet whatever demand there is, wherever in the world it is needed.

“We will continue to roll them out as long as there is demand,” he said. “And we think there’s going to be a lot of demand for it. We absolutely plan to roll out dozens and then hundreds.”

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