Key Facts Introduction Satellite internet has entered a new era in 2025. Once a niche last-resort service with slow speeds and tiny data caps, it’s now a fast-growing sector powering everything from rural homes to airplanes in flight. The charge has been led by SpaceX’s Starlink, the low-Earth orbit constellation that proved satellite broadband can…
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In 2011, NASA retired the Space Shuttle, leaving the ISS without its primary American supply line. May 2012 marked SpaceX’s Dragon as the first commercial spacecraft to rendezvous and berth with the ISS, delivering about 1,200 pounds of cargo and later returning roughly 1,300 pounds. October 2012’s CRS-1 mission launched the first official NASA Commercial…
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Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation, now has over 5 million customers in 125 countries, with rivals including Eutelsat OneWeb, Globalstar, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper and government-led IRIS2 and QianFan programs. Vodafone and AST SpaceMobile formed SatCo, a Luxembourg-based joint venture aiming to deliver direct-to-device satellite connectivity across Europe by 2026, integrating with 4G/5G networks. MTG-S1,…
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ESA’s Biomass satellite, the first with a P-band SAR, released its initial high-resolution images and enables 3D mapping of forest structure for carbon accounting. Rocket Lab’s 67th Electron launch deployed four satellites—three HawkEye 360 Cluster 12 microsatellites and the experimental Kestrel-0A—marking the ninth Electron mission in 2024. Amazon’s Project Kuiper added 27 satellites to reach…
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The space-based solar power (SBSP) concept was proposed in 1968 by Peter Glaser to place satellites in orbit and beam power to Earth. In 2023 Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) conducted three beaming tests in May, June, and July 2023 using the MAPLE flexible array to show ground reception of orbital power. In June…
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France 2030, launched in 2021 as a €30 billion investment plan, prioritizes converging 5G with space through end-to-end NTN pilots. The European Commission’s IRIS² programme, approved in 2022, will deploy hundreds of satellites (about 270 LEO and 18 MEO) and be fully operational by 2030, with Eutelsat as a prime contractor. In early 2025, Eutelsat…
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Delphi is Lux Aeterna’s flagship fully reusable satellite bus designed to launch, operate in orbit, return to Earth, be refurbished, and relaunched. The Delphi demonstrator weighs about 200 kg and will carry a customer payload to low Earth orbit before re-entering and landing for recovery. Lux Aeterna has raised $4 million in pre-seed funding, led…
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Space-based ADS-B became operational in 2019 with Aireon using Iridium NEXT’s 66 low Earth orbit satellites at about 780 km, each carrying an ADS-B receiver listening at 1090 MHz and delivering data to ground stations with latency under 1.5 seconds and updates often in the 2–5 second range. Before 2019 only about 30% of the…
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The ROQuET payload, a photonic quantum computer no larger than a shoebox, was developed by Philip Walther’s team at the University of Vienna and measures about 15 × 15 × 45 cm, weighing roughly 9.5 kg with an aluminum frame and a borosilicate glass optical circuit. The device was launched on June 23, 2025, aboard…
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On 17 June 2025, Prof. Wu Jian of Peking University and Dr. Liu Chao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences down-linked 1 Gbps from an unnamed GEO satellite 36,705 km above Earth using a 2-watt laser. The AO‑MDR method combines 357 micro-mirrors on a 1.8 m telescope to reshape the wavefront and eight spatial modes,…
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