TAMPA, Fla. — The U.K.’s space minister hopes to convince Europe to use OneWeb’s proposed second-generation satellites instead of pursuing a standalone constellation now that the British operator has merged with Eutelsat of France.
Europe’s plans for a global sovereign connectivity network by 2027 could take the form of hosted payloads on the upgraded low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites Eutelsat aims to deploy around the same time, George Freeman told SpaceNews in an interview.
Combining efforts would save costs during tough economic conditions while also reducing the mass of objects in space.
Eutelsat has estimated OneWeb Gen 2 would cost $4 billion, while Europe’s IRIS² — or Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite — is a 6 billion euro project to be 40%-funded by European Union members, with commercial companies expected to cover the rest.
“There’s plenty of people looking at this [Eutelsat-OneWeb merger] deal and saying, hang on, surely you can kill two birds with one stone,” Freeman said.
The idea comes as European Space Agency member states prepare to discuss proposals for new major initiatives during the ESA Space Summit taking place 6-7 November in Seville, Spain.
“It’s quite an interesting moment in the space economy,” Freeman added, “does security mean that you have to have your own constellation [or can you] have your own protected, encrypted bandwidth comms platform on shared spectrum?
“Well, if we’re going to have a sustainable space economy, it must be the latter.”
LEO ambitions
The British government helped rescue OneWeb from bankruptcy in 2020 and continues to hold special voting rights for the company after Eutelsat took it over last month. The U.K. also has an 11% equity stake in the combined group and a representative on both company boards.
However, Freeman said any move to combine a OneWeb Gen 2 constellation with a government payload…
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