European satellite operator Eutelsat said it will work with French startup Skynopy to explore selling unused capacity from its OneWeb ground stations to Earth observation operators.<\/p>\n
The initiative will start with tests on Ka-band antennas across OneWeb\u2019s 42 gateway sites worldwide. \u201cAny LEO ground station network has, by nature, idle time on its ground stations,\u201d Skynopy co-founder and CEO Pierre Bertrand told SpaceNews. \u201cSkynopy will define and test with Eutelsat how to take benefit from this spare capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Skynopy plans to retrofit some of Eutelsat\u2019s antennas with its own software and feed system components, and add S-, X- and Ka-band antennas at OneWeb sites to support Earth observation demand. \u201cBy using the spare capacity of OneWeb sites \u2014 antenna time, site space and high-speed backhaul \u2014 [Skynopy] is commercializing a unique service, maximizing both metrics that Earth observation satellite operators care for: data freshness and data rate,\u201d Bertrand said.<\/p>\n
The startup will begin a one-year beta testing phase in the coming months for selected operators in Ka-band before a commercial rollout. Skynopy raised \u20ac15 million ($17.7 million) earlier this year to expand its network, which currently includes more than 15 antennas, combining its own deployments with third-party stations from Amazon Web Services and Kin\u00e9is.<\/p>\n
Eutelsat last year valued its ground infrastructure at around $863 million and announced plans to sell much of it to Sweden\u2019s EQT Partners to create a standalone ground-station-as-a-service business. The partnership comes as major players including Amazon\u2019s Project Kuiper and SpaceX\u2019s Starlink build out global ground networks, while governments and defense agencies increase demand for fresh, high-volume satellite imagery.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
European satellite operator Eutelsat said it will work with French startup Skynopy to explore selling unused capacity from its OneWeb ground stations to Earth observation operators. The initiative will start with tests on Ka-band antennas across OneWeb\u2019s 42 gateway sites worldwide. \u201cAny LEO ground station network has, by nature, idle time on its ground stations,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1424,962,20,7529,489,484],"class_list":["post-20936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-eutelsat","tag-project-kuiper","tag-satellite","tag-skynopy","tag-startup","tag-sweden"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20936"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}