The European Commission signed the contract on Monday for Europe\u2019s IRIS\u00b2 constellation with the group of companies tasked with delivering the constellation in the SpaceRISE consortium. <\/p>\n
The EC Director-General for Defence, Industry and Space, Timo Pesonen, signed the 12-year concession contract at a ceremony in Brussels on Dec. 16 with leadership from SES<\/b>, Eutelsat<\/b>, and Hispasat<\/b>. <\/p>\n
SES and Eutelsat detailed the commercial opportunity each operator sees with the public-private partnership investment model. SES announced Monday it will develop, procure, and operate 18 new Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites as part of the constellation. <\/p>\n
IRIS\u00b2 will be Europe\u2019s third flagship space program after Galileo and Copernicus. It is planned as a constellation of 290 satellites \u2014 18 in MEO and 264 in Low-Earth (LEO) to provide secure connectivity services to the EU and its Member States, along with broadband connectivity. The contract signing comes after the EC announced the SpaceRISE consortium in October. <\/p>\n
The earmarked budget for IRIS\u00b2 is 10.6 billion euros with 6.5 billion euros coming from public funding, including 550 million euros from ESA\u2019s Partnership Projects program. Industry will fund the remaining over 4 billion euros. <\/p>\n
\u201cToday we are not just launching a satellite project. We are launching a vision \u2014 a vision of a stronger, more connected, and more resilient Europe. IRIS\u00b2 demonstrates the Union\u2019s resolve and commitment to strengthening Europe\u2019s space global posture both in terms of security and competitiveness to the benefit of our governments, businesses and citizens,\u201d commented Andrius Kubilius, EC commissioner for Defence and Space.<\/p>\n
SES and Eutelsat detailed their contributions to the project with the signing. SES plans to procure and operate 18 new MEO satellites to provide \u201c100% pole-to-pole coverage with carrier-grade connectivity solutions.\u201d <\/p>\n
SES said the IRIS\u00b2 satellites will form the foundation of the operator\u2019s next-generation MEO capabilities. SES will have rights to commercialize the MEO capacity and part of the LEO capacity of the system. <\/p>\n
SES plans to invest up to 1.8 billion pounds into the constellation, approximately 50% of the MEO cost. SES said this CapEx will start ramping from 2027 and have an average annual spend of around 400 million euros over 2027-2030.<\/p>\n
\u201cIRIS\u00b2 enables the profitable expansion of our differentiated MEO architecture into the next decade, while giving us access to LEO with owners\u2019 economics, to keep pace with the rapidly growing customer demand in our target segments where we have a strong right to win, record of delivering value for our customers, and history of growth execution,\u201d SES CEO Adel al Saleh commented. <\/p>\n
Eutelsat said it plans to invest 2 billion euros, which is planned for later stages of the project. Eutelsat will act as consortium system development prime, the technical authority within the consortium. Eutelsat has agreed to make available its priority spectrum rights in the Ku-band to lead on the design of the LEO segment of the constellation.<\/p>\n
Eutelsat said it expects to generate revenues of at least 6.5 billion euros from anchor EU customers and the global distribution of its LEO capacity commercial customers. The operator said that IRIS\u00b2 will give the operator at least 1.5 Tbps of additional sellable LEO capacity. <\/p>\n
\u201cEutelsat is uniquely positioned to bring unparalleled expertise to this mission, leveraging our unique LEO expertise and spectrum priority. By combining this advanced infrastructure with the collective strengths of the SpaceRISE consortium, we will deliver a transformative communications backbone that addresses Europe\u2019s most critical connectivity needs,\u201d Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke commented. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The European Commission signed the contract on Monday for Europe\u2019s IRIS\u00b2 constellation with the group of companies tasked with delivering the constellation in the SpaceRISE consortium. The EC Director-General for Defence, Industry and Space, Timo Pesonen, signed the 12-year concession contract at a ceremony in Brussels on Dec. 16 with leadership from SES, Eutelsat, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49962,"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":[],"class_list":["post-49961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49961"}],"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=49961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}