Astranis<\/b> delivered four satellites to Cape Canaveral ahead of a dedicated SpaceX<\/b> launch later this month. Astranis announced Tuesday that SpaceX is targeting December 17 for the Falcon 9 mission. <\/p>\n
The four Astranis MicroGEO satellites onboard will support a number of customers. Two satellites \u2014 NuView Alpha and NuView Bravo \u2014 will support in-flight connectivity for Anuvu. These will be the first dedicated satellites for Anuvu, which leases satellite capacity. <\/p>\n
The third satellite, AGILA, is the first communications satellite to be dedicated to the Philippines, for regional satellite service provider Orbits Corp. Astranis is also building a second satellite for the Philippines. <\/p>\n
Also onboard the launch is a multi-mission satellite named UtilitySat. It will provide services for Mexico\u2019s APCO Networks, which also ordered two future satellites from Astranis. Astranis said UtilitySat \u201cwill serve a number of customers throughout its life on orbit,\u201d but has not announced additional customers yet. <\/p>\n
This is a critical launch for Astranis after its first MicroGEO satellite, which launched alongside ViaSat-3 in April 2023, had an issue with a solar array which stopped the satellite from fulfilling its primary mission. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a huge milestone for Astranis. We\u2019re going from one to many satellites. And this is the first time anyone has ever launched 4 satellites together like this,\u201d CEO John Gedmark said in a release. \u201cThese are our most advanced satellites yet. With a number of improvements that will generate increased capacity and affordability. We couldn\u2019t be more excited to deliver for our customers, providing dedicated broadband networks in a way they can\u2019t get anywhere else.\u201d <\/p>\n
Astranis reported a number of upgrades to the MicroGEO model used in these four satellites including a new gimbal gimbal for the electric propulsion thruster developed in-house, a deployable main reflector that boosts the throughput per satellite, and additional redundancy to the Astranis software-defined radio. <\/p>\n
Because the Astranis satellites are smaller than typical GEO satellites, this mission has the interesting distinction of being the first time a single satellite manufacturer has flown four of its own satellites on a single launch to GEO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Astranis delivered four satellites to Cape Canaveral ahead of a dedicated SpaceX launch later this month. Astranis announced Tuesday that SpaceX is targeting December 17 for the Falcon 9 mission. The four Astranis MicroGEO satellites onboard will support a number of customers. Two satellites \u2014 NuView Alpha and NuView Bravo \u2014 will support in-flight connectivity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50001,"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-50000","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\/50000"}],"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=50000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}