The Arcturus satellite is seen heading into geostationary orbit.
Astranis
Astranis, a San Francisco-based company with an alternative approach to providing Internet access via satellites, has its first spacecraft in orbit and the company said Wednesday it works “perfectly.”
“We have a new way to connect people in some of the most remote and underserved parts of the world,” Astranis CEO John Gedmark told CNBC.
The company’s small satellite, built largely in-house and dubbed “Arcturus,” was deployed May 1 after launching on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket and recently entered orbit. Astranis has already completed tests with the satellite, including connecting to user equipment for the first time in its Alaska service target.
“This test validates everything we’ve worked on and what we’ve worked towards and it’s a huge, big deal,” Gedmark said.
The Arcturus satellite deploys its solar panels in the background aboard the upper stage of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
SpaceX
Astranis’ is one of a number of next-generation broadband satellite systems under development as companies race to meet a growing global demand for data – including SpaceX’s Starlink, Britain’s OneWeb, from Amazon Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile and others.
But the company’s approach is the “third way” of offering broadband services from space, Gedmark said. The company’s dishwasher satellite combines the small form factor of satellites like SpaceX’s Starlink in low Earth orbit with the distant, geosynchronous orbit of traditional players like Viasat.
Geosynchronous orbit, or GEO, is about 22,000 miles from the planet’s surface — a position that allows the spacecraft to stay above a fixed location, matching the Earth’s rotation.
Arcturus is a fraction of the size and cost of traditional GEO satellites.
“We can build these satellites very quickly compared to what has happened before,” Gedmark said.
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Astranis highlighted 13 completed major milestones for Arcturus in a press release. Gedmark emphasized that the company is “incredibly proud” of the satellite’s performance so far, fending off both the “super harsh radiation environment” and “extreme temperature range” GEO spacecraft experience.
Gedmark said Arcturus is operating about 10% to 15% above specification, which equates to about 8.5 gigabits per second of total capacity. For users, Astranis expects its satellites to deliver download speeds of about 25 megabits per second.
Service in Alaska coming soon
A “gateway” ground station in Eagle Mountain, Utah.
Astranis
Arcturus is positioned over Alaska, where Astranis’ first customer – telecommunications provider Pacific Dataport – will use it to triple the data rates available to users across the state. Gedmark said about 40% of Alaskans don’t have access to reliable broadband internet, which is “a shocking number” that shows how “starved of satellite capacity” the state has been.
“We cover pretty much the entire state, including many of the most remote islands in the Aleutian Islands,” Gedmark said, adding that Arcturus “will enable hundreds of thousands of people to get real broadband internet.”
Many of Astranis’ intended users are enterprises – such as industrial companies, schools and hospitals – rather than individual or residential customers.
The company expects Arcturus to begin service in mid-June after completing further verification steps.
Astranis employees cheer as they watch the launch at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, California.
Astranis
Demand pipeline
Astranis has raised more than $350 million since its inception in 2015, with a valuation of more than $1 billion, with investors including BlackRock, Fidelity, Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, and Venrock. The company has more than 300 employees.
As for raising more money, Gedmark said the company remains in “a strong cash position” and is currently focused on getting the service up and running as soon as possible, for “people who really needed that internet yesterday.”
Astranis has a demand pipeline worth more than $1 billion, representing orders for 10 satellites, over the next two years.
It expects to launch four more satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later this year. One of those four is under a strike a deal with Latin American service provider Grupo Andesat to provide satellites that would provide enhanced broadband access to as many as 3 million people in Peru. Two others are for the mobility-focused Anuvu, which provides services such as in-flight Wi-Fi for Southwest Airlines, and the last satellite is for an unnamed commercial customer.
Gedmark previously estimated that broadband demand is a $1 trillion global opportunity and noted that Astranis’ existing pipeline includes contracts with options for additional satellites.
“We’re ready to go out and deploy a lot of these satellites around the world and help people connect,” Gedmark said.