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TAMPA, Fla. — The fledgling small geostationary satellite manufacturing market is splitting across a spectrum of vertical integration strategies as companies weigh sovereignty, speed and scale in reshaping space-based communications.
On one end sits Switzerland’s Swissto12, which recently expanded downstream by acquiring Ku-band active electronically steered antenna (AESA) terminal assets from Hanwha Phasor, during the British company’s liquidation process.
“It allows us to fast-track Ku-band development and merge it with our existing Ka-band efforts, converging both tracks into a unified solution,” Swissto12 CEO Emile de Rijk told SpaceNews.
He added that the acquisition does not affect the five satellite programs the company has announced so far, with its debut IS-45 spacecraft remaining on track to deploy in early 2027 for Intelsat. But the terminal work, he said, adds another layer of vertical integration that positions the company to serve a broader swath of customers.
“We are seeing strong and growing interest in our AESA terminal line,” he said, “particularly from government and mobility customers who require resilient, interoperable solutions across” geostationary and lower orbits
Software-only approach
At the other end is ReOrbit of Finland, which is committed to leaving hardware to third parties even after recently raising more than $50 million in one of the largest early-stage space financings in Europe this year.
Instead, ReOrbit is building its business around a software-defined operating system called Strawberry, which CEO Sethu Suvanam says helps sovereign customers dictate their own supply chains, manufacturing partners and ground systems.
“We are purely focused on building sovereign capabilities … sovereignty as a service,” Suvanam said Sept. 17 during World Space Business Week in Paris.
He argued that vertical integration can conflict with sovereignty, since governments increasingly want to control who supplies each subsystem, how data flows end-to-end and how ecosystems develop over time.
ReOrbit is betting that buying all hardware externally and integrating it around its software core will resonate with governments seeking secure, independent networks amid rising geopolitical uncertainty.
Payload focus
Somewhere in the middle is AscendArc, a Portland, Oregon-based startup that earlier this month announced South Korea’s flagship operator as its first customer in a mission slated for the second half of 2027.
AscendArc CEO Chris McLain outlined efforts during the panel to vertically integrate around a novel payload design, focusing on squeezing more gigabits per kilogram through large-aperture antennas and hundreds of beams, while sourcing more standard spacecraft components off the shelf.
“Part of that is ultimately low cost when we get into mass manufacturing, but a lot of it up front is development time,” McLain said.
“So by controlling your own destiny, by having all of the key components in-house, we can move very quickly, and we can iterate very rapidly. That’s something you just can’t do if you’re contracting that out.”
According to McLain, AscendArc’s satellites would have the capacity of typical multi-ton geostationary spacecraft while being less than 1,000 kilograms. He also drew a direct comparison to terrestrial networks: dedicated fiber capacity in suburban markets typically costs about $1 per megabit per second per month, a price point he said AscendArc intends to match in its first-generation system.
“Now we don’t need to reinvent the reaction wheel,” McLain added.
“We can buy reaction wheels. We buy star trackers off the shelf. It’s not necessary to vertically integrate in those things that are common to many different satellites. It’s necessary in the things that are unique and give us our our ultimate economic advantage, which is the payload for us.”
Astranis, which was not on the panel and currently the only one of this new breed of small geostationary manufacturers to deploy satellites, is expanding rapidly on the back of its growing vertical integration strategy.
The San Francisco-based company announced Sept. 15 that its fourth batch of satellites is slated to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket in 2027 to low Earth orbit, and then use Impulse Space’s Helios kick stage to inject them directly into geostationary orbit.
Unlike the satellite maker’s two earlier missions that relied on months of orbit-raising using electric propulsion, Astranis CEO John Gedmark said the Helios system would cut the transfer to hours.
The six-satellite mission will boost Astranis’s fleet to 16 spacecraft in geostationary orbit by 2027, according to Gedmark, making it the eighth-largest commercial fleet.
Astranis’ third batch of satellites is slated to fly later this year, although the company has not provided an update following a propulsion issue with one of the four satellites launched on its second batch in late 2024.
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