France would more than double its stake in Eutelsat to nearly 30% as part of a $1.56 billion capital raise backed by multiple shareholders, bolstering the French operator’s plans to refresh its OneWeb constellation amid Starlink’s growing dominance.

The funds would be raised in two parts before the end of the year, Eutelsat announced June 19, a day after the French military agreed to buy OneWeb services over 10 years in a deal potentially worth up to one billion euros ($1.15 billion).

An initial 716 million euros would come from a capital raise priced at 4 euros per share, a 32% premium to the average price over the past 30 days. This tranche would be open only to a core group of shareholders: the French government, shipping giant CMA CGM, Indian telco Bharti Airtel and the FSP investment fund owned by seven France-based insurance firms.

These anchor shareholders would then take part in a subsequent 634 million euro rights issue open to all existing investors.

Eutelsat said the extra capital would help reduce its debt, positioning the company to take out loans on more favorable terms, such as financing backed by export credit agencies.

Preparing for the next chapter

Eutelsat operates over 30 geostationary spacecraft and more than 650 OneWeb broadband satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).

However, the operator said delays in ground infrastructure and regulatory approvals could push the start of fully global LEO services to the end of 2026.

Most OneWeb satellites were launched between 2020 and 2023, giving the constellation an expected design life running through 2027–2028.

Meanwhile, Eutelsat said secure and resilient multi-orbit connectivity is becoming an increasingly strategic priority, as Starlink — the only other fully operational LEO broadband network — has already deployed more than 7,800 satellites and continues to rapidly expand.

Eutelsat plans to invest up to 2.2 billion euros for the 440 satellites needed to sustain the OneWeb constellation over the coming years.

The company has already ordered 100 of these from Europe’s Airbus, slated to begin launching toward the end of 2026.

In addition, Eutelsat has committed about 2 billion euros for its share of IRIS², Europe’s public-private sovereign broadband constellation slated to come online around the end of the decade.

“The French State is proud to contribute to strengthening Eutelsat’s capital structure and support the company at pivotal stage of its development,” said Eric Lombard, French Minister for the Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty.

“This transaction reflects our strong commitment towards a major player in satellite connectivity — a strategic sector at the heart of Europe’s digital sovereignty — while fostering remarkable potential for technological innovation and sustainable economic growth.”

The U.S. military wants to turn its satellite communications into something that works like the internet — fluid, fast, and built on seamless interoperability between networks. But at an industry conference this week, Pentagon officials said the long envisioned military space internet is still a long way off.

In an era where commercial satellites outnumber military ones, the Defense Department is trying to tap into this diverse ecosystem, defense officials said June 17 at the SAE Media Group’s MilSatcom USA conference.

The goal is creating what DoD calls “enterprise satcom” — a virtualized, software-defined network that could automatically reroute communications between military, commercial and allied nations’ satellites if an adversary jams one satellite system.

But the reality today is an ecosystem full of manual processes, hardware silos and incompatible standards.

When you travel internationally, your iPhone doesn’t need different hardware to connect to local cell networks. That’s thanks to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a global collaboration that created unified technical standards for mobile networks decades ago.

After Resilience’s moon landing attempt, why openness is key to the lunar economy .

After the hard work of several hundred people from ispace-Japan and ispace-Europe over five years, and substantial financial investment by private institutional investors, mega-banks and Japanese retail investors — this mission was not funded by the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative — our colleagues overseas did not achieve the primary goal of safely landing on the moon.

But failures are only truly failures if we don’t learn from them.

In the spirit of openness and transparency, here’s what we know about the Resilience mission. Resilience’s onboard laser altitude range finder did not lock on to the lunar surface with enough time for the spacecraft to decelerate to the planned descent velocity. As a result, Resilience presumably experienced a hard landing at the moment we lost telemetry.

Now, we are forming an External Review Task Force composed of world-renowned independent experts to provide a third-party review of the technical cause analysis of the Resilience landing failure, and to suggest necessary improvements to mission reliability. In this, ispace will proceed with the maximum possible transparency and openness, ensuring that the entire space community can benefit from our temporary setback.

In addition, we plan to initiate an ispace-U.S. advisory group that includes internal and external experts who will meet regularly to ensure any systemic issues, including programmatic and managerial practices, are resolved so that our upcoming United States mission is kept on track and is successful.​

Even before Resilience’s landing attempt, ispace-U.S. incorporated lessons learned from ispace-Japan’s first mission in 2023. ispace-U.S.’s next generation lander, called APEX-1.0 builds upon the lessons learned from Resilience but contains significant improvements and enhancements and is a substantially different spacecraft than Resilience. For example, APEX 1.0 provides improved landing capability and accuracy compared to Resilience, using dissimilar redundancy and independent measurement techniques, along with the addition of Terrain Relative Navigation and Hazard Detection and Avoidance. For comparison, the Japanese Resilience spacecraft was designed to conduct a “blind landing.” Terrain Relative Navigation provides the ability to update position by comparing observed terrain to an onboard map. Hazard Detection and Avoidance supports the detection and avoidance of hazards such as boulders and craters. Based on lessons learned from Resilience, ispace-U.S. plans to further enhance and improve this system to increase the probability of a successful landing.

ispace has two mottos. The first, “Expand our planet — expand our future” acknowledges the importance of a significant lunar presence to the future of humanity. For our commercial lunar industry to be successful, all the organizations working toward creating a cis-lunar economy need to operate as a community, with extreme openness and transparency, so we can all learn from each other’s challenges and mistakes. Although this industry has for the most part acted in a uniquely transparent fashion and we have all learned from each other’s challenges, we can and must do more.

With the NASA CLPS initiative serving as a catalyst, the commercial space companies striving to routinely land on the moon can collectively jumpstart the cislunar economy and create the proverbial rising tide that lifts all (space)ships by banding together and sharing data, observations and lessons-learned. We as an industry should create a working group that serves as a forum for companies to not only share lessons learned, but also collectively contribute to the design of an architecture of a cis-lunar economy. We would then be able to collectively propose items such as interoperability standards, work together to establish shared infrastructure like relay satellites and power generation and, whenever possible, we could collaborate on individual mission objectives under the mindset that the success of one mission or company would benefit us all. Together, we can unlock amazing scientific discoveries, extract lunar resources that could dramatically improve life on Earth and leverage the technologies we develop in the process to transform the moon into a launching point that will open the door to Mars and the rest of the solar system.

ispace’s second motto is “Never quit the lunar quest.” Future success and reliability are built upon early failures. For example, not too long ago, a then-small space transportation startup called SpaceX failed to successfully launch its initial Falcon-1 rockets, three consecutive times. SpaceX learned from those early setbacks and went on to build the most reliable and cost-effective rockets in history. Efforts like that serve as “shots on goal” and, the more shots you take, the more you score. In the case of ispace-Japan’s Resilience, this mission was a shot on goal that didn’t cost the American taxpayers any money but will nonetheless bolster the chances of future lunar missions succeeding.

“Never quit the lunar quest” acknowledges that expanding a human presence to the moon is an audacious challenge. It reminds us that although we have experienced setbacks in the past, and will undoubtedly face setbacks in the future, we will stay the course. Like SpaceX, ispace will leverage invaluable lessons learned from these early missions to deliver not just payloads, but a future of awe and wonder, reliable missions and high value to every customer that flies with us.

Portal Space Systems will create a second factory to scale up production of high-performance in-space vehicles as it gears up for initial test flights in 2026.

The company announced at the Paris Air Show June 17 that it will establish a second factory, five kilometers from its current facilities in Bothell, Washington, for its Supernova vehicle. The new factory, spanning more than 4,600 square meters, is scheduled to open in late 2026.

The second facility will allow Portal to produce one Supernova spacecraft a month starting in 2027. Supernova is the spacecraft the company is developing that uses solar thermal propulsion to provide both high thrust and high delta V, or change in velocity.

“By expanding our footprint in Bothell, we’re doubling down on local talent, proximity to core operations, and a growing aerospace ecosystem supported by state leadership,” Jeff Thornburg, chief executive of Portal Space Systems, said in a statement.

SpaceX rocket being tested in Texas explodes, but no injuries reported. The company said the Starship “experienced a major anomaly” at about 11 p.m. while on the test stand preparing for the tenth flight test at Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site at the southern tip of Texas.

“A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for,” SpaceX said in a statement on the social platform X.

It marked the latest in a series of incidents involving Starship rockets. On Jan. 16, one of the massive rockets broke apart in what the company called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” sending trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean. Two months later, Space X lost contact with another Starship during a March 6 test flight as the spacecraft broke apart, with wreckage seen streaming over Florida.

Following the back-to-back explosions, one of the 403-foot (123-metre) Starship rockets, launched from the southern tip of Texas, tumbled out of control and broke apart on March 27. SpaceX had hoped to release a series of mock satellites following liftoff, but that got nixed because the door failed to open all the way. Then the spacecraft began spinning and made an uncontrolled landing in the Indian Ocean.

At the time, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk called the launch “a big improvement” from the two previous demos and promised a much faster launch pace moving forward, with a Starship soaring every three to four weeks for the next three flights.

SpaceX said Wednesday night’s explosion posed no hazards to nearby communities. It asked people not to try to approach the site.

The company said it is working with local officials to respond to the explosion.

Astroscale, the space junk removal venture, announced a British government contract June 16 worth about $7 million to deploy a pair of cubesats in 2027 to monitor space weather while tracking other objects in low Earth orbit (LEO).

The Japanese company’s British subsidiary has ordered the satellites from U.K.-based Open Cosmos as part of the 5.15 million British pound contract.

The near-identical spacecraft would fly in close formation for the year-long Orpheus mission, equipped with a hyperspectral imaging sensor to detect and identify targets of interest, and four other payloads to study geophysical activity in the upper atmosphere.

The US Naval Research Laboratory, University of Bath and small satellite specialist Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. are developing the payloads focused on examining the ionosphere, where charged particles disturbed by solar activity can disrupt satellite signals, navigation systems and radio communications.

“Changes in space weather can have a critical impact on satellites which provide navigation aids, telecommunications and data transmission,” said Paul Hollinshead, CEO of the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).

“Sustained investment in space research in collaboration with our international partners strengthens the security of U.K. interests in space.”

Dstl, an executive agency of the U.K. Ministry of Defence, awarded the Orpheus contract via the Serapis framework managed by British aerospace contractor BAE Systems.

Astroscale said it would operate the Orpheus satellites, leveraging its rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) expertise following an in-orbit servicing mission in 2021 that demonstrated its satellite capture technology.

“Whilst the nominal Orpheus mission is not an RPO mission, it requires two spacecraft to be flown in close formation using a lead-trail configuration,” an Astroscale spokesperson said via email.

“Astroscale’s flight experience of RPO missions makes them very well equipped to achieve formation flying in LEO, particularly when the operator needs to consider disturbances that can significantly impact the atmospheric drag.”

The three-year Dstl contract fully funds the project, including design, launch and operations.

#FCC highlights national security role in satellite licensing reforms . ARLINGTON, Va. — The Federal Communications Commission is reshaping how it regulates space systems, with national security emerging as a central driver alongside commercial innovation, a top agency official said June 16.

Speaking at the SAE Media Group’s Milsatcom USA conference, Jay Schwarz, chief of the FCC’s space bureau, outlined a series of ongoing reforms aimed at modernizing satellite licensing and opening new spectrum bands. While these efforts are often framed in economic terms, Schwarz said they also reflect a growing focus on supporting U.S. defense capabilities in space.

“A strong national defense very much motivates the work that we’re doing at the FCC,” Schwarz said.

The FCC’s space bureau oversees the licensing of satellites and ground stations, manages spectrum allocation for both geostationary and non-geostationary satellite systems, and regulates how U.S. companies operate in space. As private sector investment in space accelerates — particularly in low-Earth orbit broadband constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink — the FCC has taken steps to streamline approvals and improve coordination across government agencies, he said.

“We know how urgent it is for all of our warfighters to have secure, reliable communications for an increasingly contested space domain,” Schwarz said. “So I care about the economic benefits, but I also care deeply that America’s service members are equipped with what they need.”

One early result of this push is a reduction in the #FCC’s licensing backlog. Schwarz said the space bureau has reduced pending applications by 35 percent since January, including those for new space stations and ground infrastructure.

Modernizing regulations for non-geostationary satellite systems is another priority. The FCC is considering revising so-called “power limit” rules aimed at preventing interference between low-orbit constellations and traditional geostationary satellites and earth stations. Schwarz said these reforms could help pave the way for higher-throughput services that rival terrestrial broadband.

“Our hope is that this will be done in a way that ultimately we can get much faster fiber-like throughputs from space,” Schwarz said.

The agency is also weighing whether to open roughly 20,000 megahertz of new spectrum across several underutilized bands, including the 12 GHz, 42 GHz, 52 GHz, and W-band frequencies. Through a formal Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the FCC is examining how best to modernize access to these bands for satellite communications, which could significantly expand capacity for both commercial and defense use.

The proposed reforms come amid global shifts in spectrum policy, as other nations move to enable next-generation satellite services. Schwarz said the FCC’s initiatives are intended to help keep the U.S. competitive in the rapidly evolving space domain.

“We want to make sure that there’s a wide variety of systems available from which the government can procure services,” he said. “If we supply more spectrum, then existing players, new players, big players, small players—they can all compete.”

Schwarz said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has made these reforms a priority as the space economy becomes more integrated with national infrastructure and defense planning.

How two #satellites are mimicking total solar eclipses in space.

A pair of European satellites have created the first artificial solar eclipses by flying in precise and fancy formation, providing hours of on-demand totality for scientists.

The European Space Agency released the eclipse pictures at the Paris Air Show on Monday. Launched late last year, the orbiting duo have churned out simulated solar eclipses since March while zooming tens of thousands of miles (kilometres) above Earth.

Flying 492 feet (150 metres) apart, one satellite blocks the sun like the moon does during a natural total solar eclipse as the other aims its telescope at the corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere that forms a crown or halo of light.

It’s an intricate, prolonged dance requiring extreme precision by the cube-shaped spacecraft, less than 5 feet (1.5 metres) in size. Their flying accuracy needs to be within a mere millimeter, the thickness of a fingernail. This meticulous positioning is achieved autonomously through GPS navigation, star trackers, lasers and radio links.

Dubbed Proba-3, the US$210 million mission has generated 10 successful solar eclipses so far during the ongoing checkout phase. The longest eclipse lasted five hours, said the Royal Observatory of Belgium’s Andrei Zhukov, the lead scientist for the orbiting corona-observing telescope. He and his team are aiming for a wondrous six hours of totality per eclipse once scientific observations begin.

Scientists already are thrilled by the preliminary results that show the corona without the need for any special image processing, said Zhukov.

“We almost couldn’t believe our eyes,” Zhukov said in an email. “This was the first try, and it worked. It was so incredible.”

Zhukov anticipates an average of two solar eclipses per week being produced for a total of nearly 200 during the two-year mission, yielding more than 1,000 hours of totality. That will be a scientific bonanza since full solar eclipses produce just a few minutes of totality when the moon lines up perfectly between Earth and the sun — on average just once every 18 months.

The sun continues to mystify scientists, especially its corona, which is hotter than the solar surface. Coronal mass ejections result in billions of tons of plasma and magnetic fields being hurled out into space. Geomagnetic storms can result, disrupting power and communication while lighting up the night sky with auroras in unexpected locales.

While previous satellites have generated imitation solar eclipses — including the European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar Orbiter and Soho observatory — the sun-blocking disk was always on the same spacecraft as the corona-observing telescope. What makes this mission unique, Zhukov said, is that the sun-shrouding disk and telescope are on two different satellites and therefore far apart.

The distance between these two satellites will give scientists a better look at the part of the corona closest to the limb of the sun.

“We are extremely satisfied by the quality of these images, and again this is really thanks to formation flying” with unprecedented accuracy, ESA’s mission manager Damien Galano said from the Paris Air Show.

#China launches new seismo-electromagnetic #satellite with #European partners . China launched a second collaborative seismo-#electromagnetic satellite early Saturday, aimed at detecting electromagnetic precursors to natural disasters such as earthquakes.

A Long March 2D rocket lifted off at 3:56 a.m. Eastern (0756 UTC) June 14 from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China. Launch footage showed insulation tiles falling away from the rocket as it climbed into a clear blue sky above the spaceport, with hypergolic exhaust also visible.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced launch success within 40 minutes of liftoff, revealing the mission to be carrying the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite-2 (CSES-2), also known as Zhangheng-2, named after a Han dynasty polymath.

CSES-2 is based on CSES-1, which launched in 2018 and developed in collaboration with Italy, but also features upgrades in terms of design lifetime and expanded observation capabilities. A new ionospheric photometer has been added to improve the satellite’s ability to analyze the ionosphere’s layered structure in greater detail.

Like CSES-1, the satellite will look for correlation between earthquakes and electron flux activity in the inner Van Allen belt.

“The satellite has a design life of six years and carries nine payloads, including an electric field detector developed by China and Italy and a high-energy particle detector developed by Italy,” according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA). Austria is also involved in the mission, with the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IWF) providing a scalar magnetometer.

CSES-2 will monitor global electromagnetic fields, ionospheric and atmospheric conditions in near real-time, and detect electromagnetic anomalies linked to geological or human activities, as well as thunderstorm and lightning events. CSES-2 aims to enhance China’s early warning and risk assessment capabilities, and monitoring of natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and severe storms.

The satellite is intended to operate in a 507-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit, matching that of CSES-1, but with a phase difference of 180 degrees. U.S. Space Force space domain awareness cataloged an object associated with the June 14 launch in a closely matching orbit. CSES-2 is based on a 3-axis-stabilized CAST2000 platform from DFH Satellite Co., Ltd., under the umbrella of CASC.

The new satellite looks to build on the work of the first in the series. The CSES-1 satellite detected significant changes in electric and magnetic field oscillations, plasma density and energetic particles that correlate with seismic activity and thunderstorms, according to a paper published in the journal Earthquake Research Advances in January.

Africa is seeking a greater role in the global space economy following the official inauguration of the African Space Agency (AfSA) April 20. The ceremony marked the culmination of a decade-long effort to unify programs across 55 countries.

Headquartered in Egypt, the first African country to operate its own satellite in 1998, AfSA aims to coordinate and empower continental space activities through collaboration and shared resources.

As one of its initial actions, AfSA signed far-reaching cooperation agreements with ESA, the UAE Space Agency and Russia’s #Roscosmos.

Addressing African challenges

Over the past three decades, 18 African nations have collectively deployed more than 60 satellites. Yet, Africa’s space sector remains relatively small on the global stage and heavily dependent on foreign support.

African nations collectively allocated just $426 million for space activities in 2025, including contributions to AfSA, according to boutique consulting firm Space in Africa.

In contrast, ESA has an $8.7 billion budget for 2025, in addition to sizable space-related contributions from the European Union, while NASA’s fiscal year 2025 allocation alone reached $25.4 billion.

According to Space in Africa’s figures, the amount African nations allocated for 2025 is also down 7.73% year-on-year following economic pressures, shifting national priorities and some projects moving from construction to an operational phase.

Depreciation of national currencies against the U.S. dollar contributed to the headline decline. Space in Africa senior analyst Mustapha Iderawumi said some countries maintained or slightly increased their space budgets in local currencies.

Nigeria, for example, increased its local currency budget by 47.5% to 94.30 billion Nigerian Naira ($60 million), yet currency depreciation significantly reduced its dollar equivalent compared with previous years.
Managing foreign influence

Although annual space agency budgets across Africa remain modest, countries are increasingly leveraging financing from outside the continent to develop sovereign satellite capabilities.

Angola’s yearly space budget has consistently been under $5 million, Iderawumi noted, but in January its government took out a 225 million euro ($255 million) loan from a French investment bank to fund ANGEO-1, its inaugural Earth observation satellite.

And while European aerospace giant Airbus is building ANGEO-1, a new breed of manufacturer is gaining traction with smaller, cost-effective satellites in geostationary and low Earth orbit to help countries join the space community.

Last year, European microsatellite specialist EnduroSat announced plans to build Botswana’s inaugural satellite — Botsat-1, an Earth observation spacecraft based on a three-unit (3U) standard cubesat structure — in collaboration with a local university.

Botsat-1 is also part of a broader goal to build out a space hub in the country, where engineers from Botswana International University of Science and Technology would ultimately operate the satellite using software from EnduroSat.
Equitable space access

Facing the rapid expansion of Starlink and other major megaconstellations, AfSA arrives amid rising global pressure to ensure equitable access to limited orbital slots and radio frequencies.

South Africa, boasting the largest space budget on the continent, recently revised regulations to facilitate the entry of Starlink and other foreign communications providers, following a high-level diplomatic visit to the United States in May. The high cost of satellite equipment and subscriptions remains a substantial barrier to widespread adoption.

At the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2023, industry executives highlighted growing concerns from developing nations about being locked out from increasingly congested orbital environments.

One outcome of WRC-23 was a decision to formally study equitable procedures for allocating access to critical Q and V spectrum bands.

AfSA is also pursuing initiatives to enhance transparency, competitive bidding and equitable participation for space contractors in Africa.

But perhaps most importantly, advanced satellite technologies are broadly recognized as essential tools for strengthening the agricultural markets that serve as a cornerstone for many African economies.

According to the United Nations, about a fifth of Africa’s population faces food insecurity, with regional disparities prevalent across the continent.

Space also offers solutions for the continent’s considerable digital divide. With nearly two-thirds of Africans lacking broadband access, satellite services can efficiently reach underserved areas where geography and prohibitive ground telecoms infrastructure costs pose significant challenges.

AfSA’s success may be measured by how much it changes there.

This article first appeared in the June 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine with the title “Africa’s united space front.”