SatNews

Satellite Industry Intelligence Since 1983

THE SIGNAL

The Signal is our editorial vantage point—focused and tuned to what moves the market. It delivers analysis and perspective from SatNews, focused on signal over noise.

The Pentagon’s SmallSats Have An Amnesia Problem

March 20, 2026 / Military & Defense

The aerospace and defense industry has universally accepted that the future of orbital superiority lies in proliferated, software-defined constellations. The mandate from the Space Development Agency (SDA), with support from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), is clear: move away from vulnerable, exquisite "battlestars" and build agile, interconnected data networks in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). But while our architectural theory has evolved, the hardware foundation we are building it on is trapped in a dangerous compromise.

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Sovereign Checkpoints and Debt Cliffs

February 25, 2026 / Contracts & Commercial Deals

The commercial satellite communications sector has reached a structural turning point. The assumption of a borderless sky, where global mesh networks and technical neutrality defined market access, no longer holds. The industry has entered a new phase in which states intervene directly to enforce what amounts to orbital sovereignty.

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The Fractal Lab – Part II

February 2, 2026 / Data Processing & AI/ML

In Part 2 of this series, we examine the second bottleneck facing the Orbital Data Center (ODC) : Data Gravity. We will explore why moving exabytes to and from orbit is harder than processing them, and how this specific constraint fractures the market into two mutually exclusive compute types: the high-speed "Real-Time Reduction Hub" and the massive "Batch Trainer."  We will also examine other computing challenges unique to space.

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