On Sept. 15, 2026, Eutelsat Group Chief Executive Officer Jean-François Fallacher outlined the company’s long-term Low Earth Orbit constellation roadmap during an executive session at World Space Business Week in Paris.
The operator projects maintaining a fleet of approximately 1,300 active OneWeb satellites in orbit by 2030 before executing a planned transition of commercial and government customers to the European Union’s IRIS² multi-orbit network early in the following decade.
Fleet Refresh Architecture and Order Progression
The 2030 fleet structure is supported by multiple procurement agreements with Airbus Defence and Space designed to replenish legacy first-generation satellites and expand constellation capacity. The replenishment strategy relies on sequential hardware tranches to sustain uninterrupted service across international mobile backhaul, aviation, maritime, and defense markets.
The initial phase of the fleet refresh includes two contracts awarded to Airbus between late 2025 and early 2026, which account for 440 Gen 1 replacement spacecraft. That procurement pipeline was supplemented by an order for 229 Gen 1.5 satellites. The Gen 1.5 units are engineered with upgraded software-defined capabilities and hosted payload accommodations, including dedicated defense payloads procured for the French Ministry of Armed Forces.
Multi-Orbit Alignment and IRIS² Migration Strategy
The decision to maintain a 1,300-satellite LEO baseline through 2030 provides a technical bridge to the deployment of the European Union’s secure sovereign constellation, IRIS². Rather than developing a standalone, fully proprietary second-generation (Gen 2) OneWeb architecture, Eutelsat is aligning its long-term Low Earth Orbit operational framework with the multi-orbit IRIS² system.
Under this strategy, the 669 replacement and Gen 1.5 satellites ordered across recent Airbus contracts will maintain continuity for existing enterprise, civil, and military user terminals. As IRIS² operational infrastructure comes online in the early 2030s, Eutelsat will begin migrating its commercial broadband and government communications traffic onto the unified network, leveraging both commercial and government-reserved capacity.
Operational Timeline
Airbus will continue manufacturing operations across the Gen 1 replacement and Gen 1.5 tranches to support ongoing replenishment launches through the late 2020s. Eutelsat expects the combined active fleet to reach its planned 1,300-satellite peak operational threshold by 2030, maintaining full global service coverage until the formal transition to IRIS² infrastructure begins.
