Satellite Industry Intelligence Since 1983
February 16, 2026 — Rakuten Mobile, Inc. and the University of Tokyo have been selected by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to lead a major research and development project […]
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February 16, 2026 — LMT Group and Spanish satellite operator Sateliot have launched a 12-month joint initiative with the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop a universal dual-mode IoT module. […]
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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Novaspace Partner Nathan De Ruiter presented staggering figures. Opening the floor with an exclusive forecast, he predicted that 70,000 small satellites launching over the next decade will represent an investment of roughly $134 billion. Yet the mechanism for getting those satellites’ data back to Earth remains archaic, fragmented, and dangerously slow. We have entered the era of the Data Trap, where terabytes of potential insight perish in orbit because the physical pipe to the ground is too narrow.
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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Taking the stage, Dr. Bryan Benedict, Senior Director of Innovation at SES Space & Defense, dismantled rather than defended the legacy model. He described the merger between satellite giants SES and Intelsat that created a fleet of over 100 operational spacecraft not as a strategic power play but as a tactic necessary for survival.
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SAN FRANCISCO, California – As the Earth Observation (EO) market enters a hyper-operational phase in 2026, the reliance on massive, multibillion-dollar satellites is rapidly giving way to agile “tiny” satellite […]
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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. The free drinks at SmallSat Symposium usually signal a celebration, but this year they feel more like a necessity. If 2024 was the year of the press release, early 2026 is the year of the hangover. Breathless promises of ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity from space have collided with a formidable wall of physics, finance, and federal regulation.
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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Rockets still make a lot of noise, but the revolution visible at the SmallSat Symposium moves silently, digitally, and at the speed of code. For decades “metal benders”—those massive aerospace conglomerates that first weld titanium and then figure out the flight computer—have defined the space industry. That era is officially obsolete.
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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. The mood at the SmallSat Symposium has shifted from anxiety to resolve. While previous years were defined by fear of orbital overcrowding, this year marks the moment the industry decided to act. Experts at the Space Domain Awareness panel officially retired the “Big Sky” theory, the old assumption that space is too vast for collisions to matter. Yet panic did not replace this outdated concept. Instead, a sophisticated, militarized professionalism has taken command.
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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. The polite fiction that the commercial space industry exists primarily for crop yields and climate monitoring has ended. During the symposium’s Future of Geospatial Intelligence session, industry titans stopped pretending their product is intended for sale to NGOs, admitting they are instead building a new global backbone for national defense.
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iDirect Government (iDirectGov), a major provider of satellite communications for defense and government sectors, announced a successful live over-the-air (OTA) point-to-point test validating the DVB-S2X standard on its 450 Software-Defined […]
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