Is the ORCHESTRA NGSO Effort Ready to Call?

Earlier this week, Viasat nixed Inmarsat’s “ORCHESTRA” V-band filing with the FCC, presumably ending the company’s lukewarm attempt to assemble a hybrid LEO/GEO/5G “dynamic mesh network.” The fate of Inmarsat’s LEO broadband filings with the ITU is unclear, but this move certainly puts the company’s NGSO efforts on hospice.

Details of the 198-satellite LEO constellation were never very well defined. And signs of ORCHESTRA being shelved cropped up as recently as last February when Inmarsat’s VP of Corp. Dev Larry Paul declared at the SmallSat Symposium that the LEO initiative “…just doesn’t make sense at this point” – a statement Inmarsat later walked back.

Inmarsat’s five-year budget (2021-2026) of $100 million for ORCHESTRA hardly inspired confidence that it was a priority. In fact, Inmarsat and, perhaps not coincidently, Viasat have been the two harshest critics of NGSO business models, arguing that GEO bandwidth economics will always trump that of an NGSO system.

That said, Viasat already filed for a 288-satellite NGSO constellation (a 14-fold increase from its originally planned 20-satellite system), so it’s possible that it’s simply cannibalizing Inmarsat’s filing to feed its own (and to adhere to FCC guidelines which prohibit multiple holdings for unbuilt systems). What is clear: Viasat has higher priorities (i.e., ViaSat-3 replacement) right now and less wiggle room (net leverage of ~4.0x) to embark on new initiatives.

Holding its course might make Viasat the last true champion of the theory that a standalone GEO constellation can compete with a multi-orbit model in today’s space economy. 

SOURCE: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/10724268872946/1