The past year has been a roller-coaster ride in the financial markets and an unusual one for transaction activity.

On Dec. 12, news of the FCC’s final decision to reject Starlink’s appeal to qualify for $886M in federal subsidies to connect rural and unserved communities caused an uproar within the space sector and sparked heated political debate.

After declaring 100% success of all priority systems and subsystems aboard Project Kuiper’s first two prototypes launched Oct. 6, Amazon just dropped the mic.

Baffled by the labels on the Bloomberg chart above? Don’t worry. You are among the 99.9%¹ of people in the world who don’t operate in the world of high finance.

Barring any late-stage contracts, 2023 will conclude with 12 commercial GEO satellite orders, seven of which were micro GEOs (>1,000 kg).  

Three years since entering service, SpaceX’s Starlink internet is now available in 80 markets*, according to a Dec. 1 FCC filing.

After this month’s launch of the second-ever Starship vehicle, SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted a picture of four more Starships described as “the last of V1.”

A newfound ability to detect emissions from copper mines could revive demand for hosted payloads.

Military agencies have long been ideal customers for the satellite industry because of their willingness to pay a premium for resilient communications.

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U.S. lawmakers have been fretting since 2018 (when Northrop Grumman bought Orbital ATK) that the national supply base for solid rocket motors was becoming too concentrated.

Incorporating Optical Communications Terminals (OCTs) has become a baseline assumption for nearly every megaconstellation operator (i.e., Starlink, Kuiper, OneWeb Gen2, Lightspeed, PWSA, Rivada, and the EU’s IRIS²) due to their critical role in network capacity, latency, cybersecurity, and ground network costs.

This year Mongolia made two moves that will bring satellite connectivity to the landlocked country and could signal the beginning of sovereign communications unimpeded by authoritarian neighbors.

As the players in NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) transition program approach the second half of their Commercial LEO Destinations Program (CLDP) plans, one of the first-round draft picks just got traded to another team.

Military agencies have long been ideal customers for the satellite industry because of their willingness to pay a premium for resilient communications.