Blue Origin is joining the megaconstellation family with its own enterprise offering of 5,408 satellites in low and medium Earth orbit.
The new constellation will begin deployment in Q4 2027 and will “deliver symmetrical data speeds of up to 6 Tbps anywhere on Earth,” said the company.
Blue Origin said that its satellites will be optically interconnected “in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO)” which will enable “ultra-high-throughput links between global hubs and distributed, multigigabit user connections, particularly in remote, rural, and suburban areas where diverse fiber paths are costly, technically infeasible, or slow to deploy.”
The company says it meets “unmet needs of customers who are seeking higher throughput, symmetrical upload/download speeds, more redundancy, and rapid scalability.”
The company is touting its constellations download and uploads that far exceeds current LEO constellations. They state they will achieve download and upload speeds via RF up to 144 Gbps and up to 6 Tbps using optical data links.
The one tradeoff is the constellation as currently designed will only be able to serve approximately 100,000 customers.
The timeline for deployment of the constellation is quite fast, but as Blue Origin has its own launch capability in the reusable New Glenn rocket they can like SpaceX launch when they want to. It’s also noteworthy that New Glenn also has a 7 meter fairing compared to the SpaceX Falcon 5 meter fairing. Though, when Starship begins commercial use it will significant more volume including a 9 meter fairing.
Will TeraWave be a direct competitor for Canadian companies Telesat and Kepler Communications? Respectively, sort of and not really.
Foe Telesat, TeraWave might be considered a moderate competitor. Both are targeting the “Enterprise” and “Government” markets for data connectivity. The difference is that Telesat is positioned as a general-purpose enterprise ISP backbone (connects planes, ships, towns) whereas TeraWave positions itself more like a dedicated “pipeline” for massive data loads (up to 6 Tbps). Telesat will deploy two pathfinder Lightspeed satellites late this year followed by deployment of 154 satellites in 2027. Afterwards it plans to expand the initial constellation to 198 satellites.
For Kepler, TeraWave is not a direct competitor. They after different customers. TeraWave does is not offering space-to-space relay with third-party satellites (inter-satellite links), where as Kepler does. Kepler also hosts payloads with onboard processing. Kepler has already begun deployment of its optical data relay constellation with the first tranche of 10 satellites launching earlier this month.