Welcome to The OuterSpark, here I make sense of the space industry one week at a time: what's being built, who's building it, and how you get in!
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Thank you. Here's what's on my radar this week:
This Week: Everyone ‘Bought’ Their Way In
On 24 July, Amazon asked the US regulator for permission to launch up to 5,105 satellites that would beam voice, text and data straight to ordinary smartphones. No dish, no add-on box.
The interesting part isn't the satellite count. It's the spectrum.
Spectrum is simply the set of frequencies a satellite is legally allowed to transmit on. You can build the best satellite ever made, but without rights to a slice of spectrum, you aren't allowed to switch it on. Amazon's network would run on frequencies owned by Globalstar, a company Amazon is currently buying for over $11bn. That deal doesn't close until 2027, so Amazon is asking regulators to approve a system built on airwaves it doesn't own yet.
Back in April, the regulator effectively locked existing operators into those bands, so nobody new could simply apply for them. Everyone chasing this market arrived at the same conclusion at the same time: if you can't apply for spectrum, buy the company that already holds it.
SpaceX paid around $17bn for EchoStar's. Amazon is paying $11bn or more for Globalstar. Rocket Lab is paying roughly $8bn for Iridium. That's $36bn inside twelve months, and almost none of it bought hardware.
My read: we talk about space as a technology race. It's becoming a rights race. Amazon's hard problem was never manufacturing 5,105 satellites. It's licences and launch slots. The company has around 390 satellites in orbit against a commitment of 3,232 by July 2029, and its bottleneck has been rockets, not factories.
Three Things Worth Knowing
A few other things that crossed my desk this week that I thought might be relevant to you:
Starmind has a name
SpaceX confirmed what it's calling its planned AI satellite constellation: orbital data centres running on near constant sunlight, roughly a hundred times the scale of today's Starlink. Treat the numbers with caution, the direction seriously. Source
Somebody has to maintain all this
California startup ORBES unveiled Exo-ORB, a sub-26kg satellite that launches attached to a large platform, then flies 10 to 20 metres away to inspect it. First customer is an orbital data centre.
Source
Europe is going hunting for lunar ice
ESA put €65m into MAGPIE, Europe's first lunar polar ice rover, with ispace-Europe as prime. That's about 24 times what ESA had previously committed.
Source
From the Inside
Something I picked up from eight years inside this industry, which you won't find it in a press release:
If you are early in your career or coming in this industry completely fresh, build the courage and reach out to senior executives in the industry directly (LinkedIn) for advice, mentorship or thoughts on a specific topic. Seven out of ten times, they won’t reply back, but the three that do will end up becoming a solid contact which can lead you to interesting oportunities. This is the quickest way how I managed to build my network.
Just for You
If you're working on getting into space, or building something in it, here are some practical information worth looking at this week:
Upcoming Deadlines
C-LEO Call 3 (UK Space Agency) is open now. £42m for satellite communications technology: on-board processing, active antennas, optical links, networking and routing, and user terminals. Stage One closes at midday on Monday 7 September. There's a consortium building event at Harwell on Thursday 6 August, and honestly that's the real reason to go. That room is where the partnerships for the next three years get formed.
Upcoming Events
UK Space Power Conference, 23 and 24 September, IET Savoy Place, London. Delivered by UK Space Command. If defence space is where you want to end up, this is the room.
UK Earth Observation Conference, 15 to 17 September, University of Warwick. More academic, far cheaper, and much easier to actually talk to people at.
If you want the fuller map of how the UK sector fits together, who funds what, and where the doors are, the UK Space Sector Playbook is free on my Gumroad.
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Till next time!
Ricky
