SES launches O3b mPower satellites, eyeing government, defense sectors

CAPE CANAVERAL — Luxembourg-based SES’s first two O3b mPower communications satellites, aimed largely at the government and defense markets, were successfully launched on Friday.

The two birds were lofted on a reusable Falcon 9 launch vehicle after a nail-biting delay attributed to a technical issue on the ground at SpaceX’s Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station here. A SpaceX official at the site told Breaking Defense that the rocket was on about its eighth mission. Up to now, Falcon 9’s record for reuse is 14 times with another rocket, the official added, although the firm is hoping to hit 15 with an upcoming launch.

In all, SES intends to orbit 11 of the new satellites in a medium Earth orbit (MEO) constellation. Company officials didn’t describe any per-existing arrangements, but said the constellation is designed specifically for the use of government and defense customers that want secure communications for operators on-the-move.

“The government side is incredibly interested, because we offer less complexity and more performance without sacrificing security,” Will Tong, head of SES Strategic Government Initiatives for Aero & ISR Defense, told Breaking Defense in an interview prior to the launch. “With O3b mPower, we can pretty much give each user … their own link.”

The O3b mPower satellites are built by Boeing, and sport higher throughput than SES’s first generation O3b birds, and the capability to link to aircraft, ships and/or ground vehicles on the move to transmit intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, officials from both companies told Breaking Defense.

Perhaps most importantly, SES officials said, the each satellite can support up to 5,000 digitally formed beams, using open architectures that allow governments to tailor the network to their own security standards and maintain national custody of the data links.

“If you think about the way governments are thinking about security and sovereignty, that means to two things. One, they want complete control over the network that’s only possible on networks which are open architecture in which you can build sovereign gateways and deliver sovereign services. The other thing is they want access to multiple layers — they want access to geostationary to medium Earth orbit and to low Earth orbit,” Steve Collar, SES CEO, told reporters at a briefing on the day of the launch.

In the US, company officials explained, this means leveraging the capabilities of the former Leonardo DRS Global Enterprise Solutions, which SES acquired earlier this year. DRS GES specialized in managed satcom services for the Defense Department and other agencies, across multiple orbits.

SES announced on Dec. 8 it had changed the name of its US subsidiary SES Government Solutions based in Reston, Va. to form SES Space & Defense, reflecting the DRS GES acquisition and an increased corporate focus on the US government and DoD customers. The re-branded subsidiary further was restructured into two business units, Space Initiatives and Defense Networks.

“We acquired DRS GES a few months back there,” Tong said. “They’ve built the most robust end-to-end government network that’s commercially managed. So they are actually accredited from the terrestrial side all the way to the satellite side within their network. And we feel that we can leverage into that, build mPower into that, so that we can really give government users the security, and the resiliency they want with the open, flexible architectures that they desire.”

A leg up for SES in marketing O3b mPower to the US government may be Washington’s desire to find an alternative to SpaceX’s Starlink to help assure communications and command and control capabilities for the embattled Ukrainian government in its efforts to repel Russia’s on-going invasion. The company has long been providing television reception in Ukraine via its satellites in geostationary orbit.

SES needs six O3b mPower satellites in MEO to cover the globe, but that won’t happen until next year due to a series of delays. The first two satellites originally were to be launched in 2021. Collar told reporters that those two satellites now will reach their intended orbit “by about April,” and that the company could then begin testing.

The next four O3b mPower birds, he said, currently are slated for two launches in the first quarter of 2023 and by third quarter “will be delivering to customers around the world.”