Europe

On Tuesday, 18 December 2018, and Arianespace Soyuz launch vehicle will lift off for the 20th time from Europe’s spaceport at the Guiana Space Centre (GSC), carrying the CSO-1 security and defence Earth-observation satellite for the Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES) and the French defence procurement agency DGA.

Spire Global, Inc, the world's largest space to cloud analytics company, has announced Spire's most recently launched satellites are the first satellites in the world to use Galileo GNSS signals to measure radio occultation (GNSS-RO) profiles in a production capacity for the weather community.

ICEYE, the Finnish Earth observation company attempting to create the world’s largest synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite constellation, has published its first radar image from the ICEYE-X2 satellite, launched on Spaceflight’s historic SSO-A mission two weeks ago.

The UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down has issued a tender for the development of a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite reconnaissance system that weighs less than 500 kilograms, with the aim of having an on-orbit demonstrator satellite by 2022 and the start of an operational constellation for the UK's Ministry of Defence by 2025, subject to funding, according to a report in Wired UK.

The Arctic Shipping Company has chosen Maritime Connect from Orange Business Services to keep its cargo ships connected to the network while at sea.

Arianespace has been chosen by the Slovenian Centre of Excellence for Space Sciences and Technologies (SPACE-SI) to launch the Next-Generation Earth Monitoring and Observation High-Definition (NEMO-HD) microsatellite on the Vega launch vehicle as part of the Small Spacecraft Mission Service (SSMS) Proof of Concept (POC) flight in 2019.

British built VESTA telecommunications satellite will improve safety and security for commercial shipping.

MASMOVIL Group, Spain’s fourth largest telecommunications operator, has signed an agreement with Eutelsat’s subsidiary, Eurobroadband Infrastructure, to distribute broadband services to under-connected areas across the country via the KA-SAT satellite.

SpaceX successfully launched its Spaceflight SSO-A: SmallSat Express mission to low-Earth orbit on Monday, 3 December 2018 at 10:34am PST, from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California using a Falcon 9 satellite launch vehicle.

When talking about GEO versus NGSO systems – predominantly LEO and MEO – one typically ends up in a discussion about latency and how MEO and LEO are capable of offering much lower latencies relative to the traditional GEO satellites. Alternatively one may also end up in an endless debate about satellite pricing and how it will come down by virtue of so much (NGSO) capacity flooding the market, causing many challenges for many satellite operators.