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SpaceX’s Starlink space internet gets new competitor with OneWeb satellite launch

A Soyuz 2 rocket lifts off with OneWeb's first six satellites on February 27th. (Arianespace)

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7 years ago

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The most viable competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink Internet constellation has completed a demonstration launch, placing the first six OneWeb satellites in a circular orbit 1000 km (620 mi) above Earth.

Designed as a constellation of approximately 650-900 satellites, OneWeb aims to provide uninterrupted Internet access across the world with a focus on affordability for those living without a basic communications infrastructure. Assuming OneWeb’s first six spacecraft operate nominally in orbit, the first phase of the company’s constellation could be completed by late 2020 or early 2021, leading to initial operations with customers actually able to access the internet through their spacecraft.

Compared to OneWeb, SpaceX’s Starlink constellation (even in its earliest phases) is dramatically more expansive, featuring anywhere from 2-7x as many spacecraft and an overall bandwidth that is likely even greater still. As a partial consequence, Starlink spacecraft will likely be more complex and expensive to mass-produce and operate. Combined with optical (laser) interlinks that could make Starlink truly revolutionary, it remains to be seen whether the costs of high-tech solutions can be outweighed by their intrinsic benefits.

Thanks to the relative simplicity and lower mass of OneWeb’s spacecraft, as well as a partnership with industry heavyweight Airbus Defence and Space and the partial completion of a Florida-based satellite factory, OneWeb undeniably has several steps up on SpaceX, at least with respect to the goal of reaching initial commercial operations as quickly as possible. SpaceX has already gained experience operating its first two demonstration satellites – known as Tintin A and B – for a full year on-orbit, but all that is known Starlink’s first operational launches is that CEO Elon Musk is dead-set on commencing deployment no later than June 2019. Meanwhile, the status of SpaceX’s production facilities is unclear, with two mid-sized buildings in Redmond, Washington known to be dedicated to the program.

An array of job posts and brief hints from primary and secondary sources indicate that the Starlink program is already heavily focused on ramping up spacecraft production after several years of development. It’s unclear if a planned second set of prototype satellites is still on the books, hinted at by Musk in the months after the first pair’s February 2018 launch debut.

 

Aside from the satellites themselves, prospective global internet constellation operators must face the equally critical and challenging task of developing a simultaneously high-performance and low-cost user terminal, the antenna and associated electronics that turn spacecraft signals into an accessible and reliable internet connection. SpaceX’s work in this direction has been silent, while OneWeb founder Greg Wyler recently began teasing and describing the company’s own work in that direction, hinting that his team has already arrived at a $15 antenna prototype capable of supporting 20-60 Mbps (megabits per second).

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Meanwhile, the hopeful success of the company’s first launch will pave the way for the first full launch of OneWeb spacecraft, potentially as many as 32-36 at once on Arianespace’s Russian Soyuz 2 launch vehicle. OneWeb has 21 launches manifested on Soyuz 2 rockets, scheduled to occur at a more or less monthly cadence between the first operational launch and the completion of Phase 1’s 650-satellite constellation. Shortly after the first launch was completed, Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël announced that it had struck a deal with OneWeb as the official customer for the first two launches of its Ariane 6 rocket, meant to debut as early as 2020.

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch

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4 hours ago

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August 1, 2026

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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.

The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.

Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.

The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.

As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo

SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.

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5 hours ago

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August 1, 2026

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SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.

The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.

The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.

Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.

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Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

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3 days ago

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July 29, 2026

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SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.

The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.

SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters

Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.

SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.

With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.

Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.

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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

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