On the afternoon of Sunday September 13th, a single Falcon 9 carried the final three O3b mPOWER satellites off SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral. SES confirmed the launch a few hours later, with telemetry acquired and first commands successful on all three satellites, the first contact that orbit raising and in-orbit testing depend on.
With those three in orbit, the constellation reaches its full thirteen satellites. SES first announced O3b mPOWER to the market in September 2017, and Sunday’s flight was the sixth launch campaign of the programme. It is the second generation of the MEO system SES has operated since the original O3b satellites launched in 2013.
Capacity across the whole network
In a short interview SES published after the launch, Dr Xavier Bertrán, SES’s Chief Product and Innovation Officer, described O3b mPOWER as “a fully integrated end-to-end system”. Building it, he said, required the company to learn orchestration and automation in the way resources are allocated between gateways and satellites.
Each of the six launches added capacity. Now that all thirteen satellites are in orbit, that orchestration runs across the complete constellation, so capacity can be allocated dynamically as demand changes across the network. Airlines and cruise lines, whose requirements shift over the course of a day, are likely to feel that flexibility as much as the extra capacity itself.
For customers
Inflight connectivity is usually limited by how much capacity reaches each aircraft, since a full cabin shares a single terminal. For aviation, Dr Bertrán put the figure at a minimum of 200 Mbps per aircraft.
Cruise and fixed customers get more capacity and more data volume out of the same milestone. Earlier in the interview he described the system as built for customers who need to move gigabits of data between sites, which on the fixed side usually means remote industrial operations.
For government users he framed the benefits differently. O3b mPOWER carries a digital payload, and Dr Bertrán tied it to resilience against jamming and interference. He also talked about governments deploying their own terminals in the field and using the capacity with their own systems as they see fit.
What comes next
Dr Bertrán closed by looking past this constellation, naming meoSphere and IRIS² as the initiatives that will extend SES’s MEO work into further multi-orbit services. With the constellation complete, that work starts from a network already running orchestration across thirteen satellites and their gateways. SES keeps a technical overview of O3b mPOWER here.
