OneWeb Satellites to keep Toulouse factory open for other customers

Caleb Henry, for SpaceNews:

OneWeb Satellites will build other satellites roughly the same size as the 150-kilogram satellites under construction for OneWeb. Some designs may grow slightly larger, but OneWeb Satellites doesn’t intend to build much smaller than that.

“We won’t do everything. We are a certain size spacecraft with a certain capability and we can tweak some of the parameters a little bit. It’s not everything for everybody, but there are some very interesting things we can do,” he said.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week. It’s a very smart move for OneWeb.

Their architecture decisions force them to take a fresh approach to satellite production, so it’ll be very interesting to see what they can do as a production center for others.

Caleb and I talked about this sort of thing on the podcast a few weeks ago. It’s plausible to see a future of mass-produced-yet-configurable satellites take over from the one-of-a-kind, expensive, single satellite construction era.

I could very much see the ~200 kilogram satellite becoming to the next decade what the ~5,000 kilogram satellite has been to the last few. As we see with OneWeb, satellites in the 200 kilogram range can be launched on small, dedicated vehicles like LauncherOne, or put into a dispenser to launch as a set on a Soyuz or larger.

That’s a lot of flexibility for a market in transition.