Main Engine Cut Off

I’ve been kicking the news on this one around my head for a bit. I can’t quite come up with a grand unifying theory, but there are a couple of good reasons, though.

For Bharti—a huge telecom operating in India, parts of Africa, and a few other countries—the move makes a ton of sense. Constellations like OneWeb are going to be a huge factor in getting more connectivity to remote parts of the world. It’s a no-brainer for a telecom like Bharti, but it seems like they were looking for a complementary partner in the deal.

Turns out the UK is that partner. Aside from the obvious historical connections between the countries, they complement each other well because they are geographically distinct markets, so won’t compete for concurrent throughput.

The UK government, who wants and needs some new projects for growth and related economic reasons post-Brexit, might like the idea of providing services throughout remote regions of the country and the rest of Europe.

The UK also has a pretty good space sector at the moment, but intends to see more growth there. As far as their relationship with Europe, there is definitely some saltiness around being “left out” of the recent Copernicus contracts. It’s not surprising when you look at the ESA contributions, but I think the UK would quite like to have a huge launch contract to hold over Arianespace’s head—they have 19 of 22 launches left to go.

The UK and Bharti Global both put up $500 million for the acquisition, but there’s a lot of funding left to dump into this project for it to be successfully completed, so let’s see where that comes from.

I was wrong that Amazon would want the spectrum, but it sounds like they had other, more promising irons in the fire.