Airbus Rejects Idea of Moving OneWeb Satellite Manufacture to UK UPDATE

The Head of Airbus US Space Systems, Debra Facktor, appears to have flatly rejected the idea that construction of OneWeb‘s new Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband satellites could in the future be moved from their $85m (£64m) facility in Florida (USA) and shifted over to the United Kingdom.

Last month saw the UK government and Indian conglomerate Bharti Global table a successful £800m ($1bn) bid to rescue the British-registered space company OneWeb from bankruptcy, which will see the UK invest £400m ($500m) in order to help build a new global network of LEO satellites for ultrafast broadband and possibly GPS (here). Some 74 LEOs have already been launched but they’ll need 648 for limited global coverage.

At the time the British Secretary of State for Business, Alok Sharma, suggested that the acquisition would create the “opportunity to further develop our strong advanced manufacturing base right here in the UK,” although no specific plans were revealed to clarify precisely how the minister saw that happening. Previous reports had suggested that the Government might attempt to move satellite manufacturing to home soil.

Despite the turmoil of recent months, Airbus has continued to build the compact LEOs at their Florida facility (much of this is an automated process). This week a new interview on SpaceNews revealed that Airbus are also preparing to ramp-up production. Suffice to say there seems to be little expectation of a major shift to the UK.

Debra Facktor, Head of Airbus US Space Systems, said:

“We are committed to the U.S. We are in the space market and we’ve invested in Florida, so keeping our Florida operations is absolutely our intent and our plan.”

In fairness any attempt to shift production to the UK would be quite disruptive and seems likely to cause delays, as well as additional costs. Otherwise a lot of big uncertainties continue to circle this project, such whether or not they can turn it into a commercially viable business, when the next satellite launch might take place and whether the previously considered proposal to add a GPS style solution to the LEOs is viable. Hopefully the answers will come sooner, rather than later.

UPDATE 28th August 2020

In a related development, OneWeb has just been granted FCC approval to launch another 1,280 satellites (total allowed now c.2,000). Gaining such approval can take several years and so this has been coming for a while. The most interesting aspect is that the additional 1,280 satellites were approved for medium Earth orbits of 8,500km, which is higher than their current c.1,200km but still lower than the bigger GSO spacecraft at 35,000km.

We suspect they might suffer some additional increase in latency times due to operating at such a height, but on the flip side they’ll be able to deliver better coverage. OneWeb filed another application in May 2020 to seek approval for 47,844 satellites (here), albeit at their current altitude of 1,200km, but that will probably take a long time to be cleared. In any case they don’t have the investment to deliver anything even remotely that big, yet.

The latest approval confirms that satellites will use V-Band spectrum (37.5 – 43.5GHz, 47.2 – 50.2 GHz, and 50.4 – 51.4GHz).