Space & Satellite Professionals International (SSPI) has released Flying Higher, its newest video in the Better Satellite World campaign. It explores the unique capabilities that GEO orbit satellites bring to the world every day. Flying Higher is made possible by funding from Hughes.
Watch the video on SSPI’s website and on Youtube. Flying Higher is part of Eternal Orbit, SSPI’s latest campaign that explores the major value and proven business case that GEO continues to offer in a satellite business where LEO and MEO have attracted massive investment and customer interest but have yet to demonstrate long-term commercial viability.
“Satellite customers are understandably excited about the new LEO constellations bringing high capacity, low latency and aggressive pricing to satellite broadband. Other satellite operators and service providers are understandably alert to the challenges of competing and cooperating with them. In the midst of so much change, SSPI is pointing to the bigger story: that we are all fulfilling the dreams of Sir Arthur C. Clarke that launched the satellite business: of connectivity reaching every corner of the globe.” — Robert Bell, Executive Director, SSPI
Inside the Story
In a few years, there could be more than 50,000 satellites on-orbit. Most of them will fly low, crossing the sky and covering the Earth with radio waves, cameras and radar. Flying so low, they brush the upper edges of the atmosphere, which gradually slows them until they fall to Earth
But there is a place in space where no atmosphere reaches, where satellites are invisible because they fly so high, and where they can hover magically over a single spot on the Earth’s surface. It is called geosynchronous orbit or GEO, because it synchronizes with the turning Earth. It is the first orbit, the oldest one in continuous use by human beings. For decades, it has brought the world television and phone calls, internet and business networks, and communications for military bases and humanitarian missions, remote mines and ships at sea.
The first GEO satellite flew 60 years ago, but the value of GEO orbit keeps flying higher, even as low-flying spacecraft fill the skies. GEO is the only place in space where we can send a single digital signal and have it reach millions of sites. With no atmosphere to slow them down, satellites in GEO can last for more than a decade.
GEO is getting smarter, as software-defined payloads are launched that can change their mission on the fly.
GEO is also getting bigger, as companies like Hughes put spacecraft the size of buses into GEO capable of delivering high-speed broadband to millions of customers, while innovation in ground systems squeezes more capacity out of the same bandwidth every year.