The world already has a pair of successful low Earth orbiting (LEO) mega-constellations in the form of SpaceX’s Starlink and the Eutelsat/OneWeb fleet. Also on the near-horizon is the Jeff Bezos-backed Amazon Kuiper, Telesat of Canada’s Lightspeed, and direct-to-cellular satellite operations from Globalstar/Apple, AST SpaceMobile Iridium and Lynk. Now it seems the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is looking at a LEO offering.
The news comes from Space 42, the Abu Dhabi business that is the result of a merger between satellite operator Yahsat/Thuraya and geo-spatial operator Bayanat and the overall business run by Karim Michel Sabbagh, once a CEO at SES. The merger wrapped on October 1st.
Space 42, itself helped by ample expansion cash from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds (Mubadala and G42), says it wants to become a global player including satellite-based direct-to-device activity and a potential LEO constellation. Its latest presentation talks of revenue of $7.1 billion by 2030 with 92 percent flowing from Yahsat Space Services.
Space 42 has a very heathy contracted backlog of more than $7 billion (more than SES and Eutelsat combined) and while most of the contracts are with the UAE government its latest Investor presentation pulls no punches, saying it wants become a global player in a number of key verticals.
Sabbagh, speaking last week, said the company will “build on the UAE [which] is the starting point, a sandbox that allows us to incubate, validate and test before scaling. How do we take what we are doing and scale it. That is going to be a pillar for us going forward,” he said on its investor call. He said the company’s Al Yah satellites in geostationary orbit could be a springboard “to think about a multi-orbit system to deliver this secure communications network.”
CFO Andrew Cole told analysts that Space 42 will receive a $1 billion advance payment from the UAE government for the upcoming Al Yah 4 and Al Yah 5 telecoms satellites, which “will further enhance and optimise our balance sheet to fund growth and accretive projects.”
Sabbagh added, “MSS [mobile satellite services] players are moving from a handful of millions to serve billions of customers directly to their smart devices.”
The tiny – but super rich – Emirate already has the world’s most successful airline (Emirates) and some suggest its global ambitions extend well beyond aircraft.