Astranis to share small GEO launch with Falcon 9 for 2020

WASHINGTON – Astranis, the small-scale manufacturer and operator GEO, has chosen SpaceX to launch its first satellite.

On August 26, Astranis CEO John Gedmark said the company had booked a Falcon 9 launch in the fourth quarter of 2020 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Gedmark said SpaceNews by e-mail, the Astranis satellite will be a secondary payload, SpaceX announcing the main payloads at a later date. Astranis organized the launch itself, not by a carpooling aggregator like Spaceflight, he said.

Astranis builds the 300-kilogram satellite for Internet connectivity in Alaska.

Gedmark announced in January that Astranis had signed a multi-year contract worth tens of millions of dollars with Pacific Dataport Inc. of Anchorage, Alaska, on satellite capacity. In his blog, Gedmark said that Pacific Dataport and its largest shareholder, Microcom, could start using the satellite in March 2021.

The first Astranis satellite will offer a storage capacity of 7.5 gigabits per second at Pacific Dataport. Pacific Dataport has expressed the desire to have 40 to 50 gigabits per second capacity in Alaska, but has not yet decided how to obtain this higher capacity.

Gedmark said he hoped the partnership between Astranis and Pacific Dataport "will eventually grow to provide more dedicated bandwidth Gbps".

SpaceX's victory in the Astranis mission follows the launchers' recent loss of a mission in 2021 to launch the 1,500-kilogram Ovzon-3 satellite on a Falcon Heavy. On August 23, Swedish broadband satellite company, Ovzon, announced that it had moved from SpaceX to Ariane 5's Arianespace. The CEO of Ovzon, Magnus René, said SpaceNews that it "could get a better price in terms of costs and time, etc. Ariane at this stage. "