Thirty-six satellites were launched into orbit on Friday aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, which OneWeb purchased from European space company Arianespace.
Those satellites will join 74 others that OneWeb launched into space before it went bankrupt in March, citing difficulties in obtaining additional funding as investors tightened their belts in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. OneWeb’s biggest financier for most of its existence was Softbank, which was under increasing pressure from its investors to avoid riskier companies after a string of bad bets on technology companies.
OneWeb has paused operations for most of 2020 as it underwent a Chapter 11 restructuring. The UK government and India-based Bharti Global became OneWeb’s main shareholders after investing $ 1 billion in the company in bankruptcy proceedings.
Building a massive constellation of internet-radiating satellites is not easy: several companies tried and failed to bring such a business model to life in the 1990s, but they all went down, threw in the towel. ring or changed their business plan drastically realizing such a plan was much more expensive than previously thought.
But a cohort of companies are trying again, and OneWeb’s toughest competition will come from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has already launched about 1,000 satellites, has served its service to early beta testers, and is expected to launch its commercial operations next year.
The company, which says its constellation will only need 650 satellites, plans to bring its service to market by the end of 2021 and will focus on providing services to businesses rather than directly to consumers.
