Thales wins $ 3 billion contract to build 300 satellites
A view of the Thales factory in Toulouse, France (illustrative image).
AFP - REMY GABALDA
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
Thales has landed a landmark contract worth three billion dollars to build a constellation of 300 satellites for internet links for the Canadian company Telesat.
Space is definitely highly coveted at the moment.
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Telesat in turn is launching into the constellations in low orbit for high-speed connections.
These 300 satellites, which will begin to be launched in two years, will reduce data transport time compared to the performance of its geostationary satellites.
Each machine in Telesat's Lightspeed constellation will be connected to four others by optical link.
The data will therefore be able to travel in space rather than "
systematically passing through a ground station
".
According to Thales Alenia Space, this must offer "
the same type of performance as optical fiber, at an affordable cost
" and above all "
on a global scale
".
A potential windfall for the Canadian operator Telesat.
What explains this significant investment which will cost a total of 5 billion dollars according to AFP.
Although it is not the most ambitious, this project adds to a sky where astronomers fear a traffic jam.
Elon Musk's
Starlink constellation
already has close to 1,000 satellites in orbit and Space X would like to launch up to 42,000. Oneweb is targeting 650 satellites initially, but has requested many, many more permissions.
Jeff Bezos
, the founder of Amazon, also dreams of his constellation.
Kuiper would be made up of more than 3,200 satellites.
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