There seems to be a growing scandal around the government's £400 million purchase of the bankrupt satellite company OneWeb. Cummings has a strange belief that what we need in the UK is something like the US DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) where the government pumps money into blue skies projects in the hope of getting a technological lead in one field or another - usually defence related. OneWeb appears to be the UK's first attempt at such a project.
OneWeb is one of a number of companies launching Low Earth Orbit satellites to provide broadband coverage across the globe but it went bankrupt half way through.
OneWeb is one of a number of companies launching Low Earth Orbit satellites to provide broadband coverage across the globe but it went bankrupt half way through.
Apparently we are going into partnership with Bharti Enterprises Ltd. (an Indian-based company with an operational arm in the U.K.) with both of us committing $500 million to acquire the failed company. The original investors get ten per cent for the $2.6 billion they put in before it went bust.
When it was first announced I had a quick Google search and found a paper from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) comparing three of the most advanced systems (out of eleven in total) including OneWeb's. The others were Telesat and SpaceX. SpaceX is owned by the billionaire Elon Musk by the way.
MIT say that the Telesat system with 117 satellites has a maximum throughput of 2.66 Tbps and requires 42 ground stations to achieve it. SpaceX's 4425 satellites have a maximum throughput of 23.7 Tbps with more than 100 ground stations.
OneWeb's system has 720 satellites with a maximum throughput of 1.56 Tbps, and needs 71 ground stations.
You can see that OneWeb is the slowest of all at 1.56 Tbps, needs seven times as many satellites and twice as many ground stations as Telesat. And SpaceX is way out in front with a capacity nearly six times as much of both the others combined.
MIT conclude that "Telesat is the most efficient system in terms of average Gbps/satellite, with more than 4x SpaceX and 10x OneWeb." SpaceX was second, with OneWeb last. The report was from 2018 and OneWeb's system was supposed to be operational from 2019, SpaceX's from 2020 and Telesat 2022. This was before OneWeb ran out of money.
It does not take a genius to see that OneWeb does not have fastest speed or the lowest cost and may have struggled to sell their service to users and make money.
NASASpaceFlight.com, a leading online news resource for space flight related news, had an article in early July suggesting the move was "curious" because "how and when — and to what extent — OneWeb will financially benefit the U.K. is unknown, especially given that SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation, a direct competitor to OneWeb, will begin offering initial service this year with more widespread offerings to follow within several months."
NASASpaceFlight say with OneWeb currently grounded due to a lack of satellites and funding to build and launch them, exactly how far behind OneWeb will be and how much ground they will have to make up against Starlink is yet to be seen – especially with the already in-place caveat that "the U.K. will not allow every nation access to the network."
We are behind schedule and already self limiting our own market. Presumably it is the EU we are refusing access to in return for not being allowed access to Gallileo's military grade GPS signal.
And there's more. Apparently, one of the confusing elements of the purchase is the announcement from the U.K. government that they want to use OneWeb as a space-based navigation system – "something it was not designed to do." We are trying to replace our involvement in the EU's Gallileo project by a cheap not-fit-for-purpose replacement in the hope of outdoing it.
Late to market with an offering clearly inferior to our main competitors having gone bankrupt once, we now plan to re-purpose and presumably redesign the system with 74 satellites already in orbit. Is it a good investment? Probably not.
Now it emerges that Alok Sharma the Business Secretary was warned about the investment by the permanent secretary and MPs are launching a probe into the whole thing.
