Over the past three years, we at Astranis have sold out multiple launches of MicroGEO communications satellites to commercial customers in countries all over the world: the United States, Mexico, Argentina, the Philippines, Thailand, and beyond. Those satellites will connect millions of people to affordable, reliable broadband internet, and will generate over $1.2 billion of revenue for the company.

But we’re not stopping there.

Today, we are excited to announce our next-generation product — Astranis Omega — a broadband communications system with better pound-for-pound performance than any other geostationary satellite in orbit today. Astranis Omega will offer 50+ Gbps of dedicated, uncontended throughput per satellite. While maintaining a small satellite form factor. With the first flight vehicle coming in 2025, and the first satellites launching in 2026.

Omega is a leap forward, offering an industry-best throughput per kg without sacrificing the things our customers love about Astranis. We will still sell dedicated satellites; we will still build them in less than 18 months; we will still maneuver our satellites on orbit; we will still operate our satellites for 8-10 years. 

With Omega, our customers simply get more throughput at lower prices. 

For our commercial customers, Omega will mean unprecedented flexibility and access to advanced capabilities like dynamic shifting of capacity to where broadband internet is in highest demand.

For Astranis’s US government customers, Omega supports the Protected Tactical Waveform and other government waveforms to operate in contested environments. Omega also has a gimballed Q/V band antenna, greatly improving operational flexibility, and can alternatively shift gateway traffic to a Ka-band payload feed when needed. 

This is all possible because Omega comes outfitted with a next-generation Astranis software-defined radio, enabling frequency flexibility, dynamic coverage, beam supersurging, formation flying, and more.  

The obvious question, of course, is “how?” How did we get this much more capability into a small satellite form factor? The simple answer is: speed. 

Astranis is moving faster than any other geostationary satellite manufacturer or operator today. We launched our first satellite in 2023. We made significant upgrades for the four satellites that will launch in 2024, and more for the five satellites that will launch in 2025. And now, we are releasing a new product for launch in 2026. 

Some of that speed comes from pulling components in house. About half of our first satellite was built in house; the most recent satellites coming off of the line are closer to 60%; and Omega will be about 70% built in house. Some of that speed comes from hiring more than 300 of the most talented engineers in the country. And some just comes from our company’s DNA: we feel an immense urgency to build great things to help connect our commercial customers and keep warfighters safe and in mission. That urgency, more than anything else, is what helps Astranis continue to push cutting edge capabilities on orbit — as we’re doing here, with Omega.