OneWeb's big week: Eutelsat targets 1,300 satellites by 2030 as EU hands IRIS² contract to Aerospacelab

Eutelsat will have some 1,300 OneWeb satellites in orbit by 2030, chief executive Jean-François Fallacher told delegates at the World Satellite Business Week in Paris on 14 September (some outlets report the address as 15 September) — an acceleration of the replenishment of Europe’s only operating low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband network (Advanced Television). Fallacher said the boost was needed to “strengthen” the OneWeb fleet as older satellites reach the end of their lives (Advanced Television).

Some of the new craft will simply replace dying satellites, while others add capacity: “we will have more than 1,300 satellites that will be flying. Some will be replacing the current satellites, some will strengthen the constellation and add capacity to be sure we can continue to grow,” Fallacher said (Advanced Television). The orders stack up quickly: a pair of Airbus Defence & Space contracts from 2025 and this year totalling 440 satellites, plus 229 refreshed Gen-1.5 craft that will also carry a payload for the French Defence Ministry (Advanced Television).

Replenishment is urgent. OneWeb operates 654 first-generation satellites — about 600 of them for active coverage — and the oldest, launched in 2019 and 2020, are approaching the end of a five-to-seven-year design life (Tech Times). First deliveries from the 440-satellite tranche are expected by the end of calendar 2026 (Tech Times).

But the week’s biggest industrial news is who builds IRIS², the EU’s sovereign secure-communications constellation. Belgium’s Aerospacelab — founded in 2018 — has been selected as prime contractor for 264 of the 330 planned IRIS² LEO satellites, a contract worth about €2.4bn that most industry observers had expected to go to Airbus (Tech Times). Airbus instead picks up the smaller contract: 66 military Ka-band LEO satellites, deliverable in 2029 (Tech Times). “The selection of Aerospacelab for IRIS2 reflects a deliberate industrial choice, a defining moment for Europe as a whole,” said CEO Benoît Deper (Tech Times).

The two programmes meet in 2032: “we will have the full 66 plus 264 Iris2 satellites will be flying,” Fallacher said, at which point Eutelsat starts migrating customers from Gen-1 and Gen-1.5 to “Gen 2 of our constellation, which should be the commercial part of Iris2” (Advanced Television). The new OneWeb satellites are being built with software-defined interfaces forward-compatible with IRIS², smoothing that handover (Tech Times). Together they are Europe’s answer to Starlink for secure and rural connectivity — satellite broadband aimed at users terrestrial fibre cannot economically reach, and at governments that want that capacity under European, not American, control.