Astranis, the San Francisco-based satellite internet startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and other Silicon Valley venture capitalists, is set to launch its first commercial telecommunicate satellite aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. A launch time frame Q4 2020 has been scheduled.
"It's a major milestone for the company," says Astranis CEO and cofounder John Gedmark. "We're one step closer to having our first commercial satellite up and solving this problem of internet connectivity."
Astranis' goal is to address those who don't have access to broadband internet, which is still a huge number in a global scale. The company aims to provide affordable internet by using low-cost satellites, which can be built and launched must faster than existing spacecraft as well.
What makes Astranis satellites more cost-efficient is the fact that they are easier to make due to their relatively small size. This alters the economics of deployment in terms of connectivity provider partners and potential carriers.
Astranis' approach has opened doors for a partnership with Pacific Dataport, a subsidiary of Microcom based in Anchorage created to improve and expand satellite broadband access in Alaska. With the company's debut launch with SpaceX, the company hopes to achieve the same thing.
Falcon 9 will deliver a single satellite to geostationary orbit, which should add more than 7 Gbps of speed to internet providers. According to Astranis, its efforts should reduce costs by "up to three times" and triple the capacity of the network.
Though this is going to be their first satellite launch with SpaceX, Falcon has already sent one up in space through a demo launch last year just so it can prove that its tech would work.
The approach that Astranis hopes would work long term is to focus on making satellites that will stay in a fixed orbital position relative to the area on the ground wherein service is provided. This is very different from the typical approach, including the Starlink project by SpaceX, which uses a huge constellation of low Earth orbit satellites. This is how coverage is offered because one or more are bound to be over the coverage area at any given time as they orbit the Earth, handing off connections from one to the next.
Over the past few years, Astranis is but one of several satellite internet startups that have emerged. SpaceX's win of the Astranis mission follows the launch provider's recent loss of a 2021 mission to launch the 1,500-kilogram Ovzon-3 satellite on a Falcon Heavy.