Astranis Space Technologies Corp

An Astranis satellite weighs about 400 kilograms, roughly a twentieth of a conventional geostationary communications spacecraft, and is sold or leased whole to a single buyer: a country, an internet provider, an airline connectivity operator. The company builds them on its own line in San Francisco and is developing Omega, a larger version carrying more than 50 gigabits per second.

The argument is that the geostationary industry priced itself out of most of its market. A traditional GEO satellite costs hundreds of millions and has to be shared across many customers to pay for itself, so no single country gets capacity shaped around its own territory. A cheap dedicated satellite does exactly that, and Astranis is betting it can build them at a rate the incumbents structurally cannot.

The record in orbit is mixed, and the company's own count is generous about it. Astranis reports five satellites on orbit; independent reporting confirms two in commercial service. The first, Arcturus, lost both solar array drive assemblies shortly after commissioning and manages only six to twelve hours of service a day. A spare from the December 2024 quadruple launch failed during orbit raising and was left stranded in a transfer orbit. That is two significant failures in a very small fleet, in a business whose entire premise is that small and cheap need not mean unreliable. The five-satellite mission promised for 2025 had not flown by August 2026. And the largest defence programme Astranis qualified for went elsewhere: the first production orders under the Space Force's protected tactical satcom programme, worth $437.7 million, went to Viasat and Intelsat in June 2026.