Space services company SES has revealed it will deploy meoSphere, a next-generation medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellite network designed to significantly boost the company’s MEO capacity.
Targeted for operation by 2030, meoSphere is described by SES as representing a flexible, multi-mission satellite network designed to adapt, scale and evolve with the needs of government and commercial customers around the world.
Compatible with the EU’s Iris2 secure satellite constellation, meoSphere is designed to meet growing demand for secure, stable, reliable and resilient connectivity across government, mobility and fixed telecommunications markets. It is claimed to be able to boost global broadband capacity, increasing user data speeds while reducing terminal sizes and costs.
These improvements – described as step-changes – are said to come from advances in payload and terminal technologies, software-defined networking, 5G non-terrestrial network (5G NTN) standards, and MEO’s inherent strengths. The latter include efficient geographic coverage; ability to steer capacity to the high-demand areas; optimising ground-station deployment; and low latency.
MEO’s orbital geometry also offers inherent resilience: a smaller number of widely spaced satellites presents a fundamentally different threat profile than dense low-orbit constellations. The design of meoSphere can enable SES to offer mobility clients multi-orbit services in combination with LEO and geostationary Earth orbit.
Orbiting at about 8,000km, meoSphere is seen as offering adaptability across new missions, new use cases and new customer segments. Looking at these uses cases, SES notes that for government and defence customers, meoSphere could mean command-and-control communications that are resilient in contested environments.
The network’s transparent payload architecture allows sovereign customers to operate their own waveforms and modems, including in the “military Ka-Band” spectrum range, preserving the security and independence that classified and sensitive missions require. Space-based routings via optical inter-satellite links (OISLs) ensure traffic always lands in secure gateways.
For mobility customers in aviation and maritime, meoSphere is built to deliver fibre-equivalent throughput to support passenger connectivity, crew communications and operational systems simultaneously across ocean routes where coverage gaps are not an option. For commercial aviation, its combination of high throughput and low latency is built to perform at scale. For enterprises communications, meoSphere can offer a high-performance connectivity layer based on a 5G-NTN network suited to customers seeking path diversity and extended network reach.
Beyond its core broadband mission, the network’s flexible architecture will support multiple missions simultaneously, including integration with sovereign networks, serving governments and other customers that require sovereign services. It will also look to support the growing space economy, functioning as a space-based host for customer payloads and as a “backbone network in space”, enabling interconnections between constellations in all orbits to relay data to each other and to the ground in real time.
As part of the programme launch, SES will pair its own software-defined payloads, being developed and manufactured in Luxembourg, with an initial 28 high-power satellite platforms developed by satellite designer K2 Space, representing the first phase of the broader meoSphere roll-out. The collaboration aims to give SES tighter control over key supply-chain elements, compressing the build timeline, and allowing the company to manage schedules and costs with precision, laying the foundation for future scalability.
The announcement builds on SES’s existing collaboration with K2 to develop a next-generation MEO network. Over the next three years, SES plans to launch a series of MEO pathfinder missions with K2 Space to test and validate the satellite bus and SES payload components in orbit, refine operational concepts, and reduce risk ahead of full-scale deployment. Each mission will look to carry progressively greater payload complexity, incorporating lessons learned from earlier flights into the development cycle.
“Space is the invisible backbone of the global data economy and national security,” said SES CEO Adel Al-Saleh. “Together with K2 Space and other space partners, we’re building meoSphere as essential infrastructure – constructed faster, designed to handle massive data demands globally, and built to support the secure, resilient sovereign networks that our global government allies depend on.”
“The meoSphere partnership with SES is a clear validation of K2’s mission to build the highest-power satellites on orbit to realise our partners’ and customers’ ambitions in space,” added K2 Space co-founder and CEO Karan Kunjur. “We’re incredibly proud to partner in this effort with SES, a longstanding and forward-leaning space industry leader who shares our commitment to building new, efficient space architectures at speed and scale.”
