I always thought of oneweb has a kind of govt boondoggle project for the UK.
These are the projects that aren't commercially able to attract funding (which in this day is a bit wild) but have some weird pitch that gets a government somewhere to jump on them.
I believe the UK claims this will result in jumping the UK to the forefront of space commercialization? I thought secretly that oneweb was actually maybe making the sats in the US and the UK mfg of the sats was basically just govt hype? Anyone know the real scoop?
> These are the projects that aren't commercially able to attract funding (which in this day is a bit wild)
here you go:
> On 3 July 2020, the Government of the United Kingdom and Sunil Mittal's Bharti Global (formerly a partner of OneWeb) announced a joint plan to invest US$500 million each for equal stakes in OneWeb Global, approximately 42% each; the rest would be held by other creditors including Softbank.
> In July 2020, Hughes Network Systems invested US$50 million in the consortium.
> In January 2021, a further funding round raised $400 million from SoftBank and Hughes Network Systems, with SoftBank getting a director seat on OneWeb's board. This brought available funding to $1.4 billion
> In June 2021, Oneweb raised an additional US$500M from Bharti Global, increasing Bharti's holding to 38.6%
> In August 2021, Hanwha Systems invested $300 million to purchase an 8.8% share in OneWeb
The satellites are made in the USA, by, ironically, Airbus Space and Defence (who's largest shareholders are the French and German governments). OneWeb have said they will move manufacturing to the UK, but this was stated in a Select Committee meeting, so could well be simply blowing smoke up the collective 'arrises of their investors.
"This deal gives us the chance to build on our strong advanced manufacturing and services base in the UK, creating jobs and technical expertise."
The issue I have is they keep on describing the network as "cutting edge" without describing the breakthrough features of the project as well as a lot of talk about building up the UK sat mfg base, but of all the companies they pump half a billion pounds into, they choose one where at least SOME of the work is in the US.
Because the UK Govt and certain members of the British press talk this project up as 2) some kind of success for Brexit Britain and b) a potential replacement for Galileo, which Britain is no longer part of after leaving the EU.
The origin of OneWeb was that the founder approached Elon Musk with the OneWeb idea and an agreement was signed. Not sure what role SpaceX was supposed to take, but at some later point Elon bailed and started a competing service called Starlink.
The OneWeb founder posted a photo of the signed agreement on Twitter some years ago, dumping on Elon Musk.
The original OneWeb founder is no longer involved and has some other space startup now.
Originally Blue Origin and Virgin were supposed to be the launch capability but neither can put anything in space.
Here is the tweet. OneWeb was originally called WorldVu
Virgin Orbit can put things into space, although very low payload - you might have enough capacity to put one oneweb satelite into orbit at a time -- wikipedia says 500kg to 500km, Oneweb are 150kg at 1200km.
If 1 Satellite per launch, that would be 220 launched on LauncherOne at a cost of $2.6b (wikipedia costs), if Virgin Orbital could scale quickly enough (and if it can get 150kg to 1200km)
I view OneWeb as a holding company for spectrum. These sorts of companies have to have some viable operations in place to hold that spectrum, but the incentive is to build a monopoly and milk it. Good on SpaceX for iterating and building something better instead of settling for OneWeb's initial design.
These are the projects that aren't commercially able to attract funding (which in this day is a bit wild) but have some weird pitch that gets a government somewhere to jump on them.
I believe the UK claims this will result in jumping the UK to the forefront of space commercialization? I thought secretly that oneweb was actually maybe making the sats in the US and the UK mfg of the sats was basically just govt hype? Anyone know the real scoop?