SpaceX has agreed to launch satellites for the Lightspeed constellation, the brainchild of its major competitor Telesat. The private company founded by Elon Musk, which dominates the commercial space scene, had agreed to provide 14 launches for Telesat on its Falcon 9.
Each launch from SpaceX facilities in California and Florida will carry up to 18 Telesat Lightspeed satellites to LEO. The launch campaign will commence from 2026, so Telesat can begin to provide a global service in 2027. The optically linked Telesat Lightspeed network will provide multi-Gbps data links and highly secure, resilient, low-latency broadband connectivity anywhere in the world – pretty much exactly what the SpaceX Starlink constellation is doing.
It is not the first time SpaceX has worked with its competitors: it also performed Falcon 9 launches for OneWeb after the British firm’s original Soyuz launches were denied in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So, while SpaceX may have come under fire for its limited Starlink support to Ukraine, the company is getting plaudits for helping competitors of its constellation, at least where launches are concerned.
Post Script: SpaceX is launching other competitor satellites including satellites for the Globalstar-Apple alliance with a “replenishment” launch order awarded for the planned constellation’s satellites on SpaceX launches in 2025. SpaceX has received a Falcon 9 launch order for a pair of TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) – spacecraft which will study space weather and the magnetosphere from low Earth orbit. The spacecraft will now fly on an unspecified shared flight probably in 2025. The TRACERS mission was originally planned to fly with NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission which will now fly on another Falcon 9 flight carrying the SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer) mission in 2025.
