OneWeb raises $400 million

 

OneWeb raises $400 million

Soyuz launch
A Soyuz rocket carrying 36 OneWeb satellites lifts off Dec. 18 from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, the first OneWeb launch since the company emerged from bankruptcy. Credit: Arianespace

WASHINGTON — Broadband satellite company OneWeb announced Jan. 15 it has raised $400 million from SoftBank and Hughes Network Systems, allowing the company to continue deployment of its constellation.

The new round includes $350 million from SoftBank, who was the biggest shareholder in OneWeb before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2020. The remainder is from Hughes Network Systems, which announced last year it would invest $50 million into the restructured company.

The companies did not disclose the new size of SoftBank’s stake in the company, but OneWeb announced that the Japanese company would get a seat on its board. According to an October notice by the Federal Communications Commission, SoftBank owned 12.3% of the company at the time, after owning 37.41% before the Chapter 11 filing.

The same FCC notice said that Hughes’ planned investment was still being finalized, but that the investment would not have a “meaningful impact” on OneWeb’s ownership, with Hughes holding a 2.6% stake. The British government and Indian telecom company Bharti Global, which acquired OneWeb for $1 billion, each owned 42.2% of the company at that time.

The funding will help support the company as it continues deployment of an initial constellation of 648 satellites. “We have made rapid progress to restart the business since emerging from Chapter 11 in November,” said Neil Masterson, chief executive of OneWeb, in a statement. “We welcome the investments by SoftBank and Hughes as further proof of progress towards delivering our goal.”

OneWeb said the funding “positions the company to be fully funded for its first-generation satellite fleet,” but the $400 million alone is insufficient to fund the company through full deployment of the constellation, expected to be completed in mid-2022. Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises and executive chairman of OneWeb, said last month he expected OneWeb would need $2.5 billion to complete the constellation, of which about half had been raised. That suggests the company still needs to raise about $1 billion.

Bharti Mittal, though, was optimistic about getting that additional funding. “I don’t see raising capital for this wonderful project for the balance amount to be any issue,” he said, noting that Bharti Enterprises had raised more than $12 billion in the last 18–24 months for other projects.

OneWeb said last month that they expected to perform launches on a roughly monthly schedule to complete the constellation, with enough satellites in orbit by the fall of 2021 to enable service to begin at latitudes above 50 degrees north. Global service would begin in 2022, once the full constellation is in orbit.

OneWeb resumed launches of that constellation, halted by the Chapter 11 filing, Dec. 18, with the deployment of 36 satellites on a Soyuz rocket. The company has not announced a date for its next launch.

In addition to that initial constellation, the company is working on a larger “Phase Two” constellation. In a Jan. 12 filing with the FCC, OneWeb sought to modify its original application by reducing the number of satellites in that Phase Two system from 47,844 to 6,372.

Location: India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon

Image
You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earth’s surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune,  The Anchorage Daily News  reported on Sunday. The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium. Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey. Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will support A
Read more

Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies

Image
Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies WASHINGTON — The NASA Advisory Council has recommended that NASA review its existing planetary protection guidelines to balance the needs of science and exploration, an effort that could set the stage for a similar revision at the international level. The council, during a two-day meeting at NASA Headquarters Dec. 10–11, adopted a recommendation calling on NASA to establish an interdisciplinary committee of experts to review the agency’s current requirements for preventing contamination of other worlds by NASA spacecraft as well as any contamination of the Earth by materials brought back from those worlds. “NASA should establish a multidisciplinary task force of experts from industry, the scientific community, and relevant government agencies, to develop U.S. policies that properly balance the legitimate need to protect against the harmful contamination of the Earth or other celestial bodies with the scientific, social, and e
Read more

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought Jupiter  appears to have more water than anyone expected. Newly released data from  NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested. The surprise result has scientists delving deep again into results from  NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter , which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. (Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.) Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for sc
Read more