Europe’s Airbus Group is to design and build about 900 satellites for privately owned OneWeb Ltd, which plans to offer high-speed, space-based Internet access to billions of people worldwide, company officials said on Monday.
About 700 of the satellites, each of which are to weigh less than 150kg, are to be launched into orbit around Earth beginning in 2018. The rest are to stay on the ground until replacements are needed, British Channel Islands-based OneWeb said.
Bankrolled in part by Richard Branson’s London-based Virgin Group and chipmaker Qualcomm Inc, the project is to cost between US$1.5 billion and US$2 billion, OneWeb founder and chief executive Greg Wyler said.
Airbus Defense and Space is to build the first 10 spacecraft at its Toulouse, France, facility before shifting production to an undisclosed site in the US, Airbus said.
Several other companies were vying for the spacecraft contract, including Thales Alenia Space, SSL, Lockheed Martin Corp’s Space Systems and OHB of Germany, the industry trade journal Aviation Week and Space Technology reported.
Some of OneWeb’s satellites are to be flown by Branson’s space company, Virgin Galactic, which is developing a low-cost small satellite launcher, as well as a suborbital passenger spaceship.
Wyler declined to disclose how much Virgin and Qualcomm are investing in the project. As part of the deal, unveiled in January, Branson and Qualcomm executive chairman Paul Jacobs joined OneWeb’s board of directors.
Before starting OneWeb, Wyler co-founded satellite venture O3b Networks and briefly worked at Google Inc on another project to beam Internet access from space.
Wyler left Google last year to work on his own satellite project, named WorldVu, which later became OneWeb.
Google, along with Fidelity, has since made a US$1 billion investment in another Internet-via-satellite project being developed by California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX.
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