European satellite operator Eutelsat said it will work with French startup Skynopy to explore selling unused capacity from its OneWeb ground stations to Earth observation operators.
The initiative will start with tests on Ka-band antennas across OneWeb’s 42 gateway sites worldwide. “Any LEO ground station network has, by nature, idle time on its ground stations,” Skynopy co-founder and CEO Pierre Bertrand told SpaceNews. “Skynopy will define and test with Eutelsat how to take benefit from this spare capacity.”
Skynopy plans to retrofit some of Eutelsat’s antennas with its own software and feed system components, and add S-, X- and Ka-band antennas at OneWeb sites to support Earth observation demand. “By using the spare capacity of OneWeb sites — antenna time, site space and high-speed backhaul — [Skynopy] is commercializing a unique service, maximizing both metrics that Earth observation satellite operators care for: data freshness and data rate,” Bertrand said.
The startup will begin a one-year beta testing phase in the coming months for selected operators in Ka-band before a commercial rollout. Skynopy raised €15 million ($17.7 million) earlier this year to expand its network, which currently includes more than 15 antennas, combining its own deployments with third-party stations from Amazon Web Services and Kinéis.
Eutelsat last year valued its ground infrastructure at around $863 million and announced plans to sell much of it to Sweden’s EQT Partners to create a standalone ground-station-as-a-service business. The partnership comes as major players including Amazon’s Project Kuiper and SpaceX’s Starlink build out global ground networks, while governments and defense agencies increase demand for fresh, high-volume satellite imagery.
