{"id":139204,"date":"2025-11-14T09:43:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T09:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/139204\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T09:43:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T09:43:09","slug":"ula-launches-viasats-second-shot-at-a-terabit-class-broadband-satellite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/139204\/","title":{"rendered":"ULA launches Viasat\u2019s second shot at a terabit-class broadband satellite"},"content":{"rendered":"

TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 An Atlas 5 rocket sent Viasat\u2019s second ViaSat-3 satellite toward geostationary orbit Nov. 13, bringing the U.S. broadband provider closer to operating a terabit-per-second (Tbps) giant it had hoped to debut six years ago.<\/p>\n

United Launch Alliance lofted ViaSat-3 F2 at 10:04 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 41 at Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, releasing the payload into an elliptical geosynchronous transfer orbit about three and a half hours later.<\/p>\n

Viasat announced initial signal acquisition shortly after, marking a key step ahead of the satellite\u2019s roughly three-month journey to its final GEO position at 79 degrees West over the Americas.<\/p>\n

The six-ton satellite is one of the heaviest an Atlas 5 has ever sent to orbit, and at about the size of half a football field when fully unfolded, would provide more bandwidth capacity than all 23 satellites in Viasat\u2019s current fleet combined.<\/p>\n

Lift-off came a week after ULA scrubbed the mission following a faulty booster liquid oxygen tank vent valve, which was removed and replaced.<\/p>\n

Viasat had once aimed<\/a> to operate a 1 Tbps broadband spacecraft in 2019, before production and supply chain issues compounded by COVID-19 pushed the first ViaSat-3 launch to 2023, only for it to lose more than 90% of its capacity<\/a> because of a failed antenna deployment.<\/p>\n

ULA was slated to launch ViaSat-3 F2 in 2023 before the issue with the Northrop Grumman antenna on ViaSat-3 F1, which is also stationed over the Americas.<\/p>\n

Mark Dankberg, Viasat\u2019s chairman and CEO, told SpaceNews it should take a couple of weeks after ViaSat-3 F2 reaches its orbital slot to deploy and confirm its reworked antenna is operating successfully.<\/p>\n

Because of similarities with the otherwise healthy ViaSat-3 F1, the operator expects to move quickly through remaining health checks to start services early next year.<\/p>\n

\"\"Illustration of a ViaSat-3 satellite in geostationary orbit. Credit: Viasat<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a big boost to our network, especially to our mobility and fixed services,\u201d Dankberg said, \u201cbut the whole point of the Viasat-3 series is its capacity and flexibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the in-flight connectivity market, for instance, he said a ViaSat-3 satellite is designed not only to provide a huge amount of bandwidth to a multitude of planes waiting at an airport, but also to follow them with a beam of connectivity as they fly to their destination.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome satellites have beam-forming to follow the plane around, but they\u2019re doing that with 10, 20, 30 gigabits\u201d of total capacity, he added. \u201cViasat-3 can do that with close to a thousand gigabits.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boeing is under contract to provide three ViaSat-3s in total, with the payloads designed and built by Viasat. The third is slated to enter service over Asia in early to mid-2026, using a deployable mesh antenna from L3Harris.<\/p>\n

Dankberg said the company is now exploring ways to \u201cminiaturize and package [ViaSat-3 technology] into much smaller satellites,\u201d leveraging existing ground infrastructure and improving spacecraft manufacturing economics to further reduce bandwidth costs.<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 An Atlas 5 rocket sent Viasat\u2019s second ViaSat-3 satellite toward geostationary orbit Nov. 13, bringing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[12495,61,60,82,1935,37924,80227],"class_list":["post-139204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-boeing","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-sn","tag-viasat","tag-viasat-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}