Blue’s getting in on the satcom game.
Two months after launching New Glenn for the second time (and performing a picture-perfect first booster landing), Blue Origin has unveiled its latest project. TeraWave is a 5,408-bird, multi-orbit communications constellation designed specifically to serve enterprise and government customers.
- The constellation will be split between LEO and MEO, and connected with optical intersatellite links. (It’s a LEO-heavy design, though, with 5,280 of the satellites in LEO and 128 in MEO.)
- That architecture is designed to enable super high-speed connectivity, with data speeds (using laser links) of up to 6 Tbps across the planet.
- Using RF, TeraWave is looking at speeds of 144 Gbps. Still fast.
Constellation deployment is set to begin in Q4 2027. We’re betting New Glenn will play a major role in getting it off the ground.
Small but mighty: Blue is aiming to grow TeraWave to a max of 100,000 subscibers—far smaller than the markets targeted by SpaceX Starlink or Jeff Bezos’ other satcom project, Amazon Leo.
TeraWave’s customers will be enterprise-level subscribers located in remote areas where fiber is costly, impractical, or impossible to use. Data centers and governments will be at the top of the list.
The big picture: In the burgeoning era of data centers in space and heavy demands from AI, connectivity speed is paramount. The speeds Blue is touting with TeraWave are over-the-top for your average Joe, but they make sense for critical applications—and the needs of large organizations working with petabytes of data that need transporting.
