Swiss startup SWISSto12 is offering a solution to European countries looking for sovereign satellite communications.
The company is just starting initial assembly of its first HummingSat platform, which is set to launch in 2027. The startup, however, has already heard from European nations who see the 1,000 kg GEO-capable satellite as their path to orbit, CTO Mike Kaliski told Payload on the sidelines of the SmallSat conference.
“HummingSat is an opportunity for them. It’s the right size for the right mission,” he said. “And if sovereignty matters to them…our product is almost 100% European-made.”
Meet HummingSat: Kaliski said HummingSat is roughly the size of a satellite in the OneWeb LEO constellation. The spacecraft are being designed for telecommunications, but payloads can be swapped to do other missions—including beyond GEO. Kaliski predicted it was “inevitable” that a similarly sized sat would be used for lunar comms at some point.
He said the platform, intended to last 15 years in orbit, is well suited for two types of GEO operators: legacy companies which don’t have enough customers to fill the capacity offered by a large GEO sat, and new entrants to space—including commercial entities, or countries, looking to establish a presence in orbit.
Up and coming neighborhood: SWISSto12 focused on GEO in part because it saw an opportunity to compete outside of the crowded LEO market.
“You see it everywhere here—there’s too many players in LEO,” he said, gesturing around the exhibit hall. “It’s hard to build a business, and there’s only a few that can survive. The big constellations, even then, it takes billionaires or governments to do it.”
What’s next: HummingSat’s first commercial mission will be a satellite to provide additional capacity for Intelsat (now SES). That will be followed by a mission for Inmarsat (now Viasat) that includes a GNSS augmentation payload—a small piece of tech that typically had to fly as a hosted payload, but is the right size for its own HummingSat, Kaliski said.
The startup also has a contract to supply a HummingSat for Singapore-based Astrum Mobile’s planned mission to provide direct-to-device streaming.
