The ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) had announced earlier this week that it would be launching the first batch of the 36 satellites for OneWeb around the end of this month.
Notably, this news arrives just weeks after the OneWeb satellites arrived in India for this launch mission. As per the official announcement, ISRO will be launching the first batch of the 36 satellites by the third or fourth week of October 2022. The news arrives after the geopolitical conflict that between Russia and Ukraine, which saw a batch of 36 OneWeb satellites held hostage by Roscosmos, a Russian state backed space agency.
On the other hand, OneWeb had signed a deal with both SpaceX and ISRO to launch the rest of its planned 648 satellites into orbit. Furthermore, these satellites are set to be launched as a part of its global satellite internet network. Once all of these satellites are in orbit, they will be fly in a relay configuration and will cover the entire world. This network would also offer internet connectivity, mainly to various companies across the globe.
The connectivity offered will be used for a wide range of applications ranging from data analytics for agriculture, forestry and mining, and even for backhaul bandwidth for telecom based companies as well to help supplement their terrestrial networks. Interestingly, OneWeb is also being backed by Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel, and will soon rival other industry giants like Jio-SES and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the satellite internet market.
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