New Better Satellite World Video from SSPI Explores the Enduring and Still Increasing Value of GEO in the Modern Satellite Landscape

New York City, September 26, 2023 – Space & Satellite Professionals International (SSPI) today released Flying Higher, its newest video in the Better Satellite World campaign. It explores the unique capabilities that GEO orbit satellites bring to the world every day. Flying Higher is made possible by funding from Hughes.

“Satellite customers are understandably excited about the new LEO constellations bringing high capacity, low latency and aggressive pricing to satellite broadband,” said executive director Robert Bell. “Other satellite operators and service providers are understandably alert to the challenges of competing and cooperating with them. In the midst of so much change, SSPI is pointing to the bigger story: that we are all fulfilling the dreams of Sir Arthur C. Clarke that launched the satellite business: of connectivity reaching every corner of the globe.”

You can watch the video on SSPI’s website and on Youtube. Flying Higher is part of Eternal Orbit, SSPI’s latest campaign that explores the major value and proven business case that GEO continues to offer in a satellite business where LEO and MEO have attracted massive investment and customer interest but have yet to demonstrate long-term commercial viability.

Inside the Story

In a few years, there could be more than 50,000 satellites in orbit. Most of them will fly low, crossing the sky and covering the Earth with radio waves, cameras and radar. Flying so low, they brush the upper edges of the atmosphere, which gradually slows them until they fall to Earth.

But there is a place in space where no atmosphere reaches, where satellites are invisible because they fly so high, and where they can hover magically over a single spot on the Earth’s surface. It is called geosynchronous orbit or GEO, because it synchronizes with the turning Earth. It is the first orbit, the oldest one in continuous use by human beings. For decades, it has brought the world television and phone calls, internet and business networks, and communications for military bases and humanitarian missions, remote mines and ships at sea.

The first GEO satellite flew 60 years ago, but the value of GEO orbit keeps flying higher, even as low-flying spacecraft fill the skies. GEO is the only place in space where we can send a single digital signal and have it reach millions of sites. With no atmosphere to slow them down, satellites in GEO can last for more than a decade. GEO is getting smarter, as software-defined payloads are launched that can change their mission on the fly. And GEO is betting bigger, as companies like Hughes put spacecraft the size of buses into GEO capable of delivering high-speed broadband to millions of customers, while innovation in ground systems squeezes more capacity out of the same bandwidth every year.

About SSPI

Founded in 1983, Space & Satellite Professionals International (www.sspi.org) is on a mission to make the space and satellite industry one of the world’s best at attracting and engaging the talent that powers innovation. The space and satellite business has never seen a time of greater experimentation and disruption than we see today. Investment is the fuel for transformation, but people are the engine. SSPI helps the industry attract, develop and retain the talented people it needs to keep the engine turning. People who connect through high-profile events and gain recognition from prestigious awards. People who rely on SSPI for a broader understanding of the industry as much as for individual networking and career mentoring. From young people seeking a career path to industry veterans with wisdom to share, SSPI connects them all.

Talent, investment and opportunity flow to industries that make a difference. SSPI is the only organization that also promotes the enormous value of space and satellite through dramatic stories of our technologies and companies making a better world. Those stories overturn misconceptions about the industry that hold it back. They inspire our people and attract new ones to the industry. They help justify investment and give new customers a reason to care about our services and products. Through the stories we tell and the people we serve, SSPI inspires the growth of the US$ 1 trillion space economy of the future.