I attended the Satellite 2026 conference this week in Washington, DC. The Canadian satellite operator Telesat is a long-time client of mine, and the conference is an annual chance to get together IRL.
Anyone not living under a rock knows that the space economy is dynamic and growing. As recently as five years ago, the market was dominated by a handful of companies operating fleets of Geosynchronous orbit (GEO) satellites. That all changed when Elon Musk created Starlink, featuring hundreds of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites that offer the low latency required by modern Internet applications.
Jeff Bezos is now building a LEO network — Amazon LEO, formerly Project Kuiper. Telesat is launching Lightspeed, its next-generation LEO network that will take a B2B, rather than a B2C, approach to the market.
Dan Goldberg, Telesat's CEO, made some excellent points: “The geopolitical developments we're seeing are creating some of the biggest commercial opportunities for Telesat — and the rest of us. It's incumbent upon us to step up.”
Telesat recently added military Ka-band spectrum to 156 Lightspeed satellites, dedicating a full quarter of its capacity to defense and sovereignty programs. Countries want to control their own destiny for space communications, rather than depend on foreign billionaires.
The Telesat booth was non-stop meetings during the show.
There was broad agreement among panelists: multi-orbit constellations are real and here to stay, sovereignty concerns may work against consolidation, and direct-to-device has broad potential if pricing comes way down. The competition will be fierce. It's going to be a wild ride!