Main Engine Cut Off - T+313: Starlink, Kuiper, Project Bromo, and More (with Caleb Henry)

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Caleb Henry, Director of Research at Quilty Space, joins me (in studio!) to talk about Starlink V3, Starlink satellite relay, Kuiper’s rollout, the Airbus-Thales-Leonardo merger, and the future of Iridium.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Heiko, Joonas, Joel, The Astrogators at SEE, Russell, Joakim, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Natasha Tsakos, David, Steve, Josh from Impulse, Will and Lars from Agile, Better Every Day Studios, Jan, Fred, Warren, Kris, Pat, Donald, Matt, Frank, Stealth Julian, Ryan, Theo and Violet, Lee, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsCaleb Henry (@ChenrySpace) / XThe OneWeb Book | Caleb Henry | SubstackQuilty SpaceSatellite operators will soon join airlines in using Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi - Ars TechnicaStarlink mini lasers to link Muon Space satellites for near real-time connectivity - SpaceNewsProject Kuiper plots broadband services in five countries by end of March - SpaceNewsAirbus, Leonardo and Thales agree to combine space businesses - SpaceNewsProject Bromo: An Escape Hatch, Not a FortressIridium pulls $1 billion 2030 service revenue goal amid SpaceX’s D2D push - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to managing cutoff. I'm Anthony Calangelo, and I'm lucky enough to have Caleb Henry here in studio with me today. He's up in my area for a couple days, and we were hanging out. I thought it was a good opportunity to test out the new studio with multiple people here and pick Caleb's brain about a collection of things that he's really tied in. into over at his work at Quilty Space. We're going to talk about Starlink and the outlook there with the coming V3 version that would be launching on Starship soon, how Kuiper's doing after it's been rolling out a couple

of launches worth of satellites. And there's this big European merger going on, Project Bromo, Airbus, Talley's, Leonardo. I want to pick his brain about that. A couple of other stories in there as well. So I think you'll enjoy the conversation here. Caleb Henry in studio in person, the first in person. recording in this

studio that and you're probably going to be the only person ever here in person because the only person that comes at this part in New Jersey it's always good to be back in Jersey

I'm loving the new bigger space I can't touch both walls anymore I did jam you in the same spot the only other person to do an in person to do an in person

recording in the tiny almost closet studio more arm space all right I've got a scribbled list of things to talk to you about two of which you've told me that you don't have opinions

on or things to say. So I need to do my best to get you to talk about these things. I have Starship and Starlink listed first. Not because I need your takes on Starship flights, but I think the context around what Starlink has been up to lately and the expected, like for a while people have been talking about, they need to launch the new Starlink's on Starship. They've got these, you know, mass simulators that they've been flying on the demo flights.

but I haven't really checked back in recently on what is the plan for these bigger gigantic Starlink satellites and what do you think the outlook is for them flying those in the near future when there's also all this competing demand for Starship to go to in-flight refueling testing and stuff that's leading towards Artemis I don't feel like we talk about those two competing interests enough and what you might see happening

the next year or two years of Starship on that front. yeah it's a big subject and at quilty space we're much more closely following the satellite communication side so Starlink less the tension around whether or not there's enough effort being put onto the crew portion of the mission but bottom line the vehicle's got to work and it's got to work for both I think what we've seen over the course of the past several test flights are key milestones that put them in a position where they can finally launch for Starlink. I mean, they're laid on both accounts. I think a lot of attention goes to the NASA portion because NASA has these needs and they're more time sensitive and they're tied to political goals and even the representation of the country. But the Starlink V2 was designed a long time ago, so long ago that they had to shrink

it down to the mini and essentially abandoned it. It became V3. I was trying to pull up the photo of it because they released like renderings ever recently, right, with the absolutely enormous solar arrays. It's like two of them stapled together. And I think I saw you talking about how there's like an extra laser link on the new ones as well. So was there anything else you learned from those renderings they put out? To me, the only, I mean, there's plenty of differences that I'm sure are on the inside of the satellite that enable it to hit that terribit of capacity, which

is just pretty insane. But yeah, I think the original V2 Mini, you see there's three links. They kind of had to, my understanding is Tetris them inside of the rocket. Like they couldn't fit with all four on there. So another thing that the larger rocket, Starship, enables, is for them to have four links on it. And this is just conjecture here, but I think that gives Starlink more room to use that constellation as a relay platform.

You might just see in the news very recently with muon space? Yes. Yeah, I was going to, I should have written that down. That was interesting. So this is, this is using Starlink as a satellite to satellite to ground relay effectively, rather than muon communicating directly with the ground stations. Correct. Yeah.

That's pretty crazy. So, and it's interesting because that solves a big chicken and the egg issue for relay constellations. We've seen a couple of them come and go. There was Hedron, there was SpaceLink, there's the Space Data Highway, which is still operating, the European one, but it's very low on users. That's the worst name. I think, I mean, they also called it EDRS if you want to, if you miss your acronyms. But, yeah, I think with the new version, that for me was the first time made me think, hey, maybe there could be even more business applications or business models. that the Starlink constellation can serve.

You found it. I found the rendering finally past our time that we needed to look at it. But yeah, I mean, so do you take that as the Muan space announcement? Do you read the way that they talked about the roll out of that, that that relies on the V3 satellites being launched for the extra interlinking capacity? Or do you think that's something they can even pull off

with the old ones as well? I suspect it's something that they can pull off without it and that it will be enhanced by the V3. Yeah, they've talked some about how many cross-links that they have. To me, what I suspect will happen here is that the industry would love to use more relay services because you can reduce the amount of latency that you have between when you take a picture or any sort of sensor data and when you send that to the ground, Relay is not going to entirely erase that, or the ground portion of it, at least not yet.

For safety reasons and purposes, you're going to want to still have the ability to connect to a ground station. But if you can cut your time down from 60 minutes or 30 minutes down to 30 seconds, especially for time-sensitive data, like wildfire monitoring. Fire set was one that we talked about. Exactly. Because I think that's the Mulein platform, right? Yeah. It's like the perfect example of something there

where 20 minutes makes a whole world a difference. So having a relay constellation like Starlink here can make that business real. It also makes me think that like the ground station as a service business is like either this is trouble for them if people are going to start putting Starlink, you know, communicators on their own satellites and just using that as their space to ground relay, or it's something that is that a service that Kuiper would be a

good fit for? They have AWS ground station, they've got Kuiper rolling out. Like, is this actually just an upgrade of what was presumed to be an interesting industry before, which was the ground station as a service component? Yeah, well, on that side of the industry, you've got a couple of interesting things that are happening. First, you've got KSAT that is planning. They're probably the ground as a service king right now, and they're probably,

planning a relay constellation. It's what the case stands for. Yeah. Exactly. That is what it stands for. King satellite. Yeah. King satellite.

So they've got a relay constellation hyper that they're planning on doing. I think it's a single ring of satellites that would then link to ground station. So if you can pass by and basically just drop off your data, then you also have, we were just talking Starlink and Kuiper. Both of them are partners with NASA on the succession program for TDR. TDRS, NASA's own relay constellation, which they've decided to let retire. I think the satellites will run out of juice in the 2030s. And NASA's signed deals with six or seven different companies. Most of them are satellite communications operators that will extend into the relay space.

You've got those two. You've got telesat light speed out of Canada. Kepler also had Canada and I think SES and Biasat that are also doing that and it'll be interesting to see how much that push normalizes the relay services because before I used the chicken and the egg metaphor of if you want to relay service but you don't have it and then you build it but then none of the operators actually have links that can talk to you so somebody has to put a bunch of space lasers. in orbit for it to happen. Either a hopeful operator that says we'll put these on and then when somebody has the relay constellation, we can link into it or the opposite. And Starlink wasn't designing their constellation

around the premise of this will be a relay service. It was meant to enhance their own constellation and reduce the latency for internet connectivity. And now it's having the benefit of opening up a new, It's, I don't think, a huge market. I mean, the NASA deal was something around $280 million split across those six to kind of help get it started. But it's something that I think can push towards an inflection point where the industry can start to use this as a more normal way of connecting and maybe even take it so that, you know, the whole conversation before or I should say the bigger conversation about, latency was always geo versus leo versus meo now i mean guys in the ground station side of things

you've accepted you know several minutes even hours sometimes of waiting and that could just be erased yeah it's interesting because i i don't know why i didn't think it would go that way immediately but you see all the success they're having on aviation and like oh yeah it's just a little higher it's aviation it's just another couple hundred miles um of course there's you know I think the most obvious example of it was stuff like Polaris Dawn using Starlink on their flight

Vast I think was Vast the one that had an agreement in place I think so something like that so some of the space stations companies yeah right so like we knew that for the crude side but I just didn't didn't think we'd get here so fast from the satellite payload side

I'm still curious like how you think the launch rollout of the V3 satellite's going to go with Starship because now we're standing down while we're waiting for Starship V3, there's going to be some test flights of that before they're really operating it or do you expect them to, you know, they're going to have another flight or two before they're actually orbital? Do you expect once they're orbital, they're just going to be deploying these Starship V3 or Starlink V3 platforms? Or are you not seeing what we need to

see to know that those things are coming soon? I don't see a reason for them to wait any longer than they have. So one of the things that we had to do at Quilty Space when we made our last Starlink model was include a projection for how many starship launches we think will happen next year. And don't hold a gun to my head for this number. I was getting on the prediction markets right now, firing this up. Yeah. So we put the number eight out there. We think that's a reasonable number for them to hit based on the cadence that has been demonstrated with the test missions and what it might look like for them to ramp over time. So expecting one to two missions in the first half of next year and then a pause allow

them to calibrate, particularly the satellite side of it, actually once a new satellite goes up, operators tend to have a little bit of downtime to get used to the system and figure out how it works. And then they can start a more earnest launch campaign in the second half of the year to really get going. But they've demonstrated with the V2 version of Starship, the engine relight in orbit. They've had the dispenser. Those were

two of the really big pieces technological milestones that they needed to show before going there. So now they've done everything. Now it's just will the V3 Starship work as planned? We'll hit that 100 metric tons to orbit.

And I think that I don't see that much much of a competition for resources. I could be wrong, but I think in comparing it to like the HLS, you know, NASA needs, like the more heritage the rocket gets, the better it's going to get. I mean, we had, what, three Falcon 9 anomalies in a single year and it didn't disrupt anything, whereas the stand-down time for a launch failure in the past was like a minimum,

like 90 days. Right. So I think as they get experience with launching whatever they choose to launch, yeah, fluid cryogenics. I'm not going to pretend that's easier anything. Yeah, I think that's the big thing is like how many of these need to be tanker flights and transfer flights and whatnot? Or like, can they, the kicker might be is like, can they do some of that testing while also flying a Starlink mission? Because that was the Falcon 9 thing was we're doing all this testing while we're flying operational missions. And that is different because what they're testing in that case was first stage for usability.

So they could deploy a payload. and then they get a first stage booster coming back in for free, effectively. Different when the payload is the ship and, you know, but even in that case, their architecture for the future includes the fact that they would be refueling a vehicle that also includes deployable payloads.

So I don't know if those are actually in conflict. They may go and deploy a handful of V3 satellites and then go and try to meet up with the tanker and do some refueling chances. They might probably will bundle in if they don't, and they have to have dedicated refueling vehicle and a dedicated Starlink vehicle, that's where like, all right, maybe half that many is a reasonable amount.

Yeah, I mean, it would be nice to have that vision of launching multiple starships, some of them doing Starlink missions, maybe even doing other third-party customer missions, and then just have this fleet of them that can do different things in space and support each other. I think it was really unexpected in the early days of Starlink to see how much SpaceX was able to use that to learn. You know, they were usually the, and I think still are the life leaders on boosters. They were able to practice heavier missions, all of these things, and really show what they could do with the rocket. And if they can do that on their own dime with constellation, then NASA gets to benefit.

from that yeah well pump the brakes they might get this whole hls thing might go a different way so we'll find out all right let's let's we're not going to fully lightning around these other topics but Kuyper has a bunch of satellites up now they've deployed all the three launches from falcon nine presumably getting back into the flow with the uLA vehicles uh in the near future um and obviously i don't know have they filed for their extension yet because they've got uh based on my watch eight months or nine months to deploy 3,000 satellites so or 1600 how many they need by that yeah they need they need they need 1600 okay so that so total so they probably need about 1500 in the next uh nine months which seems unlikely still waiting for the waiver i haven't had much

luck with the FCC website these days because of the shutdown so can't check and the nassah website actually i don't know if that was just my computer but um i doubt it yeah i feel like it's it's a website I bet it, yeah, your computer didn't really matter. Yeah, yeah. But I think that we're finally starting in to see some momentum with Kuiper. One of the interesting things for me, everybody, of course, is going to compare them

to some extent to Starlink and SpaceX. And Starlink and SpaceX, they advertise now, but they did very little advertising in the beginning. I've seen Kuiper advertising pretty heavily towards government customers already. And so I think we're going to see more of a push for them to be present and not necessarily roll out in different markets at different times the way Starlink did. Starlink was first consumer, early Starlink didn't have cross links, which made it hard for them to connect planes and boats and things where a ground station was out of sight for an extended period of time.

this might be one of the benefits for Kuiper of which is one of the things that they have piped up is we have designed what we think is the best satellite and we're going to have the best satellite from day one going out there and so now they can just immediately go for any customer that needs secure low latency internet anywhere in the world right from the jump yeah all right looking up then yeah you think they'll be fine without with getting a waiver I don't think there's going to be any stress. And, you know, the short reason is that for them to not get a waiver or an extension or any sort of forgiveness from the FCC would basically be the FCC hurting their business. And I really do think of these large constellations as something the U.S.

And in particular, Brendan Carr thinks of as a soft power tool for the U.S., something that projects the strength of the country and its industrial base, and holding back any leading space operator, spacecraft operator, at a time where Chinese constellations are starting the launch and in real numbers would be looked at very negatively. So, I mean, in the post-war in Ukraine days, like, you can see this. strategic importance of it as well, so I don't really, yeah. It makes me wonder if they're going to revisit the concept of these rules. Yeah. For mega constellations. I think it made more sense when you were applying for a constellation of 20 satellites or whatever that you could launch half within six years. But, I mean, SpaceX hit their numbers without an extension? Or did they even need one? Oh, that's a good question. I'd have to go back. It just feels kind of silly. I remember they asked for an extension very early date.

and the FCC said no at the time. But that's also when it was unbelievable to think that they would launch 4,000 or 12,000 satellites. So at this point, the milestone regulations are typically in place to prevent people from squatting on spectrum, and neither of these operators is squatting. They might run into some of your typical industry delays, but they're largely doing what they said they were going to do.

And so if you're a regulator, there's no reason to get in the way. Yeah. All right. This iridium thing I asked you about earlier, and you were like, that's not really a story. So let's put it out there for people that might see an eridium announcement of, what do they do, drop their revenue guidance for like three or four years from now, effectively, and which people are like, obviously, everything's dying for aridium.

But you're saying, hold your horses. I would say hold your horses. So erudium has been a company that ever since this, constellation movement got big was always something that investors wondered, is it in the crosshairs of Starlink, of Kuiper, of any of these new players that are spending billions on constellations and might come and take the lunch of your longest-standing low-worth orbit connectivity system? And CEO Matt Dash's answer has pretty much always been no. And the reason is because they very smartly set their business up to not compete with those companies,

to not compete with most of the satellite industry, what I think he typically calls commodity broadband and have these specialized niche services that are good for safety. They really leverage the strengths of the spectrum that Eridium has, which is L-Band. I think what changed a little bit on their most recent earnings call was an acknowledgement that SpaceX after they went and made that bid to purchase the Echo Star Spectrum will be a more direct competitor on the direct-to-device side of things. And direct-to-device has been a little bit hard for Eridium.

They had that big partnership with Qual-com at the beginning, and then that faded away. No one really stepped in to took their place, and then a competitor got a bunch more spectrum with characteristics that are somewhat similar to eridium. I mean, Echostar was an S-band, whereas Eridium is an L-band, so they're not exactly the same. But I think there was some acknowledgement that, like, hey, this might be a little bit more head-to-head than anticipated. And you mean, on the spectrum side, if I understand right, the Eridium stuff is more robust against, like, bad weather.

Whereas now, like, if Jake gets a storm rolling through in Mexico, we're not. not going to do off nominal that day because he's on Starlink and it's pretty bad when it's raining or something. Exactly. So the lower bandwidth needs of the, I mean, I've got a garment thing sitting right there on the shelf. There you do. There you go. It's got an eridium logo on the top of its antenna. The point is like that'll, that spectrum is good when I need to send a signal that I need help because I'm in the wilderness and someone needs to come to help me. Yeah. And it doesn't need to be a face time call. Storm, sleet, rain. Right. Yeah, that's their thing. It gets you through. Yeah, but you're saying the Echo Star stuff is closer to that than the current Starlink spectrum is?

Yeah, from memory, S-band is closer to L-band, but it is slightly higher in frequency. It is the same thing that Apple is using for their connectivity with Global Star, which has also been branded and advertised as an emergency service. And if you look at Global Star press releases over the years, they're not a huge company, but I actually thought they put out some of the best because they could tout how many rescues they had done from their service so i mean those videos that apple does that their uh events are pretty good when you know people are upside down with an apple watch on and it gets out and then they'd show the iPhone one where they're like in a ravine and you know so yeah it's good it's good and now it is on the apple watch yeah not mine you're looking at my wrist as if i have a satellite one i do not but the ultra does have

that so yeah i mean um you made me think somebody was tweeting a video a clip of us at the space symposium talking to Peter Beck when he slipped and told everyone that he was working on an Amazon, uh, part of the Amazon constellation, uh, never that live show we did? Yeah, I remember at space symposium a couple years ago. He like, at one point it was like the Amazon global star. He like swallowed the word Amazon. Uh, that just made me think of that when he said a global star. Um, all right. The last thing is this merger, uh, this European merger. I've never looked at a story and like, I need cable, Caleb to explain that to me. Like I have when Airbus, Talley, Zalania and Leonardo are merging their space divisions.

What do I make of this? Yeah, I think the whole industry is still trying to figure out what to make of it. A very frequent headline that I've been seeing, which I think is wrong, is that this is supposed to be a response to Starlink. It's Europe's plan to combat Starlink or have some sort of industrial titan that will hold the fort. And I don't see it that way. I think there were some questions around how needed or not this merger was,

nicknamed Project Bromo, or if you're cynical, Project FOMO. But really, it comes down to the fact that Europe's space industry has been under a lot of pressure in recent years, and especially on the satellite communication side of things. We tallied at Quilty all of the geostationary satellite orders for the past 15 years to look at, you know, what was the market share for Airbus and for Talas and everybody else. And if you combine those two companies, they have about a third of that market. So they were the winners in the European Space Agency, the French, excuse me, the French Space Agency. They put a bunch of money into helping them win this piece of the industry. unfortunately for them, it's dying. People don't buy geosatellites as much as they used to. And when they do buy one, they're likely to consider, if not purchase, one of these small geos that typically come from a startup, like Astronis or Swiss to 12. So the market for them has become much more challenging in that portion. And then the losses, especially on the Airbus side, it's somewhere in the vicinity of 2 billion euros. So cleaving that off.

and putting it in a separate business, I think, could help Airbus's bottom line. It might help some of the others with their bottom line. And what would be interesting to me is if it allows those three companies to consolidate some of their resources. I think the way Europe has done their industrial policy, you know, it's the geo-return. So what a state or nation gives to ESA will come back in the form of contracts. And this has, I think it's worked well in some aspects. Europe can focus on singular projects with ESA and make those work. It also can risk having like duplication in different places.

Because if you're a big company and you decide the best way to get the most money is to put a factory in every single country, kind of like how some programs, NASA programs, might go here in the States, you're going to reduce the efficiency that you could have if you said, okay, I'm just going to centralize this. Airbus and Talas have a lot of factories in the same countries. So combining them, they could save money and then perhaps have more cost-effective products to compete with on the market. But to me, the iris squared constellation is too small. It's too subscale to really justify a humongous merger and, you know, say you're put together all this industrial heft.

There's still big questions about what other players in Europe will do. Germany is putting a lot of money into its own defense and space ecosystem right now. They've pledged 35 billion euros over, I think it's the next five years, and have contemplated their own low Earth orbit and even medium Earth orbit constellations. so how Germany reacts is a big question and then what some of the new startups like Aerospace Lab in Belgium or Reorbit which I think they're in Finland you know these guys have a chance to look at this

both as a threat because their biggest competitor just got bigger but also an opportunity for anyone who's concerned about that being too much of a concentration of power I think the merger works well in the sense of making Europe have an industrial titan to compete versus the U.S. and versus China in sort of a great space powers kind of way, like great power politics. But outside of that, there's still, to me, questions about how big the benefits really are to those, you know, companies

and to Europe. And it's not all of the space businesses. from those companies, right? Like, it excludes launch vehicle stuff from Airbus. I assume that it excludes, like, Talley's pressure vessels that they make for Cygnus, or is that stuff included as well? I would assume it goes in there, and, you know, they announced it as a memorandum of understanding. So we don't really know all the in-announce yet, yeah.

Cool, I just thought it was weird that they said, well, we're excluding launch vehicle activities from Airbus. And, like, did they get the Orion service model? module contract as part of this new thing, or is that still left out? Probably, my guess is it would have been harder to do because they would have to unstitch Airbus from Saffron because Air Nog Group is half of those. So you already got three major players. Sorry enough, cooks in that kitchen.

Exactly. So we'll go to a different kitchen for the rest of it. Yeah. What's interesting to me is that the merger itself, you know, Airbus defense in space is like 30 something thousand employees. and the combined entity here is 25,000 employees. So as a whole, it will be smaller than Airbus Defense and Space. The Airbus Defense and Space does have that defense portion, which we have space folks.

A lot of the people. We don't pay as much attention to, so a good portion is probably that. But I'm curious what happens to Airbus, you know, Talis, Alenia Space is about 8,000 people. Leonardo's Space Division is about 3,000 people. easy to see all of that going into this new company. I think for Airbus, it's going to be more difficult to kind of split the whole thing up. And for Airbus, it's probably also the most important because of those losses that we mentioned earlier. Yeah.

All right. So I guess we'll see when they actually announce the details. Yeah. What gets included in none. All right, man. That's the end of the list. So what are you working on? Plug some quilty stuff.

What's up next? What's up next? The next report that we are likely to do, and we just stumbled into this conversation earlier, but relay satellites is probably going to be our next big study. Other than that, we've got a few things that we're working on that can't yet be revealed. Oh, secret. But state teams for 2026. We got some irons in the fire, and look forward to sharing them then.

Quilty space, and you're still the director of research? Yes. Right. Got it. The show notes. All right, man, well, the next time you're in New Jersey, you know where you're coming. Yeah, next time we'll have to do an off-nominal. We'll grab a beverage.

We'll probably go down, it's a very steep staircase to have too many drinks of here. That's true. It's risky. I'll stick with the water. All right. Thanks, man. Thanks again to Caleb for coming on the show, for stopping by, being here in person, like one of those real physical life podcasts that occurs, which was always fun to do.

This episode is brought to you by 32 executive producers who, made this episode possible. Thanks to Haiko, Eunice, Joel, the Astrogator's SCE, Russell, Joe Kim, Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut, Natasha Saccoe, David, Steve, Josh from Impulse, Will & Lars, from Agile, Better Everyday Studios, Jan, Fred, Warren, Chris,

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