Sateliot is launching five satellites with SpaceX on Thursday, taking its constellation to 11. The Draconis mission will double daily passes, halve revisit time and bolster its 5G NTN IoT connectivity service.
Catalan company Sateliot will place five new satellites in orbit this Thursday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. With this mission, called Draconis, the company will reach 11 satellites launched since it was founded and, by its own calculations, will on average double the number of daily passes and halve the time a satellite takes to fly over the same point again.
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Liftoff is scheduled for 1 October at 20:18 (Spanish mainland time) from the Vandenberg base in California, as part of SpaceX's Transporter-18 mission, although the schedule could still shift at the last minute. The launch can be followed live from Espai Diagonal.
In essence, Sateliot offers mobile phone towers in space. Its satellites extend the coverage of mobile operators, which buy the service wholesale to provide Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity in places where terrestrial networks do not reach. The company says the technology, based on 5G NTN, has already been validated.
The five new spacecraft, built by Alén Space, are small: 20 x 10 x 35 centimetres and 10 kilos each, with a useful life of five years in a 510-kilometre orbit.
Compared with the four satellites it launched in 2024, they carry an optimised payload, a more reliable system for storing data on board, improved versions of the main computer and attitude control (more stability and easier manoeuvres), and more radiation-resistant memory. According to the company, the maturity of the design has made it possible to design and manufacture them in half the time needed for the previous mission.
The operation also involves Exolaunch, which has handled integration and logistics; KSAT and Leaf Space, partners for the tracking and control stations on the ground; and Comfone, which provides IPX connectivity services to interconnect Sateliot's network with mobile operators.
Tritó, the next big step
These five satellites are part of a constellation that Sateliot wants to expand to more than 500 units and that will evolve from generation to generation: from massive IoT towards higher-capacity, more critical services, including direct connection to devices (D2D).
The step change will come from 2027 with Tritó, which will debut 5G NR NTN technology, store-and-forward communications based on the 3GPP Release 19 standard, and a digital multibeam phased-array antenna capable of managing several coverage beams dynamically. Along these lines fits the agreement already announced with PLD Space for a dedicated mission aboard the Miura 5 rocket.
To finance this, the company is working on a Series C round worth 100 million euros. So far it has raised around another 100 million and forecasts revenues of about 500 million in 2030.
"We have validated the technology and are now increasing capacity and regularity so we can scale the service together with mobile operators," sums up Jaume Sanpera, Sateliot's CEO and co-founder. "Our goal is to turn the satellite into a natural extension of their networks wherever they do not reach," he adds.
