Blue Origin announces a new LEO/MEO constellation called TeraWave. Photo: Blue Origin

Blue Origin dropped some surprising news on Wednesday afternoon, announcing plans to deploy TeraWave, a new constellation of optically linked satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO), geared toward enterprise users and data centers. 

A satellite constellation is a new space venture for Blue Origin, which develops launch vehicles, engines, a lunar lander, and the Blue Ring in-space mobility vehicle. 

It could also put Blue Origin’s TeraWave in competition with Amazon Leo, Amazon’s satellite constellation which has enterprise users as a key customer vertical. Jeff Bezos founded both Amazon and Blue Origin, but they are separate companies. 

Blue Origin submitted an application to the FCC on Wednesday, outlining its rationale and plans for the constellation, calling it a “logical progression” for Blue Origin to move into advanced communications infrastructure. 

In terms of customers, Blue Origin said it is purpose-built for enterprise customers including enterprise, data center, and government users. The FCC filing went further, saying that TeraWave will provide industries such as aviation, defense, and manufacturing with high-quality connectivity, also mentioning government users in terms of civil, defense, and national security. 

“Explosive growth in cloud migration, AI workloads, real-time collaboration, and rich media is driving historic bandwidth demand and east-west traffic between data centers and edge sites. At the same time, even brief network outages create unacceptable risks for government, defense, critical infrastructure, and enterprise users, leading to mission failure, safety concerns and financial loss,” Blue Origin explained in the FCC filing. “Existing networks and SLAs, built primarily around terrestrial and subsea fiber, are often not engineered to provide truly “always-on” performance in the face of these demands. Blue Origin seeks to increase access to high-capacity, resilient connectivity for governments and enterprise customers worldwide.”

TeraWave will be made up of 5,280 satellites in LEO and 128 satellites in MEO, all optically linked. The constellation will operate in Q/V-band and deliver both radio frequency (RF) and optical connectivity. Blue Origin stated customer speeds will be up to 144 Gbps in Q/V-band links LEO and up to 6 Tbps from optical links from MEO. 

According to the FCC application, user uplink and downlink will be in Q/V band, with gateway downlink and uplink in the E-band.

The ground segment is designed to consist of operations centers, gateway Earth stations with parabolic antennas, user terminals, and optical terminals.

“This multi-orbit design enables ultra-high-throughput links between global hubs and distributed, multigigabit user connections, particularly in remote, rural, and suburban areas where diverse fiber paths are costly, technically infeasible, or slow to deploy,” the release stated. “TeraWave enterprise-grade user and gateway terminals can be rapidly deployed worldwide and interface with existing high-capacity infrastructure, providing additional route diversity and strengthening overall network resilience.” 

Blue Origin plans to begin deploying TeraWave in the fourth quarter of 2027. 

The release differentiated TeraWave from current LEO constellations, saying that TeraWave will serve around 100,000 customers, versus millions of customers. It is also designed to offer symmetrical bandwidth, with identical download and upload speeds. It is designed to provide point-to-point connectivity and enterprise-grade internet access.

The FCC filing also requests waiver for processing round rules for NGSO systems, arguing the system is designed to share spectrum and would not preclude entry of additional operators in the same frequency band or cause frequency conflict.

It’s interesting timing for the constellation announcement, particularly as Amazon Leo is ramping up, with plans for a wider commercial rollout this year. Amazon Leo has stated customer verticals in consumer, enterprise, and government. It recently detailed private networking features like a direct connection to Amazon Web Services, and a “Leo Ultra” terminal for enterprise users to offer download speeds of 1 Gbps and upload speeds up to 400 Mbps. 

“TeraWave is its own project. We identified an unmet need with customers who were seeking enterprise-grade internet access with higher speeds, symmetrical upload/download speeds, more redundancy, and rapid scalability for their networks,” a Blue Origin representative said in a statement to Via Satellite.

TeraWave is led by Lindo St. Angel, who recently joined Blue Origin as senior vice president of Emerging Systems. He was previously with Amazon for 15 years and served as vice president of hardware for Amazon’s Lab126 unit. He contributed to the development of Amazon consumer devices including Echo, Fire Tablet, Fire TV, Kindle, and Astro.

Blue Origin is led by Dave Limp, longtime Amazon exec and former lead on Amazon Leo.