Eutelsat has reached a deal to provide rural broadband to New Zealand’s Chatham Islands, the operator announced April 7. The Rural Connectivity Group — a joint venture between New Zealand's three mobile network operators — will use the EUTELSAT 172B satellite to deliver an upgraded telecommunications network to the islands.  This is part of Zealand government’s…

Hanwha Systems, a South Korean defense company, plans to build a 2,000-satellite constellation in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) to serve mobility applications.  In a May 30 press conference first reported by Space News, the company detailed plans to invest $420 million dollars into the system and starting pilot services in 2023. The system is expected to…

Tokyo-based Axelspace has expanded its agreement with KSAT in the area of satellite imagery applications. The two companies are expanding an existing partnership on global ground network support to include data distribution from AxelGlobe, Axelspace’s Earth Observation (EO) platform, powered by the constellation of GRUS microsatellites. The companies announced the new partnership on Monday. Axelspace…

Astroscale, the Japanese startup that wants to remove dangerous clutter from an already congested space environment, reached a critical milestone with the successful launch of its ELSA-D debris removal spacecraft early Monday morning. Russia's GK Launch Services sent ELSA-D into space on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The mission was originally…