Move Over Starlink: Blue Origin Unveils Its Plan For 6.144 Terabit Satellite Up/Down Links

Blue Origin is a Jeff Bezos' startup providing space services to NASA and other clients. Those services include cargo delivery, rocket engines, lunar landing vehicles, and under development, a commercial space station. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket carries as much cargo as SpaceX' Starship and successfully launched a NASA probe in late 2025. The first stage is reusable. 

New Glenn's success has encouraged Blue Origin to develop new satellite constellations. The company announced yesterday a hybrid network of 5,280 LEO and 128 MEO satellites called Terawave that will use dual free space lasers and radio frequencies to communicate with the Earth. Radio frequency will provide a minimum committed bit rate of 144 Gibabits per second, many magnitudes greater than what Starlink offers, with free space lasers boosting the throughput by 6 terabits in ideal weather conditions. Dual connectivity is not a new idea. Low latency financial trading platforms have been using microwave combined with free space lasers to connect US financial market data centers in New Jersey for several years now. Terawave will likely send the same data via a microwave and free space laser links, select the first intact data frame to arrive, and then hand it to the customer. This will sharply lower data errors and improve service quality.

Jeff Bezos began Amazon as an online book seller, but a key focus has been large buyers, namely corporations, governments, and large non-profits. Amazon's LEO satellite service will be targeting the business sector where it already has a very big customer base with a 1 gigabit offering, which is several times what Starlink offers today. Terawave's on-steriods 6.144 Tbps service is designed to make satellite more than just a bandwidth band aid for areas where fibre is unavailable or crazy expensive. At a minimum this should lower the wildly high prices that Global South's long haul networks charge data centers outside dense metropolitan areas.

Terawave uses the lower bandwidth LEO satellites to provide the radio frequency channels while much higher capacity MEO satellites provide the laser links. MEO latency is still quite acceptable for Internet Protocol traffic. Depending on the exact orbit, MEO latency varies from 85 to 200 milliseconds. MEOs are high capacity beasts. For example, the SES MEO satellites use phase array antennas to direct 5,000 individual beams to terrestrial clients. Each beam can do up to 10G. So 5 terabits in total.

MEO satellite advantages include coverage and life span. MEOs orbit the Earth from 8,000 to 24,000 kilometers above the planet. This contrasts with LEO orbits ranging from 160 to 2000 kilometers. So far fewer MEOs are required to provide complete global coverage. Moreover, their design lives are 10 to 15 years. Hence, depreciation is more gradual, capital replacement needs less, and economics generally better.

Diagram Outling Terawave's New LEO/MEO Satellite Network

Chart Comparison of Terawave Service Versus Standard LEO Internet Service



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