TAMPA, Fla. — Telesat said Dec. 4 its Lightspeed constellation has passed an early design review, marking a key milestone in the Canadian geostationary operator’s bid to challenge Starlink’s growing broadband dominance in low Earth orbit (LEO).
The operator said the preliminary design review showed the design of the spacecraft, the first to use Canada-based MDA Space’s reprogrammable Aurora platform, is aligned with the program’s functional and performance requirements.
The program is now entering a more detailed engineering phase toward a critical design review, which would confirm the final design of the 750-kilogram spacecraft is complete and ready for production.
Telesat has contracted 14 launches from SpaceX starting in mid-2026 to deploy all 198 Lightspeed satellites within a year.
In September, MDA started constructing a high-volume manufacturing facility in Quebec, Canada, capable of producing two satellites a day.
The manufacturer is also conducting early design work for an undisclosed customer seeking to use Aurora for a non-geostationary orbit constellation.
According to Telesat, the Lightspeed constellation would have around 10 terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity, targeting markets including backhaul services for mobile network operators and internet service providers, aviation and maritime connectivity, and government customers.
Similar to Eutelsat’s OneWeb, slated to begin global broadband services next year after deploying more than 650 satellites, Lightspeed’s focus on enterprise and government markets once helped differentiate it from SpaceX-owned Starlink.
However, Starlink has branched out of its core consumer focus in recent years, gaining significant traction in high-growth markets such as aviation.
Dan Goldberg, Telesat’s CEO, said during the Canadian operator’s Nov. 14 earnings call that Starlink’s success had validated the competitive advantage of LEO broadband.
“Starlink, I believe, is going to continue to gain market share, but they’re not going to take 100% of the market,” Goldberg said.
“The market is big. It’s growing — even with customers that they’re serving today, those customers will want multiple providers. That’s just kind of how these enterprise customers operate.”
As SpaceX continues to aggressively expand a constellation currently comprising more than 6,800 satellites in orbit, Goldberg said Telesat is focused on “bringing to market services that can compete not just with the Starlink that exists today, but the StalLink that will just be getting better and better over time.”
Meanwhile, Amazon plans to start deploying 3,236 satellites for its Project Kuiper LEO broadband network next year.
