Space Policy
NewOrbit's NEO-1 and Britain's £7.8 Billion Space Bet
NewOrbit, a Reading-based satellite manufacturer founded in 2021, has booked a launch slot for the third quarter of 2028 to fly NEO-1, its first spacecraft, into an orbit that only two prior missions have held for any meaningful stretch of time. Very low Earth orbit, the band roughly 200 to 300 kilometers up, has enough residual atmosphere to erode a satellite’s surfaces and drag it back down within weeks unless something actively fights the physics the whole time it’s up there.
Sovereign Space Capability Is Starting to Look Like Signed Contracts and Flown Hardware
OHB signed a contract worth nearly €1 billion with SES this week to build 18 medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) satellite platforms under Europe’s IRIS² secure-connectivity programme (details via SpaceWatch ). Within days, China demonstrated a two-way, high-speed laser communications link stretching more than 400,000 kilometres between Earth and the Moon (as SpaceWatch reported ). Different continents, different technologies, and neither story is a strategy paper: “strategic autonomy” is no longer a phrase that lives in government white papers. It’s a line item, a delivery schedule, and, in one case, a beam of light that actually made the round trip.