Chase Plattner

NGSO revenue to overtake geostationary market by 2028

Among increasing demand for space-based technologies such as Starlink, non geostationary orbit (NGSO) constellations are ultimately expected to surpass geostationary (GEO) satellites in revenue by 2028. Currently, GEO satellites have the comfortable majority of the $12 billion satellite capacity at 85% of the market. However, NSGO revenues are expected to exponentially grow at a 27% compound annually growth rate. At these rates, this will reach a market cap of $18 billion by 2033. This is also accelerated by other projects from Starlink such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper. With projects like these, Global Satellite capacity has continued to surge to 27 terabits per second, which handles 70% of throughput traffic. The significance of NGSO satellites are that it offers lower latency, can cover polar regions and other lone parts of the Earth; whereas, GEOS spacecraft excel in the high traffic areas. As Amazon continues to grow their project, there is still uncertainties in the impact and the direction of the NGSO market.

Rapid growth of constellations like Starlink, increase the global satellite capacity which will certainly raise significant concerns for many areas including Cyber Security. As noted in the article, “NGSO satellites can provide high-speed broadband at lower latency than spacecraft operating farther away in GEO”. These satellites will provide increased performance to previously disconnected parts of the Earth such as parts of the Ocean and the Poles. Increasing shift towards these services will promote a growth of interconnected systems and introduce a global vulnerability that hackers can exploit and obtain data. At such a global scale and with such a large number of satellites, the more these constellations grow, the greater the risk can be. As NGSO satellites lower the cost of connectivity, it will allow a larger volume of systems to be connected and will amplify the incentive for not only hackers to want to exploit, but also encourage espionage and other service disruptions. With all this growth, I have faith that systems like Starlink are well aware of the growing cyber security implications with continuing growth of interconnectivity and that they have systems and procedures in place for preventing attacks.