Geostationary orbit

The laser, Theodore Maiman, 1960.

Geostationary communications satellite, Harold Rosen, 1963.

Drip irrigation, Simcha Blass, Netafim, 1966.

Personal computer, CPU central processing unit, 1979, designed at Intel's Haifa Laboratory.

Let's add some context there for the listener.

Geostationary orbit, or GEO, is roughly 22,000 miles above the Earth's equator.

Yes.

At that specific altitude, a satellite's orbital speed exactly matches the rotation of the Earth, meaning it effectively hovers over the exact same spot on the ground permanently.

It is absolute prime real estate for crucial telecommunications and early warning military satellites.

So this Chinese satellite in GEO approaches an old, dead Chinese satellite.

It uses its robotic arm to grapple the dead satellite, fires its thrusters, and literally tows the dead satellite hundreds of miles further out into space.

Dropping it into what is known as a graveyard orbit to get it safely out of the way.

Uh, but what's really great is 10 years from now, we're gonna move even further beyond just the infrared and visible imaging, right? We're gonna move into a whole bunch of other modalities.

We expect we'll do a weather monitoring, where we're gonna look at the next class of weather satellites, where you can look at augmenting or even enhancing the GOES capabilities from GEO.

Uh, we'll look at being able to do hurricanes, severe convective storms, these other things that people really care about.

But then we're gonna have some fun looking at even more, uh, elaborate and enhanced things.

Uh, and that gives, that kind of information is tremendously valuable to them.

And that's just not something that satellites and LEO provide, right? It's really hard to get a collection of, of high frequency.

So I thought, "Well, wouldn't it be neat if you had a satellite in GEO where you could do the entire Permian Basin, you know, once every 15 minutes," right? Map the entire Permian Basin and detect methane from there.

Um, and that was kind of, got me starting to think about, "Oh, okay, what would you need for that?" You know, can...

They currently operate the largest commercial quote non-Earth imaging network In so many words, they've got access to about 50 sensors and cameras on orbit.

So this $25 million is going to accelerate HEO's expansion into both LEO and GEO orbits.

And they've already booked their first two GEO launches slated to start in quarter four of 2026 and plan to establish reliable, repeatable GEO imaging by as early as first half 2027.

So they're moving pretty quickly as far as getting these capabilities and expanding their fleet of sensors and operating vehicles as rapidly as they can.

Now, they've got some software offerings.

HEO started out as a robotics company, but they have only been talking about space domain awareness as of recent.

It seems like that's going to continue with this new funding round.

And pushing into GEO is kind of the natural extension of that.

Now, for regulars, you know the baseline here.

Geostationary broadband, that's internet from that distant fixed ring, has to prove it can still grow while low Earth orbit constellations add capacity by the thousands.

So what changed today? The F-3 satellite covers the Asia-Pacific region, and F-2 covers the Americas.

Each satellite adds more than one terabit per second of capacity to ViaSat's network to bolster its business in aviation, maritime, government, and broadband.

If an adversary can use these gravitational currents to sneak up on our most vital satellites, how on earth do we even spot them in a volume of space 1,700 times bigger than our normal neighborhood?

Well, the United States Space Force recognized that their legacy defensive perimeter was dangerously inadequate.

To adapt, they formally extended their area of responsibility outward into what Doctrine calls extra-geosynchronous space, or XGEO.

And they set up a whole new unit for this, right? Yeah.

Space Delta II established the 19th Space Defense Squadron down in Dahlgren, Virginia.

And beyond.

And beyond, yeah.

The mandate is to prevent XGEO from becoming an unmonitored sanctuary.