CesiumAstro raises $730M at over $4.5bn to build a 737-satellite network. Janus Henderson led the Series D. CesiumAstro's chief executive told Bloomberg that governments want "sovereignty over their own constellation" rather than relying on a proprietary system like Starlink. November 6, 2026 - 12:07 pm GMT CesiumAstro has raised $730M in a Series D round that values it at more than $4.5bn. The Austin-based maker of satellites and space communications systems announced the round on Thursday. It also unveiled Synchronicity, a planned network of 737 satellites with AI built in, for commercial, sovereign and defence customers. Asset manager Janus Henderson led the round. Insight Partners, Sands Capital, Sumitomo Corporation of Americas and Toyota's growth fund Woven Capital took part. So did Incharge Capital, Magnetar, AV and NewSpace Capital. The equity came with $100M of debt financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) and JPMorgan. CesiumAstro says it has announced more than $1.2bn of new capital this year. Bloomberg, which first reported the round, put its total raised to date at $1.4bn. "With our technology proven on orbit, on the ground and in the air, a significantly expanded set of capabilities, and more than $1.2 billion in new capital raised this year, we are positioned to take the next major step in our growth," said Shey Sabripour, CesiumAstro's founder and chief executive. From antennas to its own network. Bloomberg's Loren Grush reported that the company's main product has been a phased-array antenna for satellites. These antennas send out beams of radio waves that operators can steer in different directions. That widens the area they cover on Earth. In 2024 it added Element, a satellite it builds and operates for customers. Its first one, Element-1, went up in October on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission and is now operating. It is the first of eight planned spacecraft, and CesiumAstro has booked launches for the other seven. Synchronicity goes further: CesiumAstro will run the network itself. The constellation will use Ku-, Ka- and V-band frequencies and process data on board. AI will manage the network and allocate capacity. According to Bloomberg, it will operate at two different altitudes in low Earth orbit. The company gave no launch timeline. Three deals in the past 12 months feed into it. Jariet Technologies makes millimetre-wave radio chips. 1Aardvark writes mission software for defence programmes, and Vidrovr builds AI for real-time signal analysis. "We designed the silicon, the active phased array, the payload, processors, the spacecraft, ground terminals, and the network as one system," Sabripour said. Sovereignty, not Starlink. Sabripour told Bloomberg that the company's customers include businesses and governments that want "sovereignty over their own constellation". Governments from Canada to Europe are backing their own networks amid concern over Elon Musk's power, Bloomberg noted. One example is Europe's IRIS[2] network. That concern grew after Starlink's role in Ukraine came under scrutiny. "They're not necessarily competing with Starlink, but they don't want to be part of a proprietary system," Sabripour told Bloomberg. SpaceX already dominates the market with more than 11,000 Starlink satellites. Amazon's Leo network, which recently built its 1,000th satellite, will eventually span more than 3,000. Sabripour said CesiumAstro has access to radio frequencies beyond those regulators approved for SpaceX and Amazon. The company will also spend $500M over five years on its Austin headquarters. That includes buying about 25,000 square metres of manufacturing space. It plans 550 new jobs, taking its Austin-area staff past 1,000 by 2030. It also has operations in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan, Singapore and Japan. The round follows Xona's $250M round for a GPS rival in low Earth orbit last month. Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Blue Origin unveils GS3 and Northstar engine. Blue Origin's GS3 kick stage puts 14 t into GEO on New Glenn 9x4. Plus CesiumAstro's $730M round and Ukraine's Starshield talks. Top stories. Ukraine opens talks on New Starshield contract with no explanation for October outage. Ukraine's Starshield contract expires in mid-2027, and Kyiv has started negotiating a replacement with Pentagon leadership. Chargé d'Affaires Denys Sienik told the Defense Writers Group on Thursday that Ukraine is also looking at stopgap options in case a new deal is not ready in time. In October, Ukrainian officials reported a sudden change to the Starshield network. They blamed it for drone and air defense failures that led to military and civilian deaths. Sienik said neither the Pentagon nor SpaceX has explained what happened, though service has since been restored. The outage came in the same period that President Trump announced a Russian diesel import deal with Vladimir Putin and warned Ukraine not to strike Russian refineries. That timing has raised questions about whether the change was a technical fault or a deliberate decision. Blue Origin adds a third stage and a 715,000 lbf engine to New Glenn. At its Up.Summit event at Kennedy Space Center, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp announced Glenn Stage 3 (GS3), a BE-7-powered kick stage for direct GEO insertion and Earth-escape trajectories. On the 9x4 vehicle, GS3 is rated for 14 metric tons to GEO and 20 metric tons to trans-lunar injection. On the 7x2 vehicle the figures are 8 tons to GEO and 10 tons to TLI. GS3 fits inside an interstage, so payloads keep the full fairing volume. Blue Origin says a government payload bound for cislunar space is booked for 2028. At Launch Site One in Texas, the stage's composite liquid hydrogen tank held 100 percent of maximum expected operating pressure for 2.5 hours and 150 percent for 10 minutes. Blue Origin expects it to be the first composite LH2 tank flown in space. Space visualization tools The company also revealed Northstar, an LNG/LOX staged-combustion engine rated at 715,000 lbf of thrust, compared with 640,000 lbf for the BE-4. Northstar went from program approval to development testing in 11 months. A source told Spaceflight Now it will be compatible with New Glenn 9x4, and that BE-4 will still power the return-to-flight mission that follows the late-May pad explosion. Direct-to-GEO insertion would let heavy payloads skip the transfer orbit, which changes what trackers see in the hours after launch. CesiumAstro raises $730M for a 737-satellite constellation. CesiumAstro has closed a $730 million round: $630 million in equity led by Janus Henderson, plus a $100 million debt facility from the Export-Import Bank of the United States and JPMorgan. The round values the company at more than $4.5 billion. The money will fund Synchronicity, a planned 737-satellite constellation operating in Ku-, Ka- and V-band. Each satellite will carry onboard compute and serve both commercial and national security customers. Satellite tracker app The company's first satellite, Element-1, launched on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare in October. Seven more spacecraft have launches booked for 2028 and 2029. CesiumAstro wants 350 satellites in orbit by 2032, but CEO Shey Sabripour said the company has not yet chosen a launch provider for the full deployment. Read the full story: Payload Pentagon asks governors to bid for a new stateside base. The Defense Department is asking state governors to submit proposals for a new major military installation in the United States, with a site decision expected by June 2027. Dale Marks, who oversees installations and energy at DoD, outlined the plan alongside FORTRESS America. That initiative aims to harden existing bases against a range of threats and may bring in private industry to help. NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day bids Farewell to Swift. NASA titled its November 6 Astronomy Picture of the Day "A Farewell to Swift," a send-off for the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The gamma-ray burst mission has flown in low Earth orbit since 2004. Read the full story: NASA NASA announces X-70 Fractal experimental aircraft. NASA has announced the X-70 Fractal, a new experimental aircraft in its X-plane series. The agency called it a "new beginning for aeronautics." Read the full story: Space.com Space visualization tools Satellite of the Day. GEOEYE 1 - Launched in 2008 with a seven-year design life, GeoEye-1 still holds a 675 x 693 km sun-synchronous orbit three years past its 15-year fuel budget. By the numbers. * Active satellites tracked: 16,992 * Cataloged debris objects: 14,974 * New objects cataloged yesterday: 34 * Orbital launches this year: 256 (249 successful) * Next launch: Ceres-2 | Unknown Payload in about 15 hours (Nov 6, 23:35 UTC) Catalog watch. Space-Track cataloged 34 new objects in its latest daily accounting (2026-11-05), alongside 30,205 updated element sets. Reentry watch. * STARLINK-1730 (46563) - predicted decay Nov 7, 13:26 UTC, window +/-8 h (track live) * STARLINK-1338 (45532) - predicted decay Nov 8, 05:41 UTC, window +/-13 h (track live) * STARLINK-4607 (53740) - predicted decay Nov 9, 23:06 UTC, window +/-19 h (track live) Upcoming space launches. Schedule changes. * Newly added: United Launch Alliance Vulcan | USSF-114, scheduled for Dec 31, 00:00 UTC. * Newly added: United Launch Alliance Vulcan | USSF-16, scheduled for Dec 31, 00:00 UTC. * Newly added: United Launch Alliance Vulcan | USSF-23, scheduled for Dec 31, 00:00 UTC. * Newly added: United Launch Alliance Vulcan | USSF-43, scheduled for Dec 31, 00:00 UTC. * Slipped: Long March 2C | Yaogan 51-07 to 09 moved from Nov 5, 16:00 UTC to Nov 5, 15:58 UTC. * Slipped: Starship | Flight 15 moved from Nov 30, 00:00 UTC to Nov 13, 00:00 UTC. * Slipped: Electron | The Mountain God Rises (iQPS Launch 10) moved from Nov 14, 00:00 UTC to Nov 14, 05:30 UTC. * Status change: Long March 2C | Yaogan 51-07 to 09 is now "Launch Successful". * Status change: Electron | The Mountain God Rises (iQPS Launch 10) is now "Go for Launch". * Left the schedule: New Glenn | Blue Ring-1. * Left the schedule: Falcon 9 Block 5 | Inmarsat-7 F1 (GX-7). * Left the schedule: Electron | BlackSky Gen-3 8. * Left the schedule: Electron | BlackSky Gen-3 9. Next 48 hours. * Galactic Energy Ceres-2 - Unknown Payload from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, People's Republic of China (Nov 6, 23:35 UTC) Details TBD. * SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 - USSF-432 from Vandenberg SFB, CA, USA (Nov 7, 00:46 UTC) A classified mission for the United States Space Force. It is possibly a batch of classified LEO satellites based on SpaceX's Starshield satellite bus, based on locations of rocket stage drop zones being exact fits with previous Starlink Group 15 launches. Watch Live See every upcoming mission on the live schedule: Upcoming Launches Note: Launch dates and times are subject to change due to technical or weather considerations. Maurice Stellarski. Maurice Stellarski is the Chief Coordination Officer (CCO) of the Civilian Cardboard Command Center Protocol (CCCCP). With over 25 years of self-certified experience in NEATS (Non-Existent Aerospace Tracking Systems), Maurice specializes in predicting launches with uncanny accuracy using his proprietary KITCHEN (Knowledge Integration Technology Combined with Household Equipment Network) methodology. When not monitoring his mission control center, Maurice maintains the world's largest collection of mission-critical authorization stamps and hosts the underground podcast 'Countdown to Breakfast: Uncensored Launch News.'