ULA launches Viasat’s second shot at a terabit-class broadband satellite

TAMPA, Fla. — An Atlas 5 rocket sent Viasat’s second ViaSat-3 satellite toward geostationary orbit Nov. 13, bringing the U.S. broadband provider closer to operating a terabit-per-second (Tbps) giant it had hoped to debut six years ago.

United Launch Alliance lofted ViaSat-3 F2 at 10:04 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 41 at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, releasing the payload into an elliptical geosynchronous transfer orbit about three and a half hours later.

Viasat announced initial signal acquisition shortly after, marking a key step ahead of the satellite’s roughly three-month journey to its final GEO position at 79 degrees West over the Americas.

The six-ton satellite is one of the heaviest an Atlas 5 has ever sent to orbit, and at about the size of half a football field when fully unfolded, would provide more bandwidth capacity than all 23 satellites in Viasat’s current fleet combined.

Lift-off came a week after ULA scrubbed the mission following a faulty booster liquid oxygen tank vent valve, which was removed and replaced.

Viasat had once aimed to operate a 1 Tbps broadband spacecraft in 2019, before production and supply chain issues compounded by COVID-19 pushed the first ViaSat-3 launch to 2023, only for it to lose more than 90% of its capacity because of a failed antenna deployment.

ULA was slated to launch ViaSat-3 F2 in 2023 before the issue with the Northrop Grumman antenna on ViaSat-3 F1, which is also stationed over the Americas.

Mark Dankberg, Viasat’s chairman and CEO, told SpaceNews it should take a couple of weeks after ViaSat-3 F2 reaches its orbital slot to deploy and confirm its reworked antenna is operating successfully.

Because of similarities with the otherwise healthy ViaSat-3 F1, the operator expects to move quickly through remaining health checks to start services early next year.

“It’s going to be a big boost to our network, especially to our mobility and fixed services,” Dankberg said, “but the whole point of the Viasat-3 series is its capacity and flexibility.”

For the in-flight connectivity market, for instance, he said a ViaSat-3 satellite is designed not only to provide a huge amount of bandwidth to a multitude of planes waiting at an airport, but also to follow them with a beam of connectivity as they fly to their destination.

“Some satellites have beam-forming to follow the plane around, but they’re doing that with 10, 20, 30 gigabits” of total capacity, he added. “Viasat-3 can do that with close to a thousand gigabits.”

Boeing is under contract to provide three ViaSat-3s in total, with the payloads designed and built by Viasat. The third is slated to enter service over Asia in early to mid-2026, using a deployable mesh antenna from L3Harris.

Dankberg said the company is now exploring ways to “miniaturize and package [ViaSat-3 technology] into much smaller satellites,” leveraging existing ground infrastructure and improving spacecraft manufacturing economics to further reduce bandwidth costs.