Bloomberg Businessweek

T E C H N O L O G Y

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Edited by

Jeff Muskus

○ OneWeb has sent the first

of its small signal-beaming

satellites into space

The Race

To Put the

Internet

In Orbit

low-cost antennas that could be placed on homes,

schools, hospitals, and emergency services out-

posts and pull data down at an incredible clip. For

the first time, the world would be surrounded by a

type of computing shell that would give a Rwandan

high school access to the same information and

tools as a school in Mountain View, Calif., and make

it possible for a climber to fill her Instagram feed

from atop Mount Everest.

The sheer expense of Wyler’s project, including

some pricier-than-expected technology, as well as

some skeptical investors, have forced him to mas-

sage his ambitions for now. In the revised plan,

the recently launched satellites will be joined by

about 650 more over the next couple years. This

first fleet will be aimed at making money by deliv-

ering high-speed internet to airplanes, cruise ships,

and governments willing to pay to modernize their

infrastructure.

Wyler says he hopes such customers will cover

the costs of the global network, which will total

billions of dollars more than he’s already raised.

“This is the world’s largest civilian space project,”

he says while driving around the grounds of the

Guiana Space Centre. “We are not funded by NASA

or a government, and it can’t run at a loss. We want

to bring the internet to the poorest people in the

world and have built the world’s most expensive

system to do it, and the expansion of the service

needs to pay for itself.” Branson, flanking Wyler,

insists with characteristic optimism that the era

of billionaires like him losing money on space ven-

tures is over. “I think the time has come for space

companies to succeed,” he says.

Companies with names like Telesat and LeoSat

have similar plans for internet-beaming satellite

constellations, but Wyler’s biggest competition has

been Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX

and Tesla Inc. and a Branson frenemy. (The two

play-fight about their respective rocketry achieve-

ments while chilling together on Branson’s island.)

SpaceX sent two space internet test systems into

orbit last year, and its battle with OneWeb is fraught

with extra helpings of bitterness and enmity. “My

issue with SpaceX is personal,” Wyler says.

He and Musk were once friends who slept over

at each other’s houses while planning to build

OneWeb together with financial help from Google.

In 2014, Wyler spent months laying out his ideas for

Musk, only to find one day that SpaceX had decided

to build a similar project of its own and had taken

Google on as a financial backer. SpaceX declined to

comment for this story.

The OneWeb founder says he still has a huge

technological lead, citing the low-cost antennas

Richard Branson had snuck off into the corner of

the room to buy a peaceful moment, but his scrag-

gly blond mane and thick goatee are the opposite of

a disguise. One by one, people approach, apologize

for approaching, then rotate their bodies into a hug

as they raise their phones for their obligatory pho-

tos. Branson can’t escape the steady stream of selfie

takers, even at another company’s rocket launch.

The other company is OneWeb, a satellite maker

that’s raised more than $2 billion from Branson’s

Virgin Group and the likes of SoftBank, Coca-Cola,

and Airbus to build a “space internet.” The idea

is to fire an estimated 1,980 satellites into orbit to

beam signals below. On Feb. 27, Branson was one of

a couple hundred spectators who joined OneWeb

founder Greg Wyler at the edge of the Amazon rain-

forest in Kourou, French Guiana, to watch the first

six satellites leave Earth.

Wyler started OneWeb in 2012 and persuaded

Branson to help bankroll it soon after, when the

two were palling around on the British mogul’s

Necker Island. While satellites have been used to

relay internet data for decades, the existing ser-

vices are slow and expensive, because the con-

ventional sedan-size models are unwieldy, run on

outdated technology, and orbit the Earth at about

18,500 miles up, making coverage spotty. Wyler’s

pitch: Use more advanced gear to put thousands

of cheaper satellites the size of washing machines

into orbit 750 miles above the planet. In theory, the

larger network of satellites should cover everybody,

including the more than 3 billion people who can’t

yet be reached by high-speed fiber optics.

The OneWeb founder promised to make

Bloomberg Businessweek March 11, 2019