Glasgow: Europe’s Leading Satellite Manufacturing Hub

Spire Global, the space services specialist, has been awarded a contract by Lacuna Space, a satellite IoT provider, to build and operate six satellites for a dedicated IoT constellation, all of which will be made in Glasgow.

Under the agreement, Spire will build and launch the spacecraft, which will be carrying Lacuna Space’s payload and antenna. The companies say there is also the potential "to scale the constellation to dozens of satellites".

They will be adding to Lacuna Space’s existing ten satellites – the company is building its IoT network for relatively low-cost, reliable global connections to sensors and mobile equipment.

Financial details of the contract haven't been announced.

As mentioned, the six satellites will be manufactured at Spire's facility in Glasgow.

"Glasgow produces more satellites than anywhere else in Europe, and this contract between Spire Global and Lacuna Space is a fantastic example of how the UK’s strong heritage in space manufacturing is accelerating our progress towards global connectivity and new commercial applications for telecommunications," said Craig Brown, investment director at the UK Space Agency.

"This collaboration will unlock opportunities for businesses, using satellites to transfer data and information between millions of sensors on the ground that make up IoT, with the potential to scale up further. I’m looking forward to watching the constellation come to life."

Lacuna Space will operate the payloads and receive encrypted data at its headquarters in the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Harwell Campus in Didcot (pictured right).

Lacuna's segments for IoT services include agriculture, maritime, logistics, remote infrastructure, and environmental monitoring. For example, measuring soil moisture for farmers in remote regions could help improve crop yields.

The satellites will feature Lacuna’s proprietary, ultra-high density 'Gentoo' satellite gateways, it says, which work in conjunction with the company’s ground scheduling network. This will enable "adaptive, regional, fine-frequency algorithms developed using AI from years of satellite-based spectrum scans".

"This contract is a very important step in Lacuna’s progression into commercial operations and represents over five years of intensive development work to refine the concept and achieve the scalability and reliability required to provide a global commercial service," said Rob Spurrett, CEO and co-founder of Lacuna Space.

For its part, Spire highlighted the potential for new applications:

"Satellites play a critical role in providing IoT connectivity across the globe, particularly to remote, underserved, and developing areas of the world," said Frank Frulio, the general manager of Space Services at Spire. "These services are transformational in enabling new applications across a wide variety of industries and solving some of the biggest challenges facing humanity today."

"With Spire Space Services, we have streamlined the process to architect, build, launch, and operate satellites reliably, and at a much lower cost than it would typically require new space companies to build infrastructure in space, allowing revolutionary technologies, like Lacuna’s IoT network, to reach the market faster."

Lacuna Space is a UK and Dutch company that provides low-cost global connections for short data messages to sensors and mobile equipment. The company describes it as an ultra-low-cost tracking and detection service.

It operates a constellation of its own LEO satellites along with coverage of third-party constellations including MEO infrastructure.

In March last year, Lacuna Space announced an agreement with Omnispace to collaborate on an IoT service using LoRaWAN to enable direct-to-satellite communications for IoT devices.

See also: Wyld Networks launches global satellite IoT service