Andy Pasztor

Amazon's plan to spend more than $10 billion on a constellation of more than 3,200 low-Earth-orbit, internet-beaming satellites won Federal Communications Commission approval. But industry insiders are guessing about which customers the company plans to serve. Amazon told regulators its satellites could help bridge the digital divide by bringing high-speed broadband to areas that lack competitive internet service.

Apparently, an expensive, highly classified US spy satellite is presumed to be a total loss after it failed to reach orbit atop a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket on Jan 7. Lawmakers and congressional staffers from the Senate and the House have been briefed about the botched mission, some of the officials said. The secret payload—code-named Zuma and launched from Florida on board a Falcon 9 rocket—is believed to have plummeted back into the atmosphere, they said, because it didn’t separate as planned from the upper part of the rocket.

Japanese telecom company SoftBank Group is orchestrating a deal between US satellite startup OneWeb and debt-laden satellite operator Intelsat SA in an attempt to deliver faster and cheaper internet connections world-wide.

OneWeb, which is 40 percent-owned by SoftBank, will buy Intelsat, combining two very different types of satellite fleets that would offer low-cost, versatile connectivity spanning the globe. As part of the deal, SoftBank will inject $1.7 billion into the combined company, in which it will hold a 40 percent stake. The deal, which is subject to approval by Intelsat bondholders, would lower Intelsat’s roughly $14.5 billion debt by about $3.6 billion, while allowing OneWeb to further expand its ambitious satellite-production and deployment plans in the next decade.

Financial reports and interviews with former SpaceX employees depict robust growth in new rocket-launch contracts and a thin bottom line that is vulnerable when things go awry. They also show the company putting steep revenue expectations on a nascent satellite-internet business it hopes will eventually dwarf the rocket division and help finance its goal of manned missions to Mars. SpaceX projected the satellite-internet business would have over 40 million subscribers and bring in more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025, according to the documents. The internet service is currently in planning stages without a factory or a full-fledged team of engineers.