The UK has entered the increasingly competitive race to become a global satellite Internet provider after taking control of failed space startup OneWeb with Indian billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal.
The low-Earth-orbit-satellite operator emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday and will now seek a further $1.25 billion through debt or equity to achieve its ambitious medium-term goal of launching a global commercial Internet service by 2022 focusing on remote areas.
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It will face well-funded rivals, including ventures led by SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
The UK government, which will have a golden share in OneWeb, and Mr. Mittal’s Bharti Global are each paying $500 million for 84.4 percent of the company. The balance will be owned by existing creditors, including SoftBank and Airbus.
Neil Masterson, former co-chief operating officer of Thomson Reuters, is taking over as chief executive. The UK government and Bharti Global will each have three representatives on the board, and there will be three independent directors.
OneWeb’s emergence from Chapter 11, a process distressed businesses use to reorganize themselves, gives a significant boost to the UK’s ambitions to become a major commercial space player and to develop cutting-edge positioning technology that could be used to cement international security alliances.
“This deal gives us the chance to build on our strong advanced manufacturing and services base in the UK, creating jobs and technical expertise,” said Alok Sharma, business secretary.
The Satellite Applications Catapult, a government-funded innovation hub, is already working with OneWeb to develop positioning, navigation, and timing technology that could be used to enhance the resilience of existing navigation services such as GPS.
The initial focus will be to deliver a viable commercial Internet service to the UK and the Arctic region by autumn next year.
The company was one of the earliest to propose a mega-constellation to deliver Internet to remote parts of the world, but SpaceX’s Starlink constellation already has about 800 satellites in low Earth orbit against OneWeb’s 74.
Nevertheless, in its reincarnated form, OneWeb would increase its focus on business customers, helping it to compete, said Chris Quilty, analyst at Quilty Analytics, a space-industry advisory company.
“The two have elected different paths, with Starlink focusing on the consumer market and OneWeb focusing on enterprise customers,” he said. “SpaceX has developed lower-cost hardware for the consumer market but must still subsidize it, even at a $450 price point. OneWeb’s enterprise customers can expect to pay thousands—or tens of thousands—of dollars for the hardware but can expect to receive higher bandwidth.”
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