This morning at 7:20 am EDT, a Russian Soyuz rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northeastern Russia. On-board were three Russian Gonets M telecommunication satellites as the primary payload, along with 19 small satellites as the secondary payload, including the first two Generation One (Gen1) satellites for Kepler Communications Low Earth Orbit Internet of Things (IoT) constellation.
In a webcast to mark the event, Kepler said that the launch went as planned. The two new IoT satellites are now known as Kepler-4 (Antilles) and Kepler-5 (Amidala) and were deployed into a 575 kilometres Sun-synchronous orbit. Kepler expects first communications, known as Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP), with the satellites around 12:30 pm EDT (16:30 UTC) today. This will be followed by the parallel commissioning of the satellites over the next few days.
In speaking about the company and the milestone of today’s launch, Kepler CEO Mina Mitry said “our team has doubled in size every year since inception, we’re almost 70 people. Today, we’ve acquired spectrum rights to operate both our wideband and narrowband communication. And we’ve delivered service all the way to the poles. Our mission today is yet another milestone achievement towards those goals, and marks the start of our aggressive launch campaign for the years to come.”
Kepler-4 and Kepler-5 will be ready for service very soon and will enable their customers to trial their narrowband service offering.
That “aggressive” launch schedule was to have included the launch of two more satellites next month on a Russian GK Launch Services commercial mission. That launch has now been pushed back to December. Of note, at the end of the webcast Kepler did mention its next launch would be in December. The company, ever secretive about its forthcoming launch schedule, did not say if there would be more than one launch in December. However, we do know that Kepler contracted SpaceX earlier this year for rideshare missions and the Transporter-1 mission is tentatively scheduled for December 16. It is possible that Kepler will be on that mission with somewhere between six to eleven satellites. Kepler has declined to comment on the details of their future launch manifest. Should Kepler launch the full compliment of 11 satellites on the SpaceX Transporter-1 mission, then by the end of the year they could have 15 Gen1 satellites on-orbit.
Sarah McKenzie-Picot, a Systems Designer at Kepler said during the webcast that the Gen1 satellites are slightly bigger than the three demonstration satellite Kepler already has on-orbit. They also have an “improved communications payload, more power and improved thermal control” which she states “allows for a higher duty cycle and allows us to service more customers. These satellites will include both high data rate antenna for the global data service and low data rate antenna for IoT.”
One of the points Kepler was stressing in the webcast was their in-house ability to design, test and manufacture the satellites. Shehroz Hussain, the Production Control lead said this is the result of their lean and agile approach to manufacturing. That approach including working with Space Flight Laboratory to setup their in-house downtown Toronto manufacturing facility.
Kepler’s IoT constellation will consist of 140 satellites. However, they recently filed applications with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) and the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for another larger constellation of 360 satellites that would offer a variety of broadband services. All told, at the moment, Kepler is planning on launching 500 satellites between its two telecommunication constellations.
- For all our stories on Kepler Communications please visit Kepler archive.