Britain has entered the race against Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon to provide ultra-fast broadband from orbit, buying a £400 million stake in a satellite company.
The government won an auction yesterday to buy a share of equity in the failed satellite company OneWeb as part of a consortium with Bharti Global, of India.
Owning a fleet of low Earth orbit satellites is set to boost research and development into the technology in Britain.
SpaceX is building a constellation called Starlink, and Amazon is developing Project Kuiper. Collectively the three companies aim to send tens of thousands of satellites into space.
OneWeb has obtained a licence to send up almost 650. SpaceX has permission to launch 12,000, but has a longer-term aim of
