Eutelsat signed an authorization to proceed with Airbus Defence and Space on 10 September for 229 additional OneWeb satellites, an estimated one billion euro investment announced at the International Space Summit in Paris, and they will be built in Toulouse. The factory that built more than six hundred first-generation OneWeb satellites sits in Merritt Island, Florida, and Airbus put its United States small-satellite business under strategic review twelve days earlier, with a sale among the options.

The replenishment work that plant was built for is now being done on the other side of the Atlantic.

What did Eutelsat actually order?

Part of the manifest is now assigned. Under a contract announced in the same Paris week, Arianespace will carry replenishment satellites on two dedicated Ariane 64 flights in 2027 and 2028 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, which puts those two flights on a European launcher from a European site, French Guiana being an outermost region of the Union rather than a third country. The rest of the manifest is unassigned, and OneWeb has been flying on SpaceX and the Indian Space Research Organization since the Soyuz withdrawal. Arianespace flew 13 OneWeb missions between 2019 and 2022, placing 428 satellites, so the partnership long predates this order.

The new satellites carry digital channelizers for onboard processing and the ability to host third-party payloads, neither of which the first generation had. Eutelsat frames the order as replenishment and expansion through 2034, bridging to IRIS2, whose commercial Ku-band constellation the company expects to be operational by mid-2032 and to provide more than twice OneWeb’s current capacity.