Resilience, adaptiveness and collaboration vital for success in space (Studio)
Speakers at the Defence In Space Conference (DISC) 2025 highlighted the critical and evolving role of space in national security, defence and the global economy.
New enhancements have been revealed by Inmarsat for its SwiftBroadband aeronautical connectivity service.
Inmarsat’s network now supports a new higher speed SwiftBroadband streaming class, which effectively allows an aircraft exclusive use of a satellite bearer. This extra functionality will generally be available above 15 degrees elevation when the satellite resources are available.
The new streaming class is being charged per minute similar to the existing 16, 32, 64 and 128 kbps services. In addition, Inmarsat is introducing new 8 and 16kbps streaming classes together with a dynamic ‘Quality of Service’, allowing onboard applications to use the bandwidth more efficiently.
Lars Ringertz, Inmarsat’s head of marketing for aeronautical business, explained, “After making SwiftBroadband globally available at the end of February last year, we have continued to develop and evolve the service to meet the requirements of specific markets and users. With the introduction of new streaming classes and dynamic ‘Quality of Service’, we have further enhanced SwiftBroadband as an application platform for the whole aircraft, positioning Inmarsat as the only provider capable of delivering safety services, operational applications as well as higher data rate connectivity through a single pipe to the aircraft.”
Speakers at the Defence In Space Conference (DISC) 2025 highlighted the critical and evolving role of space in national security, defence and the global economy.
Both the US and Canada operate Cold War-era capabilities which cannot defeat today’s and tomorrow’s threats.
Air defence systems are continuing to appear top of countries’ shopping lists but broadly across different capabilities it is a sellers’ market, as demonstrated by backlogs and double-digit percentage point growth.
Mike Moran, Director of US Government Business at Amazon Project Kuiper Government Solutions, highlighted the evolution of space as a critical warfighting domain at the Defence in Space Conference (DISC) 2025, held this week in London.
In May this year, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the government plans to position Germany as “Europe's strongest conventional army”. A new blueprint outlines how this is going to occur through massive investment.
Two of the concrete projects outlined in the readiness report, the European Air Shield and Space Shield, will aim to be launched by Q2 2026.