Medium & Low Earth Orbit Satellites Are Redefining Space War

By Battlespace-Technology,

The modern space industry is undergoing a period of rapid transformation. McKinsey has compared the state of the sector today to the aviation space in the wake of World War II, and the internet ecosystem in the early 1990s. The World Economic Forum has predicted that the global space sector will reach $1.8 trillion in value by 2035. Space, in other words, is evolving.

The conversation is evolving, too. Increasingly, players in the sector are discussing the advantages and disadvantages of different satellite orbits. The traditional preference has been for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geostationary Orbit (GEO). But within investment circles and in publications like The Wall Street Journal, it’s recently been proposed that Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) is the ‘sweet spot’ for specialised satellite applications. Is it true?

MEO in a nutshell

MEO lies between LEO (altitudes of 160 to 2,000 kilometres) and GEO (35,786 kilometres). It balances the wide coverage of GEO with the low latency of LEO. MEO is mainly used for global navigation systems – GPS, Galileo, and GLONASS, for example – as well as military communications and Earth observation. Thanks to its position, it’s useful in areas like navigation, defence, and specialised Earth observation.