On October 20, 2026, at 7:04 a.m. Eastern Time, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, carrying 32 payloads into a mid-inclination orbit. Buried in that crowded manifest was a small but historic piece of hardware: a demonstration payload from SES Space & Defense, riding aboard Planet Labs' Pelican-12 Earth-imaging satellite. Its job is to help answer one of the biggest questions facing spaceflight today: who will connect NASA's future science missions to Earth?
For more than four decades, that job belonged to a single government-owned network: NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) fleet. NASA is now preparing to sunset TDRS and buy space-relay services from commercial firms. The payload launched this week is a global capstone test of one of the leading commercial answers — a system called LEO Relay Service, or LRS. This article explains the invention, the history behind it, and why a satellite relay test may reshape how science gets done in orbit.
Why Satellites Can't Just Call Home
A satellite racing around Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour spends most of each orbit far from any ground station. To send its data down the old way, it has to wait for a ground antenna to appear over the horizon, squeeze a burst of data through during a short pass, and then wait again. For a science satellite measuring hurricanes or an imaging satellite photographing cities, those gaps mean delayed data — and sometimes lost data.
The elegant fix, invented in the 1970s, is a relay: a second satellite, parked far above in geosynchronous orbit, that can see both the low-flying mission satellite and a ground station at the same time. The mission satellite beams its data up to the relay, which beams it straight down to mission control. NASA's version — the Space Network — was one of the great engineering achievements of the 20th century. Our story on the Euclid telescope's first discovery shows just how valuable continuous space-based data collection has become — and every one of those missions depends on a reliable path back to Earth.
A Brief History of the Space Switchboard: TDRS
The Tracking and Data Relay Satellite project was established in 1973 to give NASA's critical missions continuous communications. When the first satellite, TDRS-1, launched from the space shuttle Challenger's maiden flight in April 1983, these were the largest, most sophisticated communications satellites ever built. One satellite alone provided more communication coverage for the September 1983 shuttle mission than NASA's entire global ground-station network had provided for all previous shuttle missions combined.
The upper-stage booster meant to carry TDRS-1 to its final orbit failed, and controllers spent the satellite's own fuel nudging it into place — yet it served 27 years, finishing its life relaying data for Antarctic research. The second satellite was destroyed with Challenger in January 1986. Thirteen TDRS satellites were eventually launched, and ten remain in service today, managed from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and anchored by ground terminals at White Sands, New Mexico, and Guam.
But the fleet is aging, and every satellite is a bespoke government machine. NASA announced in 2022 that it would begin phasing out TDRS and hand satellite relay services to commercial providers. In 2024 the agency went further: while existing TDRS satellites may keep operating for a decade or more, all new orbital missions would communicate through privately operated satellite networks. The space switchboard is going commercial.
NASA's $278.5 Million Bet on Commercial Relay
The mechanism is called the Communications Services Project, or CSP. In 2022, NASA's Space Communications and Navigation division awarded $278.5 million to industry through CSP to fund the development and demonstration of commercial space relay services. The logic is straightforward: commercial satellite operators already fly huge, modern constellations for broadband and data services. If NASA can buy relay capacity from them instead of building and launching its own dedicated satellites, missions get cheaper, the technology stays current, and private companies — which also sell to other customers — share the cost.
It is the same playbook NASA used with cargo and crew flights to the International Space Station: fund demonstrations, validate the capability, then buy the service as a customer. SES Space & Defense is one of the companies competing to become NASA's future relay provider, and this week's launch was its latest proof point.
The Invention: A Radio That Reinvents Itself and a Folded Antenna
The heart of the Pelican-12 demonstration is two pieces of hardware, and both are genuinely clever inventions.
The first is a Software Defined Radio (SDR). A traditional radio does one job, fixed in its hardware: it transmits or receives on fixed frequencies, with fixed waveforms. An SDR replaces most of the hardware with software. The same physical box can be reprogrammed — even while in orbit — to speak different signal protocols, jump between frequency bands, and adapt to whatever relay network it needs to talk to. For a satellite that must interoperate with commercial constellations it will never physically touch, that flexibility is everything. Instead of building a custom radio for each relay partner, engineers upload new waveforms like apps on a phone.
The second is a folded-optic flat-slab tracking antenna. Conventional satellite dishes are curved bowls that must physically swivel to track a moving partner — heavy, bulky, and mechanically complex. The flat-slab design folds the optics so the antenna stays thin and compact, like a panel, while electronically steering its beam to follow the relay satellite overhead. Thin, light, and steerable without moving parts: exactly what you want bolted onto a small, already-crowded Earth-imaging satellite that was built for cameras, not communications gear.
Together, Planet's internally developed SDR and the flat-slab antenna give Pelican-12 a high-throughput, low-latency data pipe to SES's relay network. SES describes the upcoming orbital campaign as a "global capstone test" — the final exam that completes its CSP demonstration, proving the system can hand data off across its network no matter where on Earth the mission satellite happens to be.
What LEO Relay Service Actually Does
SES Space & Defense has already demonstrated its LEO Relay Service on two different space systems: its own geosynchronous constellation and its O3b mPOWER medium-Earth-orbit network. The Pelican-12 demonstration extends that relay capability to a real low-orbit science-style mission — an Earth-imaging satellite of exactly the kind NASA flies.
What does the service deliver? Three things that every mission needs:
- Low-latency, persistent connectivity regardless of satellite location. Instead of waiting for a ground station to appear, the mission satellite always has a relay overhead to talk to.
- Mission data backhaul. The images and measurements a science satellite collects get moved off the spacecraft and down to Earth quickly — at both low and high data rates, depending on the need.
- Telemetry, Tracking and Command (TT&C). The spacecraft's health data flows down and ground commands flow up, keeping the mission controllable around the clock.
"Global testing of our relay network is the culmination of four years of product development for the LEO Relay Services (LRS) utilizing the operational on-orbit constellations," said Sam Sutton, vice president of Space Data Relay Services at SES Space & Defense. "LRS enables low latency, persistent connectivity regardless of satellite location, enabling critical data backhaul, Telemetry, Tracking and Command (TT&C)."
The Ride Up: Bandwagon-5's Crowded Launch
The launch itself was classic modern spaceflight. SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 was the fifth flight of the company's dedicated mid-inclination rideshare series — distinct from its Transporter missions, which go to sun-synchronous orbits favored by Earth-observation satellites. The flight carried 32 payloads: six navigation satellites for Xona Space Systems, a maneuverability demonstrator from Portal Space Systems, Varda Space Industries' orbital manufacturing capsule, weather satellites, radio-frequency monitoring satellites, and more. It had been scrubbed the day before by poor weather in the booster recovery zone.
Pelican-12, built by Planet Labs in San Francisco, is the twelfth of its next-generation Earth-imaging line. Notably, SES was not the only CSP contender on the flight: Viasat flew its Maxwell satellite, built by Rocket Lab, to test its own high- and low-rate relay services for NASA's program. Rival CSP contenders are flying their hardware side by side — literally on the same rocket — which is exactly what NASA wants.
The Bigger Picture: Space Communications Goes Commercial
Step back, and this launch is about something larger than one antenna or one contract. For forty years, space communications meant governments building dedicated infrastructure. The commercial era — the same shift that gave us reusable rockets and private space stations — has now reached the invisible layer that keeps every mission connected. Just as companies like Google are pushing ambitious infrastructure projects of their own, as we covered in our coverage of Google's Project Suncatcher, the space industry is racing to build the orbital utilities of the next decade.
The stakes for science are real. A future NASA Earth-science mission — tracking wildfires, measuring sea-level rise, studying storms — will no longer wait for its data to trickle home in short ground-station bursts. On a commercial relay network, its measurements could flow continuously to researchers on Earth, nearly in real time. Faster data means faster disaster response, fresher climate records, and science teams that can re-task a satellite while the event is still happening.
There is also resilience. A single government fleet is a single point of failure; a market of competing commercial networks means missions can switch providers, combine services, and benefit from the relentless upgrade cycle of the private sector. The TDRS fleet served brilliantly for over four decades. Its successor may not be one satellite system at all — it may be an entire industry.
What to Watch Next
With the payload now in orbit, SES Space & Defense says the demonstration will continue expanding its commercial service capability through the Pelican satellite's operations. Completion of the global capstone test will mark another key step in NASA's CSP effort, advancing the validation of commercial capabilities toward future operational support for near-Earth science missions.
Watch for the results of these orbital tests — latency figures, throughput numbers, and handover performance across the relay network — because they will feed directly into NASA's decision about which commercial providers earn operational contracts. The TDRS sunsets slowly, but it is sunsetting. A small, reprogrammable radio and a flat antenna that folds light like a periscope may be the shape of what comes next.
A small payload rode a crowded rocket to prove the future of space communications is commercial. If the test performs as designed, the next generation of NASA science missions will never have to wait to call home.