Telesat markets Lightspeed as an SDA-standard space-relay network
As the brief logged it
On the Aug 13 call Goldberg said Lightspeed's optical inter-satellite links "meet the U.S. government's SDA standard," so "other operators will have their optical links also meeting those standards, which means we can pass traffic to one another" — a cross-operator interoperability claim, backed by an already-disclosed NASA demonstration contract. He named earth-observation operators, governments, and, unprompted, "when you hear others talk about data centers in space, that's another opportunity… it needs to be connected back to the earth." A second Western MEO/LEO operator positioning relay-to-orbital-compute as a revenue line is a demand-side datapoint for the space-data thread SES's own adjacency must compete in.
Provenance
Logged in the brief of 14 August 2026.
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