Cape Canaveral: Is there a launch today? Upcoming SpaceX, NASA, ULA rocket launch schedule at Cape Canaveral FLORIDA TODAY Space Team live launch coverage of Monday's mPOWER mission will kick off at floridatoday.com/space about 90 minutes before the launch window opens. Owner-operators of the world's first commercial constellation in medium-Earth orbit, SES has deployed O3b mPOWER broadband services worldwide since April 2024 to customers across the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. Key customers range from the U.S. and Luxembourg governments to Microsoft to Princess Cruises. The acronym O3b stands for "other three billion," referring to the portion of the world's population lacking access to reliable broadband internet. On Dec. 17, a Falcon 9 launched the seventh and eighth mPOWER satellites from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Monday's mission will send up Nos. 9 and 10, representing the constellation's next-to-last batch of satellites. Boeing workers continue producing the final three mPOWER satellites ahead of future launch, which will boost the total to 13. SES, Intelsat join forces amid competition Intelsat delivers about 6,500 television and radio channels worldwide to more than 500 million households on six continents. The newly combined company has about 90 satellites in geostationary orbit and nearly 30 in medium-Earth orbit. SES is headquartered in Luxembourg with a North American main office in McLean, Virginia. Starlink's growing constellation boasts nearly 8,000 operating satellites roughly 340 miles above the Earth's surface. By contrast, Al-Saleh said the more-powerful mPOWER satellites orbit nearly 5,000 miles high, while SES' geostationary satellites are about 20,000 miles up. In an earlier FLORIDA TODAY interview, Karen Jones, a space economist and technology strategist with the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at The Aerospace Corp., cited internet-satellite company consolidation as a growing trend as commercialization of low-Earth orbit matures. The SES-Intelsat merger is an example. “Bringing them together, the reason we had to do it was because the industry is so competitive — with Starlink growing, with Kuiper growing — we needed to create scale. Our scale is a little bit different than the (low-Earth orbit) operators. We operate in GEO and MEO," Al-Saleh said. "But we needed a company that’s able to invest. Able to invest heavy. And this combination allows us to invest close to $700 million to $800 million every year in capital expenditures, on top of the $2 billion-plus worth of operating expenses that we spend in running the company," he said. "So this combination creates a real, new competitor in the marketplace that serves very important industries," he said. The new SES now has a contract backlog topping $9.3 billion with a projected $1.1 billion-plus in free cash flow by 2027-28, a press release said.