A launch, a milestone, and a look ahead
06-10-2026
5-minute read
Marking its 40th anniversary, Viasat has successfully launched ViaSat-3 F3, completing its ultra-high-capacity geostationary (GEO) constellation. For Co-founder and CEO Mark Dankberg, this milestone is not just a capstone of past engineering efforts, but a launchpad for Viasat’s next era of customer-centric, multi-orbit innovation.
When a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on April 29, 2026, carrying ViaSat-3 F3, the final satellite in our ViaSat-3 constellation, it marked the culmination of years of work and the beginning of the ViaSat-3 era, with all three satellites launched.
And, by the time this six-ton satellite completes its journey to geostationary orbit, Viasat will also be celebrating 40 years in business.
The ViaSat-3 ultra-high-capacity constellation might represent Viasat’s most significant satellite infrastructure investment to date, but for Viasat Co-founder and CEO, Mark Dankberg, it is also a moment to take stock and a launch pad for what’s next.
It's another really big step, but a big step towards all the stuff we have to do. ViaSat-3 will substantially increase capacity that is secure, reliable, and highly flexible for delivering greater bandwidth economics. This GEO constellation will have a huge impact on the way people perceive how we use different orbits to achieve the effects you want on the ground, in the air, and at sea."
Mark Dankberg, CEO, Viasat
Launch of ViaSat-3 F3 at Space Kennedy Centre, Florida.
What everyone takes for granted
In the hyper-scaling satellite industry, is bigger better, and does meeting demand always mean more satellites and more scale?
The ViaSat-3 constellation embodies a different view. Each satellite is designed to deliver more than one terabit per second of throughput. Advanced dynamic beam-forming technology concentrates bandwidth precisely where demand is highest from busy flight corridors to key maritime routes and defense operations.
This paves the way for the next generation to be smaller, smarter, and launched several at a time, while retaining the advantages that make GEO economically robust. The test is the same for every orbit. Can you deliver bandwidth at a lower unit cost than the alternatives? If you can, you have a future, but scale alone doesn't answer that question.
Start on the ground
As Dankberg explained recently on a Via Satellite podcast: “Don't start with what orbits you're going to occupy. Start with what effects are you trying to create on the ground.” In other words, the orbit question matters, but the primary question is what customers are actually trying to achieve.
The orbit, the spectrum, the technology all follow from a clear understanding of the customer need. In contrast, when you start with technology, you risk ending up with a solution looking for a problem.
Direct-to-device is a case in point. It’s one of the most talked-about opportunities in satellite right now so it’s easy to think of it as a single market. In reality, it spans mobile phones, IoT devices, and wearables through to autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, rural connectivity, remote healthcare, and a growing list of national-security applications. Each has unique and dynamic requirements that no single satellite, spectrum band, or antenna type can meet alone.
“We don't think of it as discrete markets,” says Dankberg. “Depending on what the platform is, what its mission is, you might have some need for small antennas, larger antennas if there are passengers in them.” Serving this space requires a breadth of services that reach beyond isolated use cases and spot solutions.
Why it’s always cost per bit
Working back from questions about customer needs also changes what you measure. For that, one metric sits above all others: cost per bit.
The shift from broadcast to unicast echoes this challenge. When a single signal reached millions of people, bandwidth cost looked efficient because you were dividing it across an enormous audience. “The big transition has been broadcast to unicast,” Dankberg observes, "With an audience of one, the spotlight's really on the cost of bandwidth.”
Cost per bit is the foundation that tells you whether a business model works, whether a satellite is worth building, whether a partnership makes sense. It applies equally to GEO, LEO, and everything in between, and it's what makes Viasat’s multi-orbit strategy coherent as each orbit earns its place by what it can deliver economically for the customer.
The same data discipline applies to how we interpret results. On a SATELLITE 2026 panel discussion earlier this year, Dankberg mentioned wearing two fitness watches from different manufacturers simultaneously. “You take the same raw sensor data, and they make very different interpretations of that,” he said. "Because divergent perspectives mean you can reconcile and figure out whether or not you're actually improving."
When applied to bandwidth economics, that means holding multiple measurements against each other until the picture is clear enough to act on.
'Why I wear two watches' - Mark Dankberg reveals all at SATELLITE 2026
Why it’s always cost per bit
Working back from questions about customer needs also changes what you measure. For that, one metric sits above all others: cost per bit.
The shift from broadcast to unicast echoes this challenge. When a single signal reached millions of people, bandwidth cost looked efficient because you were dividing it across an enormous audience. “The big transition has been broadcast to unicast,” Dankberg observes, "With an audience of one, the spotlight's really on the cost of bandwidth.”
Cost per bit is the foundation that tells you whether a business model works, whether a satellite is worth building, whether a partnership makes sense. It applies equally to GEO, LEO, and everything in between, and it's what makes Viasat’s multi-orbit strategy coherent as each orbit earns its place by what it can deliver economically for the customer.
'Why I wear two watches' - Mark Dankberg reveals all at SATELLITE 2026
The same data discipline applies to how we interpret results. On a SATELLITE 2026 panel discussion earlier this year, Dankberg mentioned wearing two fitness watches from different manufacturers simultaneously. “You take the same raw sensor data, and they make very different interpretations of that,” he said. "Because divergent perspectives mean you can reconcile and figure out whether or not you're actually improving."
When applied to bandwidth economics, that means holding multiple measurements against each other until the picture is clear enough to act on.
Forty more years
Viasat in 1986 was co-founded by Dankberg and two colleagues operating out of his house – the business incubator of choice back then.
Today, we span defense, aviation, maritime, energy, enterprise, and home internet, operating across fixed and mobile satellite services, across space and ground, and across GEO, HEO, LEO and LTE through both owned space assets and those of world-class third-party partners.
Our multi-orbit, multi-network approach exists because different customer problems require different answers, and because the right question has always mattered more than defending the right answer.
The distance travelled wasn't covered by doing the same thing better and bigger. It was covered by reinvention, multiple times, each requiring the willingness to leave behind a business model that had worked perfectly well up to that point.
With ViaSat-3 F3 on its journey to geostationary orbit and F2 anticipated to enter service soon, the question already being asked is what the discipline of reinvention demands next.
Engineering questions like these have guided Viasat for 40 years – from ‘seizing our own destiny’ as Dankberg put it when we decided to build our own satellites because what we needed didn’t exist at the time; to standing by our founding motto to provide practical solutions to difficult communications problems; to understanding that we can never stand still. We always need to accelerate the pace of innovation and continually evolve, grow and improve. And the next four decades will be no different.
We're constantly rethinking as there's more technologies, service improvements and types of service to com. All of that rides on everything that came before it and this launch should help people understand what can be achieved now and in the future."
Mark Dankberg, CEO, Viasat
You may also be interested in