On May 12, 2018, a SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying Bangladesh's first geostationary communications satellite. The country's then prime minister declared that Bangladesh's flag had soared into space, and the moment was genuine: Bangladesh became the 57th country to independently operate a satellite in space, the first payload ever launched on SpaceX's most advanced rocket variant at the time. Seven years later, the satellite is losing money, the engineers who operate it are uncertain about their futures, and a foreign satellite internet service has arrived to compete for the connectivity market the satellite was supposed to dominate. The story of Bangladesh Satellite-1 — now officially renamed after the political transition of August 2024 — is not simply a cautionary tale about mismanaged infrastructure investment. It is a window into the complexity of participating in a space economy that has transformed beyond recognition since 2018, and the real, if unfinished, capacity that Bangladesh has built in the process.
The global space economy generated $570 billion in revenue in 2023, growing at a five-year compound annual rate of 7.3 percent. By 2024, the commercial satellite industry alone accounted for $293 billion — 71 percent of the world's total space business — with satellite manufacturing revenue increasing 17 percent year-on-year. The global space economy is projected to cross the $1 trillion threshold as early as 2032, and potentially reach $2 trillion by 2040. A record 259 launches deployed 2,695 satellites in 2024 — a launch to orbit approximately every 34 hours. The dominant actor, SpaceX, accounted for more than half of the world's orbital launches in the first half of 2025, with a liftoff every 28 hours. At the end of 2024, 11,539 satellites were operating in Earth orbit, compared with just 3,371 in 2020. The world that Bangladesh's satellite engineers trained to operate within has, in seven years, become something categorically different.
Bangladesh Satellite-1: What the First Generation Actually Built
Bangladesh Satellite-1 was built by Thales Alenia Space of France on the SpaceBus 4000B2 platform and launched at a total cost of approximately $248 million, financed through an $188.7 million loan from HSBC. The satellite carries 40 transponders — 26 Ku-Band and 14 C-Band — with coverage extending across Bangladesh and the surrounding region including India, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It operates from orbital slot 119.1 degrees east and was designed for a 15-year operational lifespan, placing its end-of-life around 2033. Ground control is maintained from two stations: a primary facility in Gazipur's Joydebpur and a backup at Betbunia in Rangamati.
The satellite's actual performance has been a source of genuine public accounting since the fall of the Hasina government. Bangladesh Satellite Company Limited (BSCL) has incurred annual losses of approximately Tk 66 crore when depreciation costs are included, and the company has not filed tax returns or made profits for five years. Of the satellite's 40 transponders, 20 were designated for domestic use and 20 for international lease — the international commercial opportunity that was supposed to underwrite the project's economics. Foreign currency earnings from leasing transponders to markets in Southeast Asia never materialised at the scale projected. The satellite is primarily used for direct-to-home broadcasting in Bangladesh, but analysts note that renting equivalent transponder capacity from established international providers would have cost roughly a third of current expenses.
Experts have been direct about the structural problem. Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb, the interim government's ICT special assistant and one of the more candid voices on the subject, acknowledged that the first satellite's business case was not viable from its design, noting that a weather and earth observation satellite would have served Bangladesh's practical needs — cyclone preparedness, flood monitoring, agricultural management — more effectively than a communications satellite in a market where commercial transponder capacity was already competitively available. Yet the infrastructure built around the satellite — the trained team of approximately two dozen engineers at Gazipur and Betbunia, the ground control systems, the institutional experience of operating a geostationary satellite — represents real capacity that does not disappear with a problematic business model.
Starlink and the Low Earth Orbit Revolution
The most consequential development in Bangladesh's satellite landscape in 2025 arrived not from BSCL's orbit slot at 119.1 degrees east, but from SpaceX's constellation of over 7,000 low earth orbit satellites positioned just a few hundred kilometres above the planet. The process began with a phone call between Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus and Elon Musk on February 14, 2025. Regulatory approvals were finalised by May. On July 18, 2025 — exactly one year after the internet shutdown during the Monsoon Revolution — Starlink was officially launched in Bangladesh at a press conference in Dhaka. SpaceX Vice President Lauren Dreyer described Bangladesh as "a model for others," noting that the country had moved from initial discussions to live deployment in a timeframe that was "rare globally."
BSCL was announced as Starlink's official national reseller, with a business-to-business agreement signed between the two organisations. The framing — the state satellite company partnering with the world's largest private satellite operator — is either an awkward irony or a pragmatic evolution, depending on perspective. Starlink offers download speeds of 25 to 220 Mbps with latency below 50 milliseconds, capabilities that Bangladesh Satellite-1's geostationary design structurally cannot match: geostationary satellites, positioned at approximately 35,700 kilometres altitude, introduce latency measured in hundreds of milliseconds by the laws of physics. For applications requiring real-time responsiveness — telemedicine, distance education, emergency communications during cyclones — Starlink's low earth orbit architecture is technically superior.
The affordability question is real. Starlink's hardware kit costs between $349 and $599 (approximately Tk 43,000 to 74,000), with a monthly residential subscription of $120 (approximately Tk 15,000). For context, local mobile data costs Tk 400 to 500 for 30 GB per month. Widespread residential adoption at current pricing is not realistic for most of Bangladesh's population. The more immediate opportunity is in business, maritime, emergency services, and remote institutional connectivity — hospitals, schools, government offices — in areas where terrestrial fibre and mobile networks are inadequate. Bangladesh's geography, with its delta-formed river systems and coastal zones exposed to cyclonic flooding, makes satellite internet resilience a genuine national infrastructure question rather than a consumer luxury.
Earth Observation: The Satellite Application Bangladesh Actually Needs
The global satellite industry's fastest-growing application segment is not communications — it is earth observation. Remote sensing revenue grew 9 percent in 2024, powered by approximately 800 operational remote sensing satellites. Earth observation satellites are playing a critical role in disaster response, agricultural management, urban planning, and climate monitoring. For Bangladesh, the practical value of earth observation satellite data is not theoretical: the country loses billions of dollars annually to cyclones, riverbank erosion, and flood events that affect millions of people. Advance warning systems, crop yield forecasting, and coastal zone monitoring all depend on timely, high-resolution satellite imagery.
This is the context in which Bangladesh's planned second satellite becomes consequential. The Bangabandhu Satellite-2 project — now proceeding under the interim government with significant restructuring — had been complicated by the Russia-Ukraine war, which invalidated a $435 million cooperation agreement signed with Russia's Glavkosmos in February 2022 before Western sanctions made the arrangement impossible. The project subsequently attracted competing proposals: Airbus Defence and Space offered a price between $300 million and $400 million, while Thales Alenia Space's Italian arm — which specialises in earth observation rather than communications — proposed $290 million. The Italian arm's involvement is significant: unlike Bangladesh Satellite-1, which was a communications satellite, the second is intended specifically for earth observation, matching the technical need that public health and disaster management experts have consistently identified as the priority.
The decision on a second satellite remains pending under the Yunus administration, with experts urging a transparent business case study before commitment. The engineering argument for moving forward is straightforward: Bangladesh Satellite-1 is scheduled to cease operations in 2033. The engineers who have spent seven years developing the institutional knowledge to operate a geostationary satellite are watching their expertise approach its expiry date. "All of our expertise is tied to this one satellite," one engineer told Rest of World in late 2025, requesting anonymity. The two-dozen-person team at Gazipur represents something Bangladesh took seven years and nearly $250 million to create — not just the hardware, but the human capacity to manage objects in geostationary orbit.
Student Satellites and Bangladesh's Emerging Space Research Culture
The national satellite programme's mixed financial record has not dampened broader engagement with space science among Bangladesh's academic community. Bangladesh's first nano-satellite, BRAC Onnesha, was designed and built by students from BRAC University in conjunction with Kyushu Institute of Technology's BIRDS programme and launched from the Kennedy Space Center in June 2017. The 1U CubeSat was capable of high-quality photography for vegetation, flood, water resources, and forestry analysis — exactly the earth observation applications that the national satellite programme subsequently acknowledged as most relevant to Bangladesh's needs.
At the competitive level, the United International University (UIU) Mars Rover team won first place in Asia for the third consecutive time at the University Rover Challenge 2024 — one of the most demanding engineering competitions in the world, requiring student teams to design and build functional Mars surface exploration rovers. BRAC University, MIST, KUET, IUT, and UIU are among the institutions regularly participating in international space and robotics competitions. The Space Generation Advisory Council records growing activity in small satellite projects and space research clubs at Bangladeshi universities. This pipeline of engineering talent — students who understand satellite systems, remote sensing applications, and space robotics — is the human infrastructure on which any meaningful expansion of Bangladesh's space programme will ultimately depend.
What Participating in the Space Economy Actually Requires
The global context makes Bangladesh's choices concrete. The space launch services market, valued at $14.67 billion in 2024, is projected to grow to $78.02 billion by 2035. Earth observation data is being embedded into agriculture, insurance, logistics, climate compliance, and financial services across markets that Bangladesh participates in as an exporter, borrower, and climate-vulnerable economy. Countries that have built the institutional capacity to access, process, and use satellite data are already gaining systematic advantages in risk assessment, supply chain management, and environmental governance over those that have not.
Bangladesh's position in this landscape is neither strong nor hopeless. It is a country that built a satellite — imperfectly, expensively, and with significant commercial miscalculation — but built one. It has trained engineers who understand orbital mechanics and ground station operations. It has universities producing engineers who win international space competitions. It has launched Starlink, which, despite the sovereignty questions that The Diplomat and others have raised about data governance and national security implications of foreign private satellite infrastructure, has brought genuine connectivity options to underserved areas in ways that terrestrial infrastructure alone could not. And it is evaluating a second satellite specifically designed for the earth observation applications its geography and climate vulnerability require.
The question for Bangladesh's space policy is not whether to participate in the space economy — the satellite overhead, Starlink's constellation, and the growing market for remote sensing data make non-participation increasingly costly in practical terms. The question is how to build the institutional and policy infrastructure that turns access to space technology into durable national capability, rather than expensive infrastructure dependent on foreign expertise and vulnerable to geopolitical disruption. The engineers in Gazipur know this better than anyone. They spent seven years learning to maintain an object thirty-six thousand kilometres away. The next step is ensuring that knowledge has somewhere to go.
WinTK covers Bangladesh's technology sector, space science, and digital infrastructure. For more reporting and analysis, visit our technology section.
