Asset-financing specialist SLI Aerospace (formerly Space Leasing International) has signed an agreement with Finnish satellite manufacturer ReOrbit to buy two of its new geostationary (GEO) software-defined communication satellites that possess a combined value of €150 million ($172Mn).

SLI’s satellite leasing platform will enable exclusive use of satellite capacity to customers as a lease rather than outright purchase, resembling a capital-efficient means of gaining satellite capability.

The company’s chief executive listed launch, insurance, and unused capital as just some of the costs that customers can sidestep by using this kind of model, to say nothing of the risks involved with keeping a satellite running.

“Our customers don’t need to pay for more than they need – the launch, the insurance, the excess capacity,” Praveen Vetrivel, CEO of SLI Aerospace, told DCD in an exclusive interview. “Mini-GEO is great for many applications, like sovereign capability or large corporations with a dedicated market where they need high throughput.”

Small geostationary satellite platforms have been a technological direction many European developers have doubled down on in recent years, translating a decades-long expertise in GEO technology into a more cost-effective and efficient set of platforms designed to meet the sovereignty needs of large corporations and small national powers.

“Space and defense have converged, and nations are now racing to secure sovereign space capabilities as a cornerstone of national power,” Sethu Saveda Suvanam, CEO of ReOrbit told DCD. “Our software-defined satellite architecture redefines small GEO as a new class of high-performance infrastructure, delivering unmatched flexibility, resilience, and cost efficiency. This enables nations to deploy secure, scalable, and future-ready space capabilities at speed.”

The ReOrbit satellites that SLI is buying possess 13 concentrated software-enabled beams and are predicted to have an operational life of ten years, according to Vetrivel.

Helsinki-based ReOrbit stresses the optimization of its ability to enable full ownership and control of the satellites and space infrastructure it develops for the customer, enabling the kind of absolute strategic autonomy that would be expected from a piece of terrestrial machinery.

Set up in 2023, SLI is the aerospace subsidiary of Libra Group, a company with more than 50 years of experience in leasing across various high-value asset classes spanning satellites and space infrastructure to aviation. The purchase underlines its certainty in the demand for sovereign satellite capability at new competitive dollar-per-gigabit-per-second pricing.

“Traditionally, the only people who can provide software-as-a-service are fully vertically integrated to possess the scale to offer turnkey service. Anyone who wants to compete with that model needs a lot of capital – we’re helping unlock the ability to scale that way,” Vetrivel told DCD. “What people really want is the right of use. In a way, insisting on asset ownership and having to fund all the required capex delays your deployment and slows your growth.”

As a leasing entity, SLI is watching the space servicing market closely, a developing sector that one day hopes to enable satellite refueling, re-positioning, maintenance, and even retrofitting, but believes it needs more infrastructure to present reliability.

SLI owns 13 satellite ground stations as part of a leasing partnership with RBC Signals, a ground-station-as-a-service provider. These include three in Sweden; two in South Africa; two in Chile; two in Singapore; and four in the United States – with two in Alaska and two in Washington State. Many were acquired from Microsoft last year.

Last year saw it purchase two Ka-Band geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellites from AscendArc for more than $200 million.