A British small satellite builder has 144 broadband satellites ready and no ride to orbit. It is asking Liechtenstein to extend a June ITU spectrum priority deadline, citing the grounded PSLV.
A row of completed ConnectedCosmos satellites sits in a clean room while Europe's sovereign broadband plan waits for someone else's rocket. Open Cosmos, the British small-satellite specialist, says it has built all 144 spacecraft needed for a June ITU deployment milestone and is now asking the regulator to extend that deadline under a Force Majeure claim tied to the grounding of India's PSLV launcher.
The extension request, filed through Liechtenstein, would push back the deadline for the first tranche of a 576-satellite Ka-band network that Open Cosmos is building in two regulatory filings known as 3ECOM. Under ITU rules, hitting 50% deployment on time is what protects a constellation's spectrum priority. Miss it, and the frequencies become available to other operators. Together, the June and September tranches of 144 satellites each define that halfway point for the ConnectedCosmos plan, which combines broadband, IoT, and near-real-time Earth observation in a single architecture.
The Force Majeure framing is Open Cosmos's, not an independent finding. The company points to the January failure of a PSLV mission that destroyed 16 unrelated spacecraft and led India to ground the workhorse launcher. With no Indian rocket flying, the company says it cannot put its completed hardware in orbit on the schedule it originally planned. Multiple ConnectedCosmos satellites are reportedly ready for integration whenever a launch opportunity opens.
That hardware pipeline is the unusual part of this story. Open Cosmos says production is running around the clock across facilities in the United Kingdom, Barcelona, Portugal, and Greece. The bottleneck is no longer at the soldering iron; it is on the launch pad, and specifically on a single foreign rocket family the company does not control. The same grounding that protected ConnectedCosmos from a missed deadline is also the reason the deadline is being missed.
The spectrum itself carries a history worth naming. The Ka-band filings being used for the network were previously held by Rivada Space, the controversial would-be operator whose own mega-constellation plans collapsed as it lost access to launch and financing. The Liechtenstein regulator, which holds the filings and submitted Open Cosmos's extension request to the ITU on the company's behalf, declined to comment while the request is being processed. Neither the regulator nor the ITU has yet published the extension filing, so the legal mechanics of the Force Majeure claim remain an Open Cosmos assertion rather than a confirmed regulatory action.
What makes this case worth watching is what it reveals about sovereign constellation economics. The build side of the equation has been solved: 144 satellites built, production running, supply chain humming. The launch side is now the binding constraint, and ITU milestone rules were written before launch-vehicle concentration became what it is today. If regulators routinely grant Force Majeure extensions when a single rocket family is grounded, spectrum priority becomes a function of who can afford to keep building while they wait. If they do not, hardware-ready constellations lose their priority to operators with better ride-share access, regardless of how much sovereign infrastructure they have already produced.
The next checkpoint is public. Liechtenstein's ITU filing, if and when it appears, will name the specific extension being requested and the period Open Cosmos is asking for. The PSLV's return-to-flight timeline will determine whether the request is a short administrative pause or the start of a longer renegotiation of Europe's connected-sovereignty roadmap. Either way, the satellites are built. The question is whether the clock will still be running by the time they fly.