SAN FRANCISCO / PERTH, 20 AUGUST 2026: LatConnect 60 (LC60) has signed a commercial contract with Transcelestial for an optical communications terminal on its SWIRSAT-1 mission, plus access to Transcelestial’s optical ground station network for space-to-ground data transport and ground station operations.
The agreement covers a terminal designed for rates up to 10Gbps, access to a ground network with two stations live today and five to six targeted by end of 2026, and ongoing data transport and operations. Together these are intended to carry mission imagery from the spacecraft into LC60’s processing and customer-delivery environment following commissioning.
“Earth-observation operators are collecting far more data than they can get to the ground. RF downlink is spectrum-constrained, licence-heavy and expensive per gigabyte. What LatConnect 60 is buying is a high-capacity optical path plus the ground network to terminate it, bought as a service, with no spectrum licensing and no optical ground segment for them to build,” — Dr. Mohammad Danesh, Co-Founder and CTO of Transcelestial
“For an Earth-intelligence mission, the sensor and the data path cannot be treated separately. The mission only creates value when we can move high-volume SWIR imagery from collection to users within useful delivery windows. Transcelestial’s terminal will reduce the time needed to clear imagery from our SWIRSATs,” — Venkat Pillay, Founder and CEO of LatConnect 60
