Steve Collar, SES president and chief executive, is shown talking to Rodolphe Belmer, Eutelsat chief executive, during a satellite operators panel at the World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris in September 2018.

Instead of buying individual satellites tailored for a specific job at a precise orbital location, fleet operator SES wants homogenous satellites with digitally processed payloads it can reconfigure in orbit to perform any job.

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Debra Werner is a correspondent for SpaceNews based in San Francisco. Debra earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. She is a recipient...