In Renens, Switzerland, a company called SWISSto12 is building geostationary satellites the size of an industrial washing machine and a fifth the mass of the multi-ton spacecraft they replace, and this week it raised $70 million on a bet that governments would rather own one outright than lease capacity on someone else's constellation

In Renens, Switzerland, a company called SWISSto12 is building geostationary satellites the size of an industrial washing machine and a fifth the mass of the multi-ton spacecraft they replace, and this week it raised $70 million on a bet that governments would rather own one outright than lease capacity on someone else's constellation

The HummingSat is a geostationary communications satellite roughly the size of an industrial washing machine, and it weighs about a ton — around a fifth the mass of the multi-ton spacecraft that have carried the world’s television, broadband and telephone traffic from 36,000 kilometers up for sixty years. On July 16, its Swiss maker, SWISSto12, closed a $70 million Series C funding round, betting that a satellite small enough for a single countr…