Seems the "software defined" in these things are mostly about reconfiguring antennas and radio beams. It's perhaps a bit more than a traditional SDR, after all there's not much modern radio communication not using SDRs, even the Mars rovers and satellites have them.

According to the press release, it is just a spaceborne SDR together with a very configurable antenna array, which can be used to provide various kinds of communication links.

The main feature is that you can "beam" a very narrow beam of rf to a moving target like military convoy

That's nothing terribly special with satellites. They've had phased array antennas for a while now.

Fair point.

But I think the space industry tries to communicate something other than SDR when they are talking about software-defined satellites. E.g., satellites as a service, allowing different customers time share a satellite and use it for different purposes by making the capabilities wider.

Industry 4.0 is basically slapping remote features onto expensive industry machines.

Took me a while to realizxe that this is actually not normal and for them its a revolution...