(Telecompaper) Vodafone and Japan's Rakuten have become the new lead investors in a venture to expand mobile coverage using a mobile broadband network that will be broadcast from space. The low-Earth-orbit (LEO), low-latency satellite network from Texas-based AST & Science has been dubbed SpaceMobile and is aiming to be the first in the world to connect directly to standard smartphones, said Vodafone in a statement.