World of Satellite-News Updates

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Spacecom Wins $6.5 Million Contract for Ku-band VSAT Services in Southern Africa
April 16, 2013
Spacecom has announced that it has won a three-year contract worth $6.5 million from one of Africa's largest Internet Communications Service Providers (ISPs) for provision of Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSAT) satellite services from the AMOS-5 satellite located at the 17 degrees east orbital position.

The AMOS-5 Southern Africa Ku-band beam will enable the African ISP to offer VSAT services to its enterprise, commercial and public sector customers in the region.

 

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DMCii, KSAT Sign Deal for Increased Downlink Capacity with Svalbard Ground Station Facilities
April 16, 2013
DMC International Imaging (DMCii) has signed an agreement with Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) that will increase the volume of imagery acquired and the speed in which it can be delivered. Under the agreement, KSAT will deliver a complete ground station service to DMCii, including the provision of hardware, and delivery of data to DMCii’s headquarters in the UK.

“The improved downlink has significantly upgraded data delivery times and has already made 30% more imagery available, further improving capability for change detection applications.” Dave Hodgson, managing director of DMCii, said in a statement.

The Svalbard ground station, located near the North Pole, provides increased downlink opportunities from polar-orbiting satellites such as those operated by DMCii. Whilst an antenna near the equator might get two or three passes of a satellite over it in a day, antennas at Svalbard get 14 passes a day, so satellite data can be downlinked every 90 minutes. A high-speed data link between Svalbard and DMCii headquarters will speed up the delivery time of satellite imagery.

“This is a strong Anglo-Norwegian partnership that we expect to continue with future missions such as the UK’s forthcoming NovaSAR mission. The combination of timely deliveries of Earth Observation data and operational marine monitoring services is important for KSAT marine situational awareness services," Rolf Skatteboe, president of KSAT, said in a statement.

 

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NSSLGlobal Marks Business Expansion With New Singapore Office
April 16, 2013
Satellite communications service provider NSSLGlobal has announced the opening of a new office in Singapore. The move is a result of the company’s expansion plans and its increased business growth in the Asian market for the past few years.

“As our first office in the Far East, it’s an important step in the progression of NSSLGlobal. With a good infrastructure and easy access to the surrounding regions, the opening of our new Singapore office provides the perfect base to support our growing Asia Pacific customers, who require a company to manage their account within their own time zone. We see this as another step in our commitment to invest time and money in the market,” Sally-Anne Ray, chief operations officer, NSSLGlobal, said in a statement.

To lead this new office, NSSLGlobal has appointed Priya Patel, who has been with the company since 2000, as general manager for Singapore.

In addition to the Singapore office, NSSLGlobal recently opened an office in Cornwall, U.K., as the company continues to expand. This new office will serve as a back-up and disaster recovery center to the main headquarters, ensuring an uninterrupted network operation center for its customers.

 

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NASA Unveils Asteroid Retrieval Initiative
April 16, 2013

NASA has unveiled its plans to develop the technology and infrastructure to retrieve asteroids for human research. The process would start with identifying an asteroid in deep space, robotically capturing it and transporting it into our planetary region, and then set it into orbit around the moon for astronauts to study it and, possibly for space entrepreneurs to mine.

The project fits into the goals the Obama administration has set for NASA, which include learning how to deviate asteroids heading toward the Earth, finding a destination to practice for a manned trip to Mars, and providing opportunities for space investors.

NASA has just started developing this idea and plans to set up a meeting this summer to work out all the details of the mission. So far, the agency has released a video with a prototype of how something like this could be accomplished.

NASA expects to select an asteroid by 2016, capture it by 2019 and have the first astronauts study the asteroid in orbit by 2021.

 

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Orbital Sciences Prepares for Antares Test Flight
April 16, 2013

Orbital Sciences is preparing for the first-ever launch of its 135-foot-tall Antares rocket. The Antares is scheduled for liftoff at 5:00 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 17, from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The test flight (A-ONE mission) is the first of two Orbital is scheduled to conduct this year under its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Space Act Agreement with NASA. If A-ONE is successful, the company will carry out a full flight demonstration of its new Antares/Cygnus cargo delivery system to the International Space Station (ISS) around mid-year. NASA has invested approximately $288 million in the Antares technology.

The two-stage rocket is powered by engines from Aerojet-General and will take an 8,300-pound mock cargo capsule 160 miles above Earth. The capsule will carry instruments to collect data and will remain in orbit for a few months until natural gravitation pulls it toward the Earth and causes it to burn up in the atmosphere.

This year Orbital will also perform its first of eight scheduled operational cargo resupply missions to the ISS under a $1.9 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA. After the agency’s space shuttled retired, it opened up the doors for commercial companies to preform these flights. So far, SpaceX has conducted two successful resupply missions and now Orbital joins the competition.

 

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Dish’s Bold Move For Sprint Nextel Could Transform Landscape
April 16, 2013
Dish Network’s proposed deal for just under $26 billion to acquire Sprint Nextel (Sprint) is potentially a huge transformative deal on the U.S. communications landscape, which has direct implications to the satellite industry. The company is competing with Japanese wireless giant Softbank for a significant piece of Sprint, so the deal is far from straightforward, especially given Dish Networks’ bid was unsolicited.

In October last year, Softbank announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire a 70 percent stake in Sprint which would see the Japanese mobile giant invest $20.1 billion in Sprint, consisting of $12.1 billion to be distributed to Sprint stockholders and $8 billion of new capital to strengthen Sprint’s balance sheet. The deal had been expected to close in the middle of this year and would have given Softbank a blue-chip position in the lucrative U.S. wireless market.

Sprint Nextel has just fewer than 56 million customers in the United States and was one of the first operators to bring 4G services to customers in the United States.

The situation is a tangled one on many levels, given that both Dish Network and Sprint have also been competing to do a deal for Clearwire, a provider of 4G wireless broadband services. Clearwire’s 4G mobile broadband network covers more than 130 million people in the United States.

Given Charlie Ergen, Dish Network’s Chairman’s history of dealmaking, the ambitious nature of this deal should come as little surprise.

“I wasn't surprised as Dish has been trying desperately to find suitable terrestrial partners for a long time. It wants to acquire a terrestrial operator, as the company wants to go forward with its LTE venture. It had already targeted Clearwire but Sprint will be a win-win deal for both companies,” said Maxime Baudry, a satellite analyst at French consultancy firm, IDATE.

Should the deal go ahead, and Dish acquires Sprint Nextel, it could lead to combinations of communications technology for Dish, with satellite a key part of the overall infrastructure.

“The ICT world is really going to mobility and ubiquity and the deal should allow Dish to establish a nice LTE network through a combination of Sprint's LTE spectrum with its own spectrum in the 2 GHz band and be in a position to propose new quadruple play offerings. In the future, we might also see interesting things around mobile broadcasting in LTE. It will open Dish's huge distribution network and DTH subscriber base in order to compete better against AT&T and Verizon Wireless. We should see interesting bundles emerging from the deal,” added Baudry.

Any deal could clearly impact the satellite sector given Dish Network’s position as a major satellite pay-TV provider in the United States.

“It is an important step, not just in terms of the U.S. telecoms landscape, but for the satellite landscape. After the ATC ventures some years ago, which all failed because no suitable terrestrial partners were found, this move will be interesting to follow in order to see what Dish will do with its spectrum, and in terms of market offerings to its subscribers,” Baudry said.

 

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Thuraya Exec Still Sees Asia as Major Growth Engine
April 17, 2013
Thuraya has boosted its position in Latin America by extending its GSM roaming coverage to 11 additional countries across the Americas in partnership with leading telecommunications providers, Claro and Telefónica. With these new deals, the company now has roaming agreements with 356 GSM networks across Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and North America. T. Sanford Jewett, vice president of marketing at Thuraya told SatelliteTODAY.com that the latest roaming deal represents “an important milestone” for the company.

“Thuraya has traditionally had strong market share in Africa and the Middle East. However, in the past few years we’ve witnessed tremendous growth for our services across Asia Pacific. We expect the APAC region will be a strong driver of our future growth,” Jewett said. “We also see strong demand for Thuraya’s services in Africa where we’re looking to expand our distribution network and are actively recruiting service partners to help us respond to the demand we are seeing from the energy, NGOs/humanitarian organizations and the government sector.”

The company made a splash at SATELLITE 2013, when it launched its SatSleeve product, which it claimed was theworld’s first satellite adaptor for the iPhone, which expands the smartphone’s network coverage and capabilities.

“We see the Thuraya SatSleeve as a real game-changer for our industry. Just as DTH satellite changed the broadcast industry, we feel that the SatSleeve has mass-market potential by making satellite phone connectivity more accessible than ever before. Our initial stock has been sold out within days of launch,” Jewett said. “We’re now ramping up production of the SatSleeve data edition, which we anticipate will be available in the third quarter of this year. We are also receiving a significant number of requests across the government, media & broadcast, humanitarian NGOs, among others for the SatSleeve.”

Thuraya also sees the defense and energy sectors as potential markets. “Defense missions will continue to drive land-mobile services. While oil exploration activities in remote environments and deeper waters will further require the support of mobile satellite communications solutions that we offer,” Jewett said.

 

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Eutelsat 3D Satellite Readies for Upcoming Launch
April 17, 2013
Eutelsat Communication’s Eutelsat 3D satellite is now undergoing final preparations for launch aboard an International Launch Services (ILS) Proton Breeze M rocket at the Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Lift-off is scheduled for May 14.

The Eutelsat 3D weighs 5.4 tons at lift-off and was built by Thales Alenia Space using its Spacebus 4000 platform. The satellite is designed to operate in orbit for 15 years.

Eutelsat 3D will initially be located at the 3 degrees east orbital position to address high-growth video, data, telecom and broadband markets. Through its configuration of Ku and Ka transponders connected to three footprints, the new satellite will serve customers in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. A fourth service area in the Ku-band will address markets in sub-Saharan Africa.

Once the following satellite, Eutelsat 3B, is deployed, the Eutelsat 3D will change its orbital position to 7 degrees East. The upcoming Eutelsat 3B is scheduled for launch in 2014 to provide spectrum growth and high levels of operational flexibility in C, Ku and Ka bands.

 

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TrustComm Announces New Ownership and Contract with U.S. Army
April 17, 2013
TrustComm, a small-business provider of secure Comsatcom solutions to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), has announced completion of its reorganization after the American investor group Global Secure Networks (GSN) acquired the company. The TrustComm name will be retained.

The GSN investor group is led by Bob Roe, who has served as TrustComm’s CEO since March 2012. The GSN equity infusion will enable TrustComm to expand its operations.

Additionally, the company also announced it will serve as a subcontractor to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in its fulfillment of the Global Tactical Advanced Communications Systems and Services (GTACS) IDIQ multiple-award contract from the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T). The award enables SAIC to compete for task orders under the five-year contract, which has a total value of $10 billion.

 

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C-Com Reports Increased Revenues and Profits
April 17, 2013
C-Com Satellite Systems, a provider of mobile auto-deploying satellite antenna systems, has seen a significant increase in revenues and profits in the first quarter. This was one of the highlights of its first quarter results, announced April 17.

Revenues increased by 50 percent to $3,93 million compared with results from the same period last year, when total revenues were $2.61 million. The company also saw a significant increase in net profits. For the first quarter, it reported a net profit of $907,301 compared with $283,659, at the same stage last year.

"The first quarter has historically been the slowest in terms of revenues for C-COM; however, the December to February period this fiscal year was the strongest Q1 in the company's history,” Leslie Klein, president and CEO of C-COM Satellite Systems, said in a statement.