Posts Tagged ‘astrium’

Eles adoram brasileiros no Luxemburgo

Tuesday, June 4th, 2013

Nice daytime launch of a Proton-M (Протон-М) with SES-6 as the the payload. It’s a big boy: weighing in at 6,100 kg, with lots of transponders: 43 C-band and 48 Ku-band. It’s replacing the 806 spacecraft, one of the few remaining “brick” birds (LM/AS-7000). That’s a good thing to do because you never know when these might go on ya.

Besides filling it partially with what’s on 806, what are you going to do with all that capacity? You could probably wait until the 2014 World Cup to help fill it with 6 weeks of occasional business. Then what? Hey, how about a DTH business? And the players are:

  1. Net/Embratel with 8,638,984 subscribers
  2. Sky (DirecTV) = 5,144,946
  3. Oi = 792,107
  4. Telefónica/Vivo = 586,152
  5. GVT = 451,605

Oi waits for launch, then signs the contract. Anchor customer, probably. Large? Good enough.


How Satcom Spacecraft Get Built

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

SES and Astrium put together a video of how and why a spacecraft gets built, launched and operated.

Here’s the short version…

And here’s the long version…

Want to see the raw footage? Yeah, that’s here, too…