Posts Tagged ‘kazsat-2’

Oh da baby!

Monday, July 18th, 2011


No Borat jokes. This is serious space business. Last Friday’s successful launch of KazSat-2 and SES-3 aboard a Proton/Briz-M launcher was the first time with a dual payload. ILS will now be making money like Arianespace is with their two-at-a-time configuration. Here’s the video…

Read the summary on Caspionet. You’d think Borat did the translation:

On the threshold of the launch, the governmental delegation headed by the Prime Minister Karim Massimov arrived at the space-launching site. For the first time people enjoyed the launch online via Twitter.

The launch of the Proton-M expendable launch system, which happened on Saturday morning, is a historic launch. This is because in the near future Kazakhstan will be able to use a modern and reliable communication satellite. The Russian side and especially producers of the satellite, the Khrunichev space centre said that the KazSat-2 satellite will serve at least 12 years. The project witnessed several revisions from the moment of signing the agreement on the creation of the satellite. As a result, the KazSat-2 satellite received completely new hardware components and a new management algorithm. It also became more energy intensive and the number of transmitters increased to 20. The total capacity of transmitter-responders increased to 4.5 kilowatts, which will help to process larger amounts of data.

Yes, rocket scientists: “enjoyed the launch via Twitter!”

SES-3 is set to replace AMC-1 (formerly GE-1), the very first A2100 spacebus built by Lockheed Martin. It will be interesting to see how customers adapt to the Ku-band side not having the polarization offset (26° counter-clockwise).