Posts Tagged ‘telesat’

Estrela do Suck It

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

Telesat can’t catch a break. Telstar-14/Estrela do Sul, a spacecraft that’s had on-orbit problems for years. Its replacement launches beautifully, but one of the solar arrays isn’t fully deployed.

Too many moving parts, rocket scientists. Better to use exploding bolts!

The report, via Space News

The Telstar 14R/Estrela do Sul 2 telecommunications satellite launched May 21 has failed to deploy one of its two solar arrays, a defect that, if permanent, will curtail owner Telesat Canada’s growth plans in South America, Telesat and satellite builder Space Systems/Loral announced May 25.

The satellite’s south array has fully deployed and is providing power, but the north array has not. Ottawa-based Telesat said that if the situation is not corrected, Telstar 14R will be able to provide “at a minimum” the same level of service of the satellite it is replacing, the Telstar 14/Estrela do Sol spacecraft launched in 2004.

Satcom’s Responsibility

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

The scale of the disaster in Japan, who some have compared to “four Katrinas,” is as mind-boggling today as it was a week ago. The automatic reaction in the satcom community was one of “ready, set, go” — let’s get our satcom systems turned up to help with communications efforts. The ITU cobbled together a bunch of satellite phones and terminals, et. al. as quickly as it could…

Among material already deployed are 78 Thuraya satellite phones equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to facilitate search and rescue efforts, along with 13 Iridium satellite phones and 37 Inmarsat Broadband Global Area Network terminals. An additional 30 Inmarsat terminals are ready for dispatch. The equipment can be charged by car batteries and are supplied with solar panels to enable operations during power outages.

This may seem as if it’s not nearly enough to help, but you should also consider the response inside Japan. Only yesterday did the Ofunato City Hall get a much-needed satcom connection via the KIKU No. 8 (ETS-VIII) mobile satellite system…

On March 24, JAXA set up a ground antenna and the movable test communication terminal for the KIKU No. 8 at the Ofunato City Hall to connect the communication line of up to 768 Kbps between the City Hall and the Tsukuba Space Center via KIKU No. 8 in cooperation with the National Institution of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) based on a request from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, which received a petition from Ofunato City, Iwate Prefecture.

With this communication line installation, Ofunato City Hall workers began collecting information by PCs through the Internet. Apart from city hall, local fire departments and other offices can also now use the Internet and IP telephones to share information for strengthening their cooperative activities.

In addition, as one of the special features of the KIKU No. 8 is communications with a small movable test terminal, which was installed at Ofunato City, information dispatch from evacuation centers and other places through the Internet became possible, because it is easy to move around and install it. Therefore, the connection this time is expected to further contribute to a smooth recovery from the disaster.

Simply getting these terminals out to where they were needed took time — and to find power sources. Most can be powered by a car battery, but they weren’t easy to find. Having a handheld unit is wonderful, until you need to recharge. As many found during last winter’s storm and subsequent power outages in the U.S., you could maintain your Internet connection/communication with an iPhone — only you’d be charging it in your car. In Japan, you car may have been washed away or buried under tons of debris, miles away. So that’s not an option.

Nobody could have predicted this type of utter destruction of property and the communications and power-transmission systems failures. The challenge of preparing satcom systems to respond effectively is to make sure there’s capacity available to meet the demand. As with the REDiSat Network, developed by SES Americom in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2006, nobody wants to pay for capacity that’s not needed. Full-time customers are ready to today, so they fill up the spectrum for their businesses. You can’t simply bump them to make room for emergencies when they have hundreds of customers depending on it for their livelihood.

That’s when the government needs to step in and  help foot the bill. Help the satcom operators keep satcom inventory ready to deploy in case of emergency, only not at the target 80% EBITDA margins. A reluctance to part with capacity at a lower profit margin caused the  REDiSat Network to fade away. Designing, building, testing, launching and operating a satcom spacecraft is expensive and they do serve the public well.

Broadcasters’ reliance on — and willingness to pay for — satcom systems is a wonderful arrangement.  It’s magic: an infinite number of receivers for video and a good source of cash flow for the satellite operators. Keeps a lot of rocket scientists employed, too.  As good corporate citizens, shouldn’t some of the profits be set aside to provide satcom capacity when needed?

I’m sure the accountants can find a way to pay for it.

Anybody who has capacity available in the region is likely booking it for TV news. Only SKY Perfect JSAT has any meaningful response (opens in PDF) …

As a measure for supporting post-disaster recovery, we are allocating necessary transponders capacity to anti-disaster organs, etc. and preparing for aid measure one by one. At present, the number of applications for subscription is increasing steeply. We are dealing with it as follows: For recovery assistance, we will immediately conduct what we can do with our communication satellite. We hope that the devasted area will be restored soon.

About the use of satellite communication services

  • We will first distribute transponders to the institutions for post-disaster recovery, such as National Police Agency, the Ministry of Defense, related ministries, Telecommunication carriers and the U.S. military.
  • As for the use of bands by electric power companies, including TohokuElectric Power, we will assist them proactively and give priority to them to allocate the cacant bands of Superbird-B2 owned by SKY Perfect JSAT
  • As for the steep increase in the use by media organizations, we will deal with it thoroughly, and as for new subscriptions, we will allocate the band of JCSAT-5A, which has some room.

Where are the “we’re helping” press releases from the major satcom players?

Blog That Hosted Payload

Friday, February 11th, 2011

 

 

Interested in government payloads hosted by commercial spacecraft? There’s a blog for that! That’s right, rocket scientists: Space News and Intelsat General put together a Drupal-based blog entitled "Hosted Payloads" last week. Good idea, but will you have enough content to sustain it?

 

 

 

 Satellite operators Intelsat and SES have been talking about it for years, so why not blog about it? Cisco’s IRIS is up, and CHIRP will be going up this year, with a second EGNOS payload on Sirius-5 to follow. Brilliant idea to get Intelsat to sponsor the "microsite."

The timing is actually pretty good. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece on space budgets and actually gives some ink to hosted payloads, with Intelsat saying it’s working on three hosted payloads…

Intelsat and other companies have also joined with some Pentagon offices to champion putting more "piggyback" military payloads aboard privately funded and operated satellites.

Such arrangements offer expanded surveillance and communication capabilities significantly faster than, and at a fraction of the cost of, building and launching military satellites. Intelsat has three such agreements in place with the U.S. government and is discussing several others, industry officials said.

What I find peculiar is the Pentagon is talking to two Luxembourg-based companies for hosted payloads. Why not talk to the home boys at U.S. Space LLC? I’d rather deal with Telesat, as they fly a WAAS payload on Anik F1R.

To really get a taste of the details and possibilities of hosted payloads, you should read the Jon Glass story in GeoPlace.com. Excellent summary…

 "It’s the speed and cost efficiency that is really driving the government’s interest in this," adds Jeff Foust, senior analyst with Futron Corp., a technology-management consulting firm that helped organize several government/industry workshops on hosted payloads. "There’s a steady stream of opportunities for hosted payloads, because you have 20 to 25 commercial GEO satellites being ordered and launched every year, plus you have special opportunities such as Iridium NEXT that have a much larger number of satellites in a global system."

Because hosted payloads are relatively new, developing a set of policies and procedures that make it easier for government agencies and the private sector to partner on projects is a challenge. This includes developing mechanisms that regulate contracts and pricing as well as enable federal agencies to take advantage of available opportunities. Because of existing regulations and bureaucratic barriers, government agencies can find it difficult to move at the same speed as the private sector.

A key purpose of hosted-payload workshops has been to give industry and government officials a forum to identify potential barriers and begin to develop solutions. The important thing, notes Foust, is that with the new U.S. space policy, government supporters of hosted payloads now have the official backing of the administration to pursue opportunities.

"It’s a trite phrase, but the use of hosted payloads has the potential to be a win-win," adds Foust. "It’s an opportunity for the industry to maximize potential revenue by making use of satellite capacity that otherwise might go unused. For the government side, it provides a greater degree of flexibility to get important payloads up faster and less expensively than the traditional way of doing business. There’s a great potential here to do more with less and provide some real savings to the taxpayers."

Oh, and SES WorldSkies has a blog now, too. Good luck commenting on that one. SEO, anyone?