Europe’s Astrium has formed a US subsidiary as part of its push into the country’s governmental satellite telecoms market.
Called Astrium Americas and headquartered in Vancouver, the new unit will be headed by John Schumacher, a former NASA chief of…
Europe’s Astrium has formed a US subsidiary as part of its push into the country’s governmental satellite telecoms market.
Called Astrium Americas and headquartered in Vancouver, the new unit will be headed by John Schumacher, a former NASA chief of staff.
Schumacher explained: “The space marketplace is increasingly global, and we want to provide US government and private sector customers with the benefits of our commercial approach to providing space capabilities from complete space systems to state of the art satellite services.”
Initially, Astrium Americas will focus on providing telecoms services for the US and Canadian governments, supported by combining assets from its Astrium Satellites unit and recently acquired Vizada communication services company. As well as providing L-band solutions for MSS operators including Iridium, Inmarsat and Thuraya, the new subsidiary will provide X-band and UHF services from Astrium Satellites’ military spacecraft. It will also offer C, Ku and Ka-band solutions for FSS operators.
The company said it will announce additional information in the coming weeks on Astrium Services’ space transportation, geo-information, satellite and hosted payload capabilities.
Astrium, the aerospace subsidiary of EADS, reported revenue of close to €5bn in 2011 and employs most of its 18,000 workforce in France, Germany, the UK, Spain and the Netherlands. The group is split into Astrium Satellites for spacecraft and ground segment, Astrium Space Transportation for launchers and orbital infrastructure, and Astrium Services for end-to-end satellite communications and network solutions.
EADS, which also owns Airbus, Cassidian and Eurocopter, generated €49.1bn in revenues last year.
The group’s push into the US comes hot on the heels of Canadian space technology firm MDA’s US$875m acquisition of US satellite manufacturer SS/L, which was completed on 2 November.
Speaking to SatelliteFinance about the deal earlier this month, MDA CEO Dan Friedmann underlined the importance of owning manufacturing assets in the US when bidding for government contracts, not least for the export credit opportunities.
Even before the acquisition, Friedmann said MDA was already a strong supplier to the US government for applications including robotics and radar-related intelligence imagery.
However, he said his group decided to acquire California-based SS/L as it became apparent that “there are a lot more jobs we could get if we were doing the work in the US – to the satisfaction of the US government from a security and economic point of view”.
Click here to read our exclusive interview with MDA’s CEO.
