Fresh from securing the US$611m financing package that will fund its debut satellite Jabiru-1, nascent Australian satellite operator NewSat is already pushing ahead with plans for its third, fourth and fifth satellites. Speaking to SatelliteFinance,…
Fresh from securing the US$611m financing package that will fund its debut satellite Jabiru-1, nascent Australian satellite operator NewSat is already pushing ahead with plans for its third, fourth and fifth satellites.
Speaking to SatelliteFinance, NewSat founder and CEO Adrian Ballintine said that the company had already begun early stage informal discussions on the new satellites and expected to secure agreements by the end of the year.
He commented: “We already have a business plan for -3,-4 and -5. Jabiru-3 is going to be two degrees away from Jabiru-1, Jabiru-4 is over Africa and Jabiru-5 is over South America. And we have orbital slots for that purpose.
“We have a pipeline already on Jabiru-3 of about US$200m, and it’s our intention to do -3 and -4 together and we expect this plan to be substantially developed during this calendar year.
“We’ve already had informal discussions with people and we’ve a very good understanding of who will be our customers on them. I think by the end of this year we may have already entered into agreements over the construction and launch of those satellites.”
As for Jabiru-5, Ballintine expects to announce something in the first half of next year.
Unlike NewSat’s second satellite, Jabiru-2, which is a hosted payload on the Measat-3b spacecraft that is slated to be launched by Arianespace in Q4 2013, the new satellites will be owned outright. Ballintine said that Jabiru-2 was the product of NewSat lacking the necessary orbital slots.
“The hosted payload was when we didn’t have our own orbital slots. As you know, Jabiru-1 is in a slot we are leasing from Measat, and Jabiru-2 is going in the same orbital slot. It is an anomaly because we simply didn’t have orbital slots when we entered in to that agreement,” he said.
NewSat now owns eight orbital slots in perpetuity following its deal with Cyprus-based Kypros Satellites back in February 2011. However, Ballintine suggested that NewSat may not use all of these and was more likely to form hotspots in the more lucrative orbital locations.
He stated: “There are a couple of slots that are in locations that I doubt we’ll use because they’re in covering territories that are probably not as rich in opportunity as the ones that we have outlined using. So I’d prefer to put two or three satellites into the one orbital slot. We could have three satellites in each of those three slots.”
For more on NewSat’s future plans as well as the completion of the Jabiru-1 financing, see the next edition of SatelliteFinance for a Q&A with Adrian Ballintine.
