British MSS operator Inmarsat has secured a deal that looks set to hand it the first commercial launch of SpaceX’s upcoming Falcon Heavy rocket.
The company plans to use it to place the recently-announced Europasat S-band payload it aims to have ready…
British MSS operator Inmarsat has secured a deal that looks set to hand it the first commercial launch of SpaceX’s upcoming Falcon Heavy rocket.
The company plans to use it to place the recently-announced Europasat S-band payload it aims to have ready to launch at the end of 2016.
Europasat’s speedy construction will help it meet strict rollout regulations tied to the S-band spectrum, and could see it placed before the Falcon Heavy mission Intelsat has scheduled for 2017.
However, Inmarsat is also reserving the right to switch to the smaller Falcon 9 vehicle in case there are any issues with the rocket that has pencilled in its inaugural flight next year.
Europasat was jointly ordered last month with Saudi Arabia’s Arabsat, which will own a separate payload called Hellas-sat-3 to expand across Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Inmarsat expects to pay around US$200m to build, launch and insure its Europasat payload, and said its SpaceX deal is captured within that.
The SpaceX Falcon Heavy/Falcon 9 agreement also has options for two more launches.
The London-based operator said one of these could place the extra Ka-band Inmarsat-5 bird it ordered last year that will initially serve as a launch spare from mid-2016.
Another could be used for an Inmarsat-6 generation satellite which it has yet to order but will likely target a first launch towards the end of the decade.
Rupert Pearce, Inmarsat’s CEO, said: “We believe that SpaceX has demonstrated tremendous successful progress in its launch capabilities and is now a fully-credible provider of vehicles to support geostationary missions.
“We are delighted to be working with SpaceX for the launch of our S-band satellite and other potential future missions for Inmarsat. In view of capacity constraints in the satellite launch market, Inmarsat believes that securing optionality today is an important business safeguard to mitigate future launch schedule risk.”
The first government launch of a Falcon Heavy is set to lift a radar technology satellite called Space Test Program (STP-2) in 2015 for the US Air Force.
