The Luxembourg governing council has approved the bill to form a 50-50 joint venture with SES that will acquire, launch and operate a new satellite.
Defence Minister Etienne Schneider said that the spacecraft, referred to as GovSat, will have X- and…
The Luxembourg governing council has approved the bill to form a 50-50 joint venture with SES that will acquire, launch and operate a new satellite.
Defence Minister Etienne Schneider said that the spacecraft, referred to as GovSat, will have X- and Ka-band payloads and would be used for military and government communications.
The government plans to provide a portion of the satellite’s capacity to fulfil part of its membership obligations to NATO, while any additional capacity will be sold to other international institutions including the European Union and the United Nations.
NATO, which currently uses X-band capacity from France’s Syracuse, Italy’s SICRAL and the UK’s SkyNet satellite systems, has been pushing its members to increase their funding contributions as most are still failing to reach its 2% of GDP target. Luxembourg spent 0.4% of its GDP on defence in 2013.
The total cost of the satellite has been put at €225m with both the government and SES contributing €50m. The state will pay its share in annual instalments between 2015 and 2017.
The remaining €125m will be secured through a commercial loan borrowed by the joint venture from a financial institute based in Luxembourg. The government said that it will not provide a state guarantee for the facility.
As part of the venture, the government has committed to purchase €10m of capacity from GovSat every year for the next ten years.
The state added that the planned orbital position for GovSat must be occupied before the end of the year otherwise so SES’ forthcoming Astra-2G satellite will be positioned there following its launch at the end of November. SES has said that the Ku- and Ka-band satellite is to be located at 28.2E.
