Willis is set to test market appetite over the next month with a raft of high powered satellite placements. The broker is on the verge of going out to insurers to get launch-plus-one cover for Al Yah-3, while it has just completed market briefings for…
Willis is set to test market appetite over the next month with a raft of high powered satellite placements.
The broker is on the verge of going out to insurers to get launch-plus-one cover for Al Yah-3, while it has just completed market briefings for Europasat / Hellas-sat-3 and Inmarsat’s I4 F5 satellites.
Yahsat’s Al Yah-3 is currently being constructed by Orbital Sciences and is scheduled to be launched by Arianespace in the fourth quarter of 2016. The satellite is to be equipped with 58 Ka-band spot beams and will provide broadband services to Brazil and Africa. According to Orbital, Al Yah 3 will be its first hybrid electric propulsion GEOStar-3-based spacecraft.
Europasat / Hellas-sat-3 is a condosat with Inmarsat owning the Europasat S-band payload and Arabsat the Hellas-sat-3 payload. Willis is broker for Inmarsat, while JLT/ Marsh are representing Arabsat on Hellas-sat-3.
Inmarsat expects to pay around US$200m to build, launch and insure Europasat, around half what it would have cost to deploy a standalone S-band bird.
The spacecraft, which is being built by Thales Alenia Space, will make use of the S-band spectrum it was awarded five years ago to deploy in-flight broadband across the EU.
For Arabsat, Hellas-sat-3 will help grow the company’s 39E DTH hotspot. The satellite will have 44 Ku-band transponders and will replace Hellas-sat 2.
Inmarsat’s other satellite I-5 F4 is a Ka-band satellite that will initially act as an in-orbit spare for the company’s three satellite Global Xpress constellation. Based on Boeing’s 702HP platform, the I-5 satellite carries 89 Ka-band beams and is due to be the first commercial launch on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
SpaceX briefed the insurance market last month on the rocket, which the company claims will be the most powerful in the world by a factor of two. It has a demonstration launch in November 2015, with I-5 due to be launched in mid-2016.
The second commercial Falcon Heavy launch is ViaSat’s HTS Ka-band bird ViaSat-2. Aon ISB is placing insurance for the spacecraft and is understood to have already locked in a portion of the significant US$450m of coverage it requires. The broker is believed to have been waiting to place the remainder once SpaceX had briefed the market about the Falcon Heavy.
