Intelsat announced, mid-August, that it has started building the Intelsat 27 satellite (IS-27), as a replacement for its 805 satellite in the Atlantic Ocean region.
Constructed by Boeing, the satellite, expected to be launched by December 2012, will…
Intelsat announced, mid-August, that it has started building the Intelsat 27 satellite (IS-27), as a replacement for its 805 satellite in the Atlantic Ocean region.
Constructed by Boeing, the satellite, expected to be launched by December 2012, will have a hybrid C- and Kuband design for media and network customers, and will also host a UHF payload intended for US Navy, Defence and NATO users.
“Intelsat has been providing commercial UHF services to the US Department of Defense (DoD) and our allies since the Marisat and Leasat programs. This payload continues that heritage and builds upon our current program with the Australian Defence Force,” said Don Brown, vice president of Intelsat’s hosted payloads division, in a press release. “The IS-27 UHF payload will be functionally equivalent to the Navy’s UFO-11 satellite.” Last year, Intelsat had indeed announced that a large amount of the capacity on the Intelsat 22 spacecraft would be sold to the Australian Defence Force (ADF) for US$167m. And in April this year, the ADF wrote in a statement that it was exercising an option to buy the full UHF payload on IS-22.
Intelsat is not the only satellite operator increasingly tapping the governmental sector with hosted payloads. A few months ago, SES Astra was awarded a second contract by the European Commission to provide hosted payload services for EGNOS, the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service.
This partnership trend has particularly gained momentum in the wake of the financial crisis. Brown previously told SatelliteFinance that we would “see increasing use of this model worldwide. It is not just military payloads – government space programs are filled with budgetary and societal pressure, and hosted payloads are a way to mitigate those pressures and gain faster access to space.” Intelsat stated that a commercially hosted UHF payload was one of the solutions described by a plan submitted to Congress by the Navy to mitigate the shortfall in UHF capability.
Such models are also seen by commercial satellite operators as a way of diversifying their sources of revenue. In the second quarter, Intelsat’s total revenue dropped by 1% to US$635.3m compared to the same period a year ago. But the company’s financial results for Q2 also showed that revenues from governmental customers increased to 18% compared to 16% in Q2 2009.
