The insurance community is anxiously waiting for news from Boeing over whether it has successfully deployed the 22-metre reflector antenna on LightSquared’s SkyTerra-1 satellite, which was launched on November 14.
Following the launch, Boeing detected…
The insurance community is anxiously waiting for news from Boeing over whether it has successfully deployed the 22-metre reflector antenna on LightSquared’s SkyTerra-1 satellite, which was launched on November 14.
Following the launch, Boeing detected that the unfurlable antenna had not fully deployed and there are concerns that if this remains the case then the satellite will effectively be a constructive total loss. If this were so, and this remains a big if, then the insurance pay out would likely turn a healthy year of profit for space insurers into one of just over break even. The global income for the industry insurers for 2010 is approximately US$650m while claims so far have been around US$390m.
The antenna was built by Harris and similar models have suffered in-orbit anomalies in the past. In April 2009, the S-band antenna that was part of the Solaris payload on Eutelsat’s W2A satellite suffered technical issues and led to the SES-Eutelsat joint venture filing an insurance claim for the full value of the payload.
That failure, combined with the prior problems to the Harris-built antenna on Asia Cellular Satellite’s Garuda 1 bird back in 2000, led to Terrestar delaying the launch of its debut satellite after pressure from its insurers in order to amass additional data to verify that its satellite would not be affected by the same issue.
With SkyTerra-2 due to be launched in 2011, one source told SatelliteFinance that its launch plus one insurers may consider citing a material change to the insurance package and seek either an exclusion precondition linked specifically to the antenna or an adjustment in the rate paid in order to cover their risks.
Willis was the broker on both SkyTerra-1 and SkyTerra-2.
