The European S-Band service provider Solaris Mobile has re-confirmed that it is going forward with plans for a new payload, and that its joint shareholders SES and Eutelsat have confirmed their support to move forward with the procurement.
Solaris CEO…
The European S-Band service provider Solaris Mobile has re-confirmed that it is going forward with plans for a new payload, and that its joint shareholders SES and Eutelsat have confirmed their support to move forward with the procurement.
Solaris CEO Steve Maine told SatelliteFinance: “We’re moving towards placing a contract for a new satellite. I won’t define it in terms of weeks or months but we’re making solid progress.”
Although Maine would not specify a definitive timeframe, he did say that he anticipated that the procurement would go ahead by the end of the third quarter this year.
Solaris’ first S-Band payload suffered a malfunction soon after its launch on Eutelsat’s W2A satellite in April 2009. The satellite retained a limited amount of capacity that Solaris has utilised to offer reduced services, including a mobile broadcast network in France.
According to Maine, this capacity has been immensely beneficial towards Solaris meeting the milestones laid down by the European Commission for the utilisation of the 15 Ghz S-Band capacity it was allocated back in 2008.
Furthermore, Solaris would always have needed to launch a second payload in order to satisfy the coverage commitments it made to the Commission.
Maine said: “Our view, and this has been accepted by the Commission, is that we’ve met the early stage commitments we’ve made under the spectrum process. We will obviously need to accelerate the procurement of the second satellite, which we always needed anyway, to make sure that we can meet the remaining commitments we’ve made.
“So, I don’t think we’re that far off track, even though we have a severely damaged satellite.”
There has still been no final decision made as to what form the new payload will take, but Maine said that there was nothing to suggest it would be a like-for-like duplication of the first one.
“We can’t just take specs we had last time and say we’ll have another of those,” he said. “That was a piggy-back payload – we have other options to look at this time, including stand-alone satellites. We’ve got timescale issues to think about, in terms of commitments we’ve made to the Commission to extend the coverage we can achieve with our existing payload and of course satellite technology’s moved on as well.”
Maine said that a stand-alone satellite was still an option despite the fact that it is likely it would be more expensive than the first S-Band payload, meaning that the insurance return on W2A would not wholly cover the cost of the new spacecraft.