Israel’s Spacecom said it will make a US$158m total loss insurance claim after failing to revive the Amos-5 satellite that ceased communications three weeks ago. It believes an issue with the spacecraft’s power supply system likely caused the failure.
Israel’s Spacecom (TASE:SCC) said it will make a US$158m total loss insurance claim after failing to revive the Amos-5 satellite that ceased communications three weeks ago.
The operator told investors it was still unsure what caused the fault although the group is confident it was not a propulsion issue, which would not be covered under the spacecraft’s in-orbit insurance policy.
“According to the manufacturer, the most likely reason for the malfunction is a complete failure of the power supply system, as a result of a malfunction inside or from an object hitting a part of the power supply system or the associated wiring,” it said in a statement to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Russia’s ISS Reshetnev built the majority of Amos-5, basing the bird on its Ekpress-1000N platform. Its payload was made by Franco-Italian manufacturer Thales Alenia Space.
Marsh, which is Spacecom’s insurance broker, was unable to comment on the news.
Africa-focused Amos-5 started running into problems a year after it was placed in December 2011 to 17E by International Launch Services, suffering a number of propulsion system anomalies that prompted insurers to successfully exclude such issues from its in-orbit policy.
In October 2013, a power supply failure knocked out six of the satellite’s eight thrusters before ISS Reshetnev was able to get them all back online. Even still, the thruster issue negatively impacted the satellite’s service life.
Amos-5’s latest failure saw Spacecom’s share price dive almost 35% over the course of 21 November 2015 – even as engineers were hopeful of getting the bird back online. The shares were trading at around NIS30 (US$7.7) as SatelliteFinance went to press, compared with NIS54 (US$13.9) the trading day before the issue was announced.
The satellite is equipped with a fixed pan-African C-band beam and three steerable Ku-band beams, targeting Africa’s emerging satellite services market.
Soon after communications were lost, Hong Kong-based satcoms firm SpeedCast said it had moved its customers to Measat’s Africasat-1a C-band satellite and Intelsat’s 10-02 C-band bird. The satellite services firm said some of its customers had been in the middle of drilling campaigns costing more than US$1m a day.
Spacecom, owned by a private holding company called Eurocom that is controlled indirectly by Shaul and Yosef Elovitch, told Israel’s stock exchange that it expects to receive insurance proceeds early next year.
It has previously indicated that proceeds from a total loss claim would repay some of the US$140m bonds that helped fund Amos-5.
The group is also counting down to the launch of a new satellite called Amos-6 in Q1 2016, to be launched to 4W with three Ku-band beams for the Middle East and parts of Europe, and 36 HTS Ka-band spot beams over sub-Sahara Africa and Europe. Social media giant Facebook has booked the entire broadband payload on Amos-6 to help realise a long-held goal to provide connectivity to large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Meanwhile, sources have told SatelliteFinance that an Amos-5 claim would tip the space insurance industry into a US$100m-US$150m loss this year.
