Avanti Communications has had an extremely bad week. The satellite operator, which once foolishly promised that it had enough capacity to supply much of Europe with its HDTV transmissions, is discovering that selling satellite capacity is a tough task. The world, it seemed didn’t want its Ka-band capacity located at 33.5 degrees West, especially for […]
Rocket launch countdowns are highly sophisticated, computer controlled, affairs. However, early – and wholly unofficial – reports suggest that a software glitch might be to blame for the Proton launch catastrophe last week. The Proton-M rocket failed July 2nd spectacularly just seconds after lift-off, exploding into a dangerous ball from its 170 tonnes of highly […]
The catastrophic failure of a Russian Proton rocket has brought arch-rival Arianespace out with fighting talk, saying that if customers want it could offer another Ariane launch or two to its manifest. Given that – as a rule – an Ariane rocket launches two satellites at a time, this could rescue 4 waiting satellites between […]
A recent report informed us that the City of London Police are, along with the Intellectual Property Office, setting up a special unit to tackle digital piracy and counterfeiting. The IPO is going to provide £2.5 million over two years for the unit. Not exactly the FBI is it? I’m guessing that sum is less […]
International Launch Services (ILS) which markets the launch of Proton rockets for the world’s commercial satellite operators, has distanced itself from the catastrophe, saying that its missions use an older – and tried and tested – version of the rocket that blew up. Additionally, ILS says it will set up its own independent failure review […]
Larry Gerbrandt finds parallels between the development of the aviation and television industries. I spent several summers working my way through college in a fruit-canning plant where my grandfather was a manager. During one of our evening conversations, it dawned on me that he had witnessed the entire evolution of aviation, from the Wright Brothers […]
Having now firmly abandoned his attempt to secure more terrestrial wireless spectrum via Sprint/Nextel and Clearwire, Dish Network’s founder Charlie Ergen – never one to be idle – must be pondering his next chess move. It is worth remembering that it wasn’t so very long ago that Dish was pursuing wireless carrier T-Mobile’s assets in […]
Although a day later than planned, the first four satellites in the O3b Networks constellation were successfully launched from the French Guiana site atop a Russian Soyuz rocket on June 25th. This first batch of satellites will now be placed into their correct Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and in stand by for the second batch […]
Bosses at India’s TataSky DTH operation say they are desperate for additional transponder capacity, and are being deliberately stymied by officials at state-owned Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which administers all satellite activity over the sub-Continent. TataSky says it is contemplating legal actions against ISRO. TataSky uses Insat 4A as its core orbital service. TataSky […]
Eutelsat 3B, currently being built by Astrium, will be orbited by the Sea Launch floating platform in April next year. The order is a major achievement for Sea Launch which has suffered some problems with its Zenit launch rocket. Eutelsat 3B will weigh some 6 tonnes at launch and serve Europe, Africa & the Middle […]