Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
INTELSAT ORDER: Intelsat has picked Orbital Sciences Corp. to build the Intelsat-18 (IS-18) communications satellite. To be based on Orbital’s STAR-2 platform, IS-18 will carry 24 C-band transponders to cover the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and 12 Ku-band transponders to provide services to the United States, French Polynesia, Australia, New Caledonia and other Pacific Islands. IS-18 will replace Intelsat’s IS-701 spacecraft.
Managers with NASA’s Constellation program say the Ares I rocket design still has about 6,600 pounds of performance margin after the addition of hardware to dampen vibrations during its ascent. The vibration fixes are estimated to cost the Ares system about 1,200-1,400 pounds to orbit. The fix hardware itself will weigh about ten times that, but since it’s discarded with the first stage, the mass penalty is not a one-to-one ratio, NASA officials said during a teleconference Aug. 19.
SPACE MARKETS: Forecast International is projecting that over the next decade, launch vehicle providers around the world will produce 636 expendable launch vehicles worth approximately $48 billion, driven by an anticipated resurgence in demand for satellite communications. Governments should continue to be the prevailing customer, having accounted for 66 percent of total global launches in 2007. Meanwhile, over the same decade defense departments worldwide will invest some $30.6 billion on approximately 95 military satellites, Forecast says.
