HOUSTON — NASA’s 11-year-old Mars Odyssey spacecraft has been repositioned along its polar orbit around the red planet to provide a near-real-time communication link with Earth during the Mars Science Laboratory’s Aug. 6 entry and landing. News of the $2.5 billion rover mission’s fate should reach NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., through Odyssey on Aug. 6 at 1:31 a.m. EDT, nearly 14 min. after the actual landing — the time it will take X-band transmissions to cover the 154 million mi. separating the two planets.
PARIS — Harris CapRock Communications on July 23 said it would book more than 1 gigabit per second (gbps) of broadband capacity on Intelsat’s new generation of high-throughput EpicNG satellites, which are scheduled for launch in 2015. The capacity will be used for advanced fixed and mobile satellite services in the energy, maritime and government markets.
HELPING HAND: The Export-Import Bank of the United States has approved two transactions totaling more than $1.2 billion to finance the export of U.S.-made telecommunications satellites to Mexico and Australia. A $922 million loan guarantee will support the export of three satellites and related equipment to the Mexican government for the Mexsat regional mobile satellite system. The bank also is providing a $281 million direct loan to Jabiru Satellite Ltd. in Southbank, Australia, for the purchase of satellite and ground equipment from Lockheed Martin.
PARIS — Commercial remote-sensing satellite imagery providers DigitalGlobe and GeoEye announced they would merge in a cash-and-stock deal worth $453 million that would leave Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe operating the world’s largest fleet of commercial imagery satellites. Under the agreement’s terms, DigitalGlobe is offering 34% more than the July 20 closing price of $15.17 per share for GeoEye stock, the companies said in a July 23 conference call with investors.
An article in the July 16 issue (page 34) incorrectly stated the Franco-German cost estimate for a next-generation European launcher, which is $5-8 billion. In addition, the article should have indicated that the U.K. investment in a national space technology program is funded at £10 million ($15.5 million).
Budget and political decisions made in Berlin, Brussels and Washington will help shape the global aerospace industry. So it was not surprising that an undercurrent of anxiety ran through the recent Farnborough air show (see p. 43). Uncertainty from a financial crisis in Europe, potentially hefty cuts to U.S. defense spending, and slower economic growth in Asia and Latin America have put buyers and suppliers on edge.
The powerful rocket engine developed in the 1960s to launch the first men to the Moon could be reprised in the 2020s as the powerplant for strap-on boosters that NASA hopes to use in heavy-lift human missions to Mars. (Image: NASA)
Three veteran space travelers are settling in on return visits to the International Space Station, after their Soyuz launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
EADS space subsidiary Astrium has made another foray into the U.S. satellite equipment market with a contract from Lockheed Martin to provide Ku-band receivers and Ka-band beacons for the Jabiru-1 satellite, which Lockheed is producing for Australia’s NewSat. Designed to last 15 years, Jabiru-1 will be positioned over the Indian Ocean covering Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Somalia. Launch is slated for late 2014 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket.
Nearly 10 years have passed since Raytheon lost a contract to Boeing for the U.S. Air Force's next generation of satcom terminals. Known as FAB-T (Family of Advanced Beyond-line-of-sight Terminals), the program, estimated at $4.7 billion, will facilitate communications between military aircraft and the Pentagon's new Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite constellation.
HOUSTON — NanoRacks, LLC, plans to improve astronaut training for its MixStix science canisters, to avoid a repeat of an activation failure involving 15 student experiments launched to the International Space Station in May.
PARIS — British military demand for Skynet satellite bandwidth is expected to decline with troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, prompting Paradigm Services, a division of EADS-Astrium, to expand its commercial offering to include civil service monitoring and data collection for government and private sector customers.
The contracts provide $412 million to ULA for three Delta II launches and $82 million to SpaceX for a Falcon 9 mission, all from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., in 2014-16.
HOT AIR: This weekend NASA will test a large, inflatable heat shield aboard a suborbital rocket launched from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3) payload will travel through Earth’s atmosphere at Mach 5, or 3,800-7,600 mph, via a three-stage, suborbital Black Brant XI launch vehicle. After its flight, IRVE-3 will fall into the Atlantic Ocean about 350 mi. down range from Wallops. The flight is expected to take about 20 min. from launch to splashdown.
