WASHINGTON — The battery malfunction that put DirecTV’s Spaceway-1 satellite at risk of exploding has a “very low likelihood” of occuring on other satellites, according to the satellite’s manufacturer, Boeing. Spaceway-1 was the first of three virtually identical Spaceway satellites built by Boeing and launched between 2005 and 2007. AT&T […]
EchoStar-3
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This op-ed originally appeared in the Jan. 15, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine. Last year, in the space of a few months, four geostationary satellites failed in orbit. Each had reached, or exceeded, its design life. Each incident created, or posed a high risk of creating, debris that could endanger […]
WASHINGTON — An internal research and development program using widely available telescopes has evolved into a space situational awareness business for ArianeGroup. France’s Joint Space Command on Dec. 14 became ArianeGroup’s first customer for GEOTracker, a network of ground-based telescopes monitoring the geostationary arc some 36,000 kilometers above the Earth, […]
WASHINGTON — An EchoStar satellite that stopped obeying commands this summer has since been boosted into a graveyard orbit 350 kilometers above the geostationary belt, EchoStar said Sept. 6. EchoStar-3 undergoing testing prior to launch. Credit: Lockheed Martin. EchoStar-3, a 20-year-old television broadcast satellite from Lockheed Martin, stopped responding to […]