SEA LAUNCH TO ORBIT DIRECTV SATELLITE
LONG BEACH - 11/07/03 - Arianespace, which sells services for Europe's Ariane rocket, has awarded a contract to orbit a major television satellite to Sea Launch, the Long Beach-based space launch consortium.
The contract covers the orbiting of the DirecTV-7S, a geo-stationary satellite for the US digital multi-channel television provider DIRECTV.
The 3,000lb DirecTV-7S satellite was built by Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) in Palo Alto, California and will operate with 37 spot-beam transponders and seven super-high power beam transponders to serve 60 local television markets across the US.
According to Agence France Presse, the award to Sea launch was made because of a European Space Agency (ESA) scheduling conflict with the launch of its Rosetta comet-chasing robot probe scientific mission next February. The Rosetta probe will rendezvous in 2014 with the comet Churyuamov-Gerassimenko, according to the ESA.
Last January, Arianespace signed a cooperative "launch services alliance" agreement with Boeing Launch Services - which markets Sea Launch's services - Sea Launch, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan through which the companies agree to provide backup launches if one of their number cannot cope with an order.
Sea Launch - which uses US, Russian and Ukrainian space technology to provide equatorial launches from a specially adapted ship - is a consortium owned by Boeing; RSC-Energia of Russia; Kvaerner of Norway; and SDO Yuzhnoyo/PO Yuzhmash of Ukraine.
The DIRECTV launch will be the second carried out for the company by Sea Launch, which successfully completed its very first commercial satellite mission in 1999 with the orbiting orbit of the DIRECTV 1-R broadcast satellite.
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