News from World Satellite Business Week | Inmarsat taps MHI for H2-A launch; SES picks Arianespace for two launches

View this email in your browser SpaceNews' show daily for Euroconsult's World Satellite Business Week in Paris, Sept. 11-15 September 12, 2017 Daily Coverage brought to you by Inmarsat picks MHI's H2-A to launch its first sixth-gen satellite Brian Berger and Caleb Henry — Global satellite fleet operator Inmarsat said Sept. 12 that it has chosen Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) to launch Inmarsat-6 F1 in 2020 aboard an H-2A rocket. An MHI executive, speaking Tuesday at World Satellite Business week in Paris, was blunt in stating that the price the Japanese firm offered Inmarsat was not a strength of MHI's bid/ "The reason why we got the launch order for Inmarsat, I think it's not of course the price competitiveness of H-2A,"  Ko Ogasawara, MHI's director of space systems business development department "[Our] launch record is very good, 35 record success and high reliability. The other one is on-time launch. We keep our schedule, so I think they put high value on that."  SEE FULL STORY OneWeb Satellites to keep Toulouse factory open for other customers Caleb Henry — The OneWeb-Airbus joint venture tasked with building 900 satellites for OneWeb plans to keep its first production line in France running to build satellites for other operators.  OneWeb Satellites is building the first 10 small satellites for OneWeb's low-Earth orbit broadband constellation in Toulouse, France, before shifting production of the majority of the constellation to a new $85 million factory in Exploration Park, Florida.  But rather than let the infrastructure in France lay idle, OneWeb Satellites wants to repurpose the factory to build more small satellites. SEE FULL STORY Arianespace wins contracts for O3b and SES-17 satellites Jeff Foust — Satellite operator SES has selected Arianespace to launch a fifth set of O3b satellites as well as a large geostationary orbit communications satellite, the companies announced Sept. 12. In one announcement, SES said that a fifth set of four O3b satellites will launch on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana in 2019. The first 12 O3b satellites launched on Soyuz rockets in 2013 and 2014, with a fourth set of four due to launch in 2018, also on a Soyuz. The O3b satellites, built by Thales Alenia Space, operate in medium Earth orbit at an altitude of 8,000 kilometers. These satellites are separate from the new O3b mPower system announced Sept. 11, which will feature seven Boeing-built satellites. SES has not disclosed launch plans for those satellites. SEE FULL STORY Bandwidth requirements to keep driving future satellite developments Tereza Pultarova — The requirement for higher and higher bandwidth will remain the major driver shaping future satellite infrastructure and services in the next five years, according to Mark Dankberg, chairman and CEO of Viasat. Speaking Sept. 12 at the World Satellite Business Week here, Dankberg said that terabit-capable satellites like the Viasat3 satellite it is building with Boeing, are more responsive to customer expectations than forthcoming low-Earth-orbit mega-constellations emphasizing lower latency than geostationary satellites. "Our customer want more bandwidth, they want to be able to stream video," Dankberg said.  "We have done studies when we asked customers what would affect their willingness to pay for a service and we found that latency has the least impact." SEE FULL STORY ILS Proton launches Hispasat satellite Caleb  Henry — International Launch Services Monday night conducted the second of three commercial Proton launches planned for this year, completing a nine hour and 12-minute mission carrying Hispasat's Amazonas-5 satellite. Proton lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 3:23 p.m. Eastern, using its first three stages to reach a suborbital trajectory, followed by five burns of the Breeze M upper stage to reach geostationary transfer orbit. The launch is Proton's third overall this year, preceded by an ILS launch of EchoStar-21 in June and a Russian government launch of the Blagovest-11L satellite in August. SEE FULL STORY Blue Origin enlarges New Glenn's payload fairing, preparing to debut upgraded New Shepard Caleb Henry — Blue Origin will likely launch the third iteration of its New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle by year's end, paving the way for a human-rated version and ironing out the reusability plan for the orbital New Glenn rocket.  The company also revealed a large, 7-meter payload fairing for New Glenn, meant for launching more voluminous payloads than the original design. Clay Mowry, Blue Origin's vice president of sales, marketing and customer experience, said Sept. 12 that the third New Shepard incorporates lessons learned from the previous model that launched and landed five times before retiring last October. SEE FULL STORY Follow SpaceNews Copyright © 2017 SPACENEWS, All rights reserved.