Overview

Building on our heritage as one of the industry's premier providers of low-Earth orbit satellites, Orbital has firmly established itself as the world's leading supplier of small geosynchronous (GEO) satellites designed to provide direct-to-home TV broadcasting, cable program distribution, business data network capacity, regional mobile communications and similar services.

Orbital's highly successful GEO communications satellites are based on the company's STAR spacecraft platform which provides up to 5 kW of payload power and can accommodate virtually all types of commercial communications payloads..

Orbital entered the GEO satellite market in 1997 with the launch of our first STAR™ spacecraft, IndoStar–1. Since then, Orbital has evolved and improved the STAR platform and has built and delivered 17 GEO satellites, and has another 8 on order or in production.

From auspicious beginnings just a decade ago, STAR has become the small GEO communications satellite of choice by leading satellite operators worldwide. Current and past customers include the two largest operators of commercial communications satellites, Intelsat and SES Global, as well as important regional operators such as Optus, Telenor, MEASAT, JSAT, BSAT, PT TELKOM, NTT DoCoMo and IndoVision.

For many applications, the lighter weight, more affordable STAR design is an attractive alternative to the larger, more costly GEO satellites offered by other suppliers. Because Orbital STAR satellites are smaller and significantly less expensive to manufacture and launch, they are an ideal fit for established companies that require incremental capacity for their network or for customers in the early stages of building their business.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Communications Networks

Orbital is also a pioneer in low-Earth Orbit communications satellites, having conceived, built and deployed the ORBCOMM network. ORBCOMM was the first global communications network to employ a constellation of LEO satellites. From 1994 -1999 the company built and deployed 35 satellites, integrated five “gateway” ground stations and a network operations center to manage the satellites and process their data.

The narrow-band ORBCOMM network is utilized to send and receive short messages to mobile assets such as trucks, trailers, marine vessels, railcars and other remote assets that are often out of reach of terrestrial communications networks. In 2007, Orbital delivered six communications subsystems to ORBCOMM, Inc. for satellites which were launched in 2008 to augment the ORBCOMM in-orbit fleet.

Check Out

• Communications Satellites Video