Alphasat Boost for Inmarsat, Courtesy of Astrium & Thales

Astrium and Thales Alenia Space will be jointly developing Alphabus. This follows the recent agreement between Inmarsat and European Space Agency (ESA), which will provide a new European platform for nexgen high power comsats. The contract from Inmarsat [LSE:ISAT] calls for the creation of the Alphasat I-XL satellite. The new satellite will augment Inmarsat’s Broadband Global Network (BGAN) service and the company has stated their investment will be in the neighborhood of †260 million. This contract is supported by the ESA through the ARTES-8 technology program and CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales of France) and the key telecom payload technologies will be designed and manufactured in the United Kingdom.





A joint project team will be in charge of project management and engineering. Astrium’s specific responsibilities will include: electrical functional chain, solar arrays, chemical propulsion, plus spacecraft assembly, integration and test. Thales Alenia Space is in charge of the mechanical and thermal subsystems, avionics (data handling and attitude and control) and electrical propulsion.




Alphasat will be one of the largest comsats in the word and will support a newgen of mobile technologies and will support communications across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with increased capacity able to handle more than 750 L-band channels with improved quality, which is of particular interest to satphone users—London, United Kingdom