Hughes SPACEWAY 3 satellite
September 28, 2007 Posted by Satellite Man
A new dawn is approaching in satellite communications. The Hughes next-generation SPACEWAY 3 satellite, scheduled for launch early in 2007, will be the world’s first commercial spacecraft to feature on-board switching. This “switch in the sky” enables communications directly between customer sites in a single hop, without going through a central hub.
The first two SPACEWAY™ satellites, SPACEWAY 1 and SPACEWAY 2, are currently in service, providing video services for DIRECTV. When in operation next year, SPACEWAY 3, owned and operated by Hughes, will change the face of broadband satellite services, providing high-speed communications to a massive area in the Western hemisphere—from Alaska to Florida, from Maine to southern California, and into Canada and South America. Inside SPACEWAY A look inside the SPACEWAY satellite reveals a dazzling array of complex and innovative equipment, somewhat bewildering to the untrained eye. But all those new chips and logic are only there because they translate into unprecedented advantages for delivering broadband services.