Satellite Internet News

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.

What Makes SPACEWAY Different

On-board Switching

The most unique capability of SPACEWAY is that it can switch traffic on board. All conventional satellites today are basically reflectors and require a ground-based network center to route and switch traffic—a “double-hop” journey. SPACEWAY’s revolutionary on-board switching capability means that the satellite receives, processes, and routes traffic directly to and from customer locations without transmitting back and forth to a hub—a “single-hop” journey. On-board switching reduces delay, increases overall transmission efficiency, and enables point-to-point or mesh communications directly between two or more customer sites.

Signal Reconstitution

Another unique capability is signal reconstitution. With today’s satellites, a signal is received from a ground terminal, amplified, translated to another frequency, and sent back down—errors and all. But SPACEWAY changes all that. Serving as an intelligent device, SPACEWAY remodulates the signal, correcting any errors introduced on the way up. With uplink and downlink paths that are independent of each other and other unique capabilities, errors are not retransmitted when the signal comes back down to its destination.

Spot Beams

SPACEWAY also makes use of spot beams, creating energy efficiency and allowing frequency reuse. Its phased array antenna transmits spot beams directly where the traffic needs to go. Because a spot beam focuses all its energy on a very specific, narrow area, it makes more efficient use of the available satellite power. With 24 hopping spot beams, SPACEWAY can focus and concentrate the energy to specific areas as needed—enabling bandwidth-on-demand services—with smaller antennas and greater satellite efficiency.

Frequency Reuse

Similar to a cellular system that reuses frequencies throughout a coverage area, SPACEWAY will reuse frequencies across the coverage area, yielding higher effective capacity at a lower cost. SPACEWAY also incorporates a host of advanced techniques to mitigate rain fade—increasing or decreasing power as required in rainy or dry areas.

One Large Bird

Stretching 134 by 24 feet when deployed and weighing in at more than 13,000 lbs., SPACEWAY 3 will be one of the heaviest satellites lifted into a geosynchronous orbit. Manufactured under contract by Boeing, it will be launched by Sea Launch Co. from a modified oil rig platform located on the equator in the Pacific Ocean.

The SPACEWAY Crew

“Because of the many technological advances we designed into SPACEWAY, Boeing is one of only a few companies that could actually build it,” said Bob Buschman, vice president of the Hughes SPACEWAY group. “When we started this program, several other manufacturers said that this satellite couldn’t be built—that the technology did not yet exist. But Boeing took the challenge and built it.”

“The network operations control center and the satellite terminals were designed by a large team of Hughes’ best and brightest engineers,” added Buschman. “We built several hundred terminals that were used in our 30-day over-the-air tests and in our labs. And when the satellite is in orbit and in service, we anticipate building more than 10,000 terminals a month for installation all over North America.”

The building process continues as we go to press with this article—installing the uplink and downlink antennas, mating the two halves of the payload and bus, adding solar wings and deployable radiator panels—and the numerous other tasks and components that pull it all together. Full assembly by Boeing is expected during this summer, with delivery to Hughes in the fall. Later in the year, final preparations will begin to move the SPACEWAY launch platform out to sea in readiness for the big launch early in 2007.