Vietnam launched its first satellite over the weekend to provide telecommunications, broadcasting and Internet links across the country.
Vinasat-1 was carried into space aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the European spaceport in French Guiana Friday evening.
Also launched from the rocket, was Star One C2 with a payload of 28 C-band transponders, 16 Ku-band transponders and 1 X-band transponder. It will be used by Brazilian telecommunications operator Star One and was built by Europe’s Thales Alenia Space.
“With transmission capacity equivalent to 10,000 voice, Internet and data channels, or 120 TV channels, Vinasat-1 will help Vietnam bring telecommunications, Internet and television services to all isolated, mountainous and island areas where other means of transmission is not feasible,” said Doan Hop Le, Vietnam’s minister of Information and Communication, in a televised speech shortly after the launch.
Vinasat-1 was built by Lockheed Martin and will be positioned at 132-degrees East. Its footprint will cover all of South East Asia in addition to the eastern part of China, India, Korea, Japan, Australia and Hawaii and has a design lifetime of 15 years.
Five other nations in the region already have their own satellites in space: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. According to the 2006 SatNews chart (above), AsiaSat has 3 satellites in orbit, Brazil’s StarOne has 5 in orbit, Indonesia’s PT Telecom has 2 satellites in orbit, Malaysia’s Measat has 3 satelites in orbit, India’s Antrix has 10 satellites in orbit and Thailand’s Shin satellite has 5 in orbit.
Next up for Ariane is the British Skynet 5C. The satellite is part of the UK military’s £3.6bn ($7.2bn) next-generation space communications system. It will ride into orbit with a Turkish satellite.
Meanwhile, the Russian State Commission investigating the AMC-14 failure of a Proton Breeze M launch has traced the cause to the rupture of the gas duct between the gas generator and the propellant pump turbine in the Breeze M main engine.
In other space news, an experimental Air Force satellite designed to monitor the Earth’s ionosphere and foresee impending communication disruptions was successfully deployed into space last week by an Orbital Sciences air-launched Pegasus rocket. A three-stage rocket successfully delivered the Communication/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) spacecraft into an elliptical orbit about 525 miles high with a perige of 250 miles, and an inclination of 13 degrees north and south of the equator. The official story is that C/NOFS will increase warning times for outages of UHF communications.
Related DailyWireless satellite articles include; ICO G-1 In Space, AMC-14: Killed by Lawyers?, Top Teleport Operators, Satellite Jam, Eutelsat HotBird 8, Satphones Localize, Spotbeams & WiMAX Unwire Vietnam, NGO Emergency Response, and Global Satellite Providers Now Three.
