Hisdesat receives approval from Indra and the Ministry of Defence to build Spainsat NG-III

1. Forced to manufacture a third Spainsat NG
2. Services are covered by Spainsat NG-I and the 20-year-old Spainsat 

The year in which the company Hisdesat celebrates its 25th anniversary and in which it has the two largest and most advanced Spanish secure communications satellites in flight has got off to a bad start... a very bad start.

This is because the company that provides strategic satellite services to the Spanish Ministry of Defence, as well as the department itself and the Indra group – which has just taken effective control of Hisdesat – issued separate statements on 16 January announcing the definitive loss of the second and last satellite in the Spainsat NG programme.

The decision is a major setback for all three parties, especially Indra and Hisdesat, whose short-term commercial plans have been torpedoed, their Christmas celebrations ruined and their New Year's joy dampened.

But at least at Hisdesat, the company headed by Miguel Ángel García Primo, whose newly appointed CEO is Ana María Molina – until a few weeks ago the corporate general manager of Hispasat – they have decided to ‘put on a brave face’ and have already set to work to remedy the setback and serious delay caused by the postponement of the entry into service of their Spainsat NG-II.

Launched into orbit on 23 October from Cape Canaveral by a Falcon 9 rocket from the American company SpaceX, the NG-II has been travelling through space for just a few weeks. It was following an elliptical trajectory that should have left it in its final geostationary position at 30º West next April, as assigned by the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. But that will no longer be possible.

Forced to manufacture a third Spainsat NG

The joint statement by Indra-Hisdesat dated 16 January, following another on 2 January, announces the start of a ‘tender process’ to appoint the main contractor to manufacture Spainsat NG-III.

The new satellite will be a technological twin of the two previous Spainsat NG satellites, but it will replace the NG-II, ‘after verifying that the damage suffered from the impact of a space particle prevents it from carrying out its planned mission,’ the statement said.

The Spainsat NG programme is ‘one of the fundamental pillars of the modernisation of the Armed Forces' satellite communications,’ according to a parallel statement from the Ministry of Defence, also dated 16 January.

The importance of the programme, the Ministry of Defence emphasises, lies in its objective of ‘gradually replacing the current Spainsat and Xtar-EUR satellites with a new generation of more advanced, secure and resilient satellites capable of operating in the X, Ka and UHF bands’.

The handover was well underway. Spainsat NG-I is already in service at 29º East and last August took over from Xtar-EUR, which had been in orbit since early 2005. But with the NG-II, things have gone awry, as it has not managed to replace Spainsat, which has remained at 30º West since 2006 awaiting replacement, which is now the responsibility of the future Spainsat NG-III.

Services are covered by Spainsat NG-I and the 20-year-old Spainsat 

What happened to Spainsat NG-II to render it unusable? An accident that was very difficult to foresee. The Indra-Hisdesat statement cites that the space particle, measuring ‘millimetres in size and weighing just a few grams’, but without specifying whether it was a micro-meteorite or another type of object, ‘is estimated to have collided at high speed with a vital area of the satellite’, causing ‘irreparable damage’.

The evidence available to the technicians of the main contractor, Airbus Space Systems, who are tracking the Spanish satellite's trajectory by telemetry from Toulouse, France, suggests that the digital power system must have suffered fatal damage, meaning that it is not sending enough energy to activate the five xenon ion engines that propel the NG-II.

Space systems experts consulted point out that ‘failure in power units is very rare’. ‘They have a lot of watts, they are large, they have regulators and they are redundant, i.e. there are two units on board’. In addition, they have undergone what is known as failure mode and effects criticality analysis (FMECA), tests that ‘verify what can go wrong if the anomaly spreads, with the aim of preventing chain failures’. But anything is possible.

The situation of the NG-II that has been disclosed by Indra-Hisdesat is that the satellite is ‘stable, complete and in a very eccentric orbit’, between 36,000 and 50,000 kilometres, so it ‘will not interfere with present or future space operations’.

For the time being, transmission services for the Spanish Armed Forces and Hisdesat's national and international customers are covered by the combined capabilities of NG-I in the X, Ka and UHF frequency bands, and Spainsat, which the Ministry of Defence says ‘remains fully operational’ in the X and Ka bands.

Fortunately, Indra and Hisdesat assure that the loss of NG-II ‘does not entail any economic damage’. The satellite is insured against the damage it has suffered. The main insurance company is the Spanish firm Mapfre, together with an international broker that has distributed risk policies with other insurers.