Twelve minutes after noon on Sunday December 8th a 6-ton spacecraft manufactured by Boeing for Inmarsat blasted off aboard the Russian Proton Breeze M rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The satellite is the first of Inmarsat’s Global Xpress (GX) family of satellites and part of a nearly £1 billion investment into the next generation of mobile broadband communications. Inmarsat, a London-headquartered satellite communications provider is launching the series of satellites to kick off a revolution in Internet connectivity aboard aircraft.
About five and a half hours after liftoff, Inmarsat’s Paumalu ground station in Hawaii established contact with the satellite -- at 5:48 pm GMT. This marked the beginning of the early orbit phase and in the next few weeks, Inmarsat controllers in London will steer the satellite into geosynchronous elliptical orbit.
By the end of the Christmas holiday season, solar arrays and reflectors will be deployed and using electrical thrusters, the satellite will finally be boosted into operational position in geostationary orbit. At that time, it will be almost 36,000 km above the Earth’s surface. At the end of January payload testing will begin.
Christened the Inmarsat-5 F1 satellite the spacecraft will be followed by three additional satellites, two of which will be launched by the end of 2014. “The successful launch of this first Inmarsat-5 satellite is a major landmark on our journey to deliver the world’s first globally available, high speed mobile broadband service. We are on schedule to achieve full global coverage by the end of 2014,” Inmarsat CEO Rupert Pearce said.
The Global Express constellation will offer up to 50Mbps to fixed or mobile terminals, including those aboard flying aircraft. “The Inmarsat-5 generation is, by some distance, the fastest satellite development program in our history,” Pearce said. “This is an extraordinary achievement and I would like to pay tribute to the skill and expertise of Inmarsat’s engineering teams and all our employees involved in the design, development, manufacturing, testing and launch.”
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