Astrium provides for NewSat under Lockheed Martin Contract

Astrium Satellites is providing Ku band and Ka band payload hardware for the Jabiru-1 commercial telecommunications satellite being built for NewSat of Australia under a contract with Jabiru-1 prime contractor Lockheed Martin Space Systems, as they announced it on July 19.

The contract is a representation of a breakthrough of Astrium’s product division, placing itself to win business with Astrium Satellites; prime contractor competitors aside from providing in-house components for Astrium-built satellites.

According to Astrium’s Head of Products Department Andreas Lindenthal, the contract illustrates an increasingly common practice among satellite prime contractors that test the open market with value-for-money considerations than just the automatic buying from their own divisions.

“All of the primes are doing this. They test the market for make-or-buy decisions to determine whether someone else can deliver a product more quickly, or less expensively, or one that is state of the art. Astrium has made a conscious decision to extend or business with external contracts. Our contract with NASA is another example of this.”

In 2011, NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) selected Astrium to supply a high-precision fiber-optic gyro unit for the Joint Polar Satellite System meteorological program.  

Lindenthal, in a July 20 interview, stated that Astrium was well-positioned for the Lockheed contract following a development program for Ku band communications receivers and Ka band beacons, funded in part by the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency.

The Generic Flexible Payload program is the result of this effort. They developed satellite electronics gear that is 60 percent generic, remaining it can be applied to any given communications satellite regardless of prime contractor.

The generic product line enables Astrium to produce larger batches of the communications equipment, reducing unit costs and giving the company a stock of hardware that can speed delivery times. The remaining 40% that is specific to a given satellite program “can be completed in a couple of months,” Lindenthal said.

Launched in November 2006 for Avanti Communications of London, the Bylas 1 satellites was the first Astrium-built satellite that made full use of the Generic Flexible payload investment.

See: Communications satellite