Eutelsat’s W2A satellite was successfully launched by International Launch Services (ILS) from the Baïkonour Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, at 10:24 p.m. local time on April 4th. Thales Alenia Space is the prime contractor of the spacecraft, which will deliver services at the 10 degrees East longitude orbital position.

Based on the Thales Alenia Space' powerful Spacebus 4000 C4 design, W2A had a launch mass of 5.9 tons. The satellite provides Eutelsat with 46 Ku-band transponders connected to two beams: one beam over Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and a second beam over southern Africa, and islands in the Indian Ocean. The satellite also provides Eutelsat with a payload of 10 C-band transponders providing coverage of the African continent and extending east to central Asia and India and west to Latin America. The third payload, in the S-band, will be managed by Solaris Mobile, a joint venture established by Eutelsat and SES Astra.. The satellite’s electrical power will be 15.4 kW end of life — for a lifetime expectancy of at least 15 years.

The W2A satellite’s S-band payload will allow for the delivery of Mobile Satellite Services, including mobile TV and digital radio, directly to mobile users’ handsets. This is a first in Europe. This is made possible by a state-of-the-art S-band payload fitted with a 12-meter antenna and operating at 2.2 GHz, the frequency band immediately adjacent to UMTS frequencies used for 3G networks. W2A is the 16th satellite built by Thales Alenia Space for Eutelsat. Three additional satellites are expected to be delivered to Eutelsat in the near future: W7, to be launched in mid-2009, W3B to be launched in mid-2010, and W3C, for which the contract with Eutelsat was signed last month.

The launch of the W2A satellite marks the first ILS launch of the year and the 50th commercial launch overall for ILS; a significant milestone. The Proton Breeze M vehicle is built by Khrunichev Space Center of Moscow and has a heritage of 344 missions since its inception. ILS has exclusive rights to market the Proton, Russia’s premier heavy-lift vehicle, to commercial satellite operators worldwide. ILS is a U.S. company located in Reston, Virginia, near Washington, D.C.