A star-crossed start of the year for Sea Launch saw the launch provider take another hit with the March 1 announcement that Arianespace has been retained to launch the Spaceway-3 communications satellite for Hughes Network Systems LLC.

An August liftoff is scheduled aboard an Ariane 5 launch from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. Hughes will operate the Ka-band satellite, built by Boeing Satellites Systems Inc., as part of its new broadband satellite network to provide multimedia services throughout North America.

The satellite had been scheduled to be placed into orbit by Sea Launch before the end of July, but Hughes switched vehicles following the launch provider’s Jan. 30 failure that destroyed the SES New Skies NSS-8 satellite.

Sea Launch spokeswoman Paula Korn said the investigation into the failure is ongoing and offered no timetable for its conclusion.

Hughes could not afford to wait. "Obviously it’s very important for us to get Spaceway-3 up," said Mike Cook, Hughes’ vice president for North America. "The satellite itself is ready in a Boeing factory. [Launch] was going to be between May and July. We feel very fortunate to be able to find an opening in Arianespace’s launch schedule."

To maintain its options, Hughes also still holds its Sea Launch contract, but "we do not have a confirmed alternate date from Sea Launch," Cook said. "Sea Launch is still reviewing their investigation," he said. "I can’t talk about contractual issues, but suffice it to say we have a plan."

Korn said that while Sea Launch was aware of Hughes’ switch, "we haven’t talked with them, really, but we still have the contract. We haven’t had contact with them about it."

Cook said the delay has not directly cost Hughes, but "obviously we had to move very quickly," Cook said. "The thing about manifests is that they’re always a little fluid. We were lucky that our satellite’s ready and we’re able to take advantage of flexibility in the Arianespace schedule."

"We’re very pleased," said Clay Mowry, president of Washington-based Arianespace Inc., the U.S. marketing arm of Arianespace. "For them to be able to get up in August is very positive for them and us."

Planned since 1998 and expected to be operational by the end of the year, Spaceway-3 will be dedicated exclusively for data communications, Cook said, serving more than 325,000 subscribers to HughesNet broadband services throughout North America.

"Once we’re operational, we’ll have our own satellite; meanwhile, essentially everyone with Ku-band capacity is a supplier to us," Cook said. "So while there’s no direct cost for waiting, there is a cost for leasing. The sooner we get it up, the sooner we can reap the benefits of having our own capacity."

Spaceway-3 is an Internet protocol network which demodulates the signal, routes it to the appropriate beam and sends it to the proper terminal, Cook said. "We can literally go [from] dish to dish. It will enable us to deliver a huge range of services. It’s our next-generation data-communications satellite. It allows us to shape and deliver different beams for different services. It can provide 10 gigabits per second, which compared to the typical Ku-band is eight satellites’ worth of capacity."

Commercial and enterprise customers include major gas companies Shell, Exxon, and BP; major retailers Lowe’s, TJ Maxx, and Rite Aid; and restaurants McDonalds, Jack in the Box, and Wendy’s.

Spaceway-3 marks a second customer’s switching from Sea Launch to Arianespace. SES Americom plans to launch its AMC-21 satellite in the 2008 second quarter aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. The satellite previously had been scheduled to be launched by Sea Launch’s planned Land Launch vehicle.

While Mowry described the current situation in the launch industry as "extraordinary," he also hinted that more contracts may prove to be in the offing.

"We had a set manifest and saw it for the year," Mowry said. "As we had more visibility into delivery schedules for satellites coming out of factories, we were able to accommodate. With Spaceway-3, we saw that there would be some opportunities to come later in the year, and we had a pairing that fit. It was a case of engineering studies. Five months is not something that we were normally able to do."

Yet he added "I’m not precluding that you won’t see any more announcements. We’re trying to help where we can; we’ve got people under time pressures, and we’re trying to see whether there are opportunities to accommodate them. We’ll continue to do that.

"I have no crystal ball, but in a practical way, as we see satellites coming out of the factory, you get a better sense of the timing," Mowry said. "Usually when they go through their thermal back test, you have a much better certainty for when a launch is going to take place."

Another factor enabling accommodation was that Arianespace launched Spaceway-2 in 2005. Originally built by Boeing to be used for HughesNet, Spaceway-2 was retrofitted to deliver high-definition local channels to numerous markets nationwide as part of DirecTV’s constellation of direct broadcast satellites.

"Spaceway-2 obviously gives us some insight," Mowry said. "From an engineering standpoint it makes it easier, but it doesn’t really have an impact on the schedule side. It doesn’t really change the availability on the manifest."

Similarly, Mowry said that the cost of Arianespace’s launches have not changed since the NSS-8 failure.

While "we don’t generally comment on prices, what I can tell you is that after the anomaly, the prices are the same as before the Sea Launch failure," Mowry said. "The offer sheet is the same. We didn’t change anything in respect to that."

Prior to the launch failure, Rob Peckham, president and general manager of Sea Launch, said the company was "hitting [its] stride." NSS-8’s was to be the first of six Sea Launch missions scheduled for 2007: Besides Hughes, other customers under contract were Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications Co., DirecTV, PanAmSat Corp. and EchoStar Communications Corp.

Thuraya’s CEO, Yousuf Al Sayed, last week expressed his "hope [that] we can launch Thuraya-3 before October," but did not elaborate on whether or how that might be realized beyond explaining that "we will know after the launch failure investigation is over."

Immediately after the launch failure, however, Marco Caceres, a space analyst for Teal Group, expected a delay of at least six months, and noted that while Sea Launch "was clearly on a roll" with their 2007 manifest, "they definitely won’t do five or six this year," and likely only half of those even if all goes well after the investigation.

At SATELLITE 2007, Peckham vowed that Sea Launch would conduct at least two launches before the end of the year.