[12-28-07 – Satellite News] The year started with a bang and ended in disappointment for launch services provider Sea Launch, which was unable to recover from a January failure in time to perform any mission in 2007. International Launch Services (ILS) has a successful year despite the failure of its Proton vehicle in September, but Arianespace was able to avoid a failure and capture business while the other two major launch companies were out of service.
“We’re the good news of the year,” Arianespace Inc. President Clay Mowry said. The company performed a record six missions of its Ariane 5, placing a record 12 commercial geosynchronous satellites in orbit. Arianespace’s Starsem affiliate also launched three missions on Russia’s Soyuz vehicle.
Arianespace has a full manifest for 2008, and the company hopes to perform eight missions and place 16 satellites into orbit during the year. “We see it’s a stable market of about 20 to 25 commercial satellite [launches] a year,” Mowry said. “We’re happy to compete in that market. In a good year we can launch up to 16 satellites. In a market of 20 to 25 a year, that’s a fair amount of capacity we think we bring to the marketplace.”
    Before the failure interrupted its momentum, ILS was having a record year. Through August, the launch provider had inked 11 different contracts with a total value of more than $1 billion. “The last time we had more than  $1 billion in orders for a year was in 2000, and we had three products — Atlas 3, Atlas 5 and Proton — serving much larger markets,” ILS President Frank McKenna said in October.
    ILS was able to recover and returned to flight with the Nov. 18 launch of SES Sirius’s Sirius 4 satellite.  “The business of launching satellites has risk associated with it,” McKenna said. “When a failure does occur it’s a very humbling event. We need to focus on the customer at hand, as we immediately begin recovery efforts. We did that very professionally. We had contingency plans in place. As a result we moved through that process very effectively.”
    McKenna said ILS still had an extraordinary year in 2007, and he is expecting another banner year in 2008. “We have a very full manifest in 08, a good manifest in 09 and we just last week signed contract for orders in 2010,” he said. “Our backlog is 21 missions, some of which extend through 2013. It’s a very long term backlog and a very firm business base with customers.”
    Sea Launch was slow to recover from its January failure as the launch provider’s attempts to return to operations in October was foiled by strong ocean currents that forced the company to reschedule the launch of the Thuraya-3 satellite. The mission is expected to take place before the end of January, Thuraya said.
    “This is a difficult industry,” Sea Launch CEO Rob Peckham said in October. “I think just by virtue of the fact we signed up two new contracts while we were in our repair and recertification process is testimony to the fact that this is not going to impact our ability to get future business. In light of lessons the company can learn, obviously, there is room for improvement in every launcher, in every piece of launch operations and we will continue to strive for improvement across the board. We are taking what we are learning and applying it to becoming more effective and efficient in what we do.”
     After Sea Launch returns to flight, Peckham expects the launch provider to at least maintain the level of business it had planned for 2007.