Lockheed Martin has, as expected, been awarded the contract to a build NSS-6 satellite for New Skies Satellite. NSS-6, from 95 degrees East, will be an A2100AX (launch mass 4650 kgs) heavyweight Ku/Ka-Band craft with a footprint stretching from the eastern Mediterranean and Southern Africa to Australia, Japan and Korea. Launch will be in the fourth quarter of 2002, and the craft will have a life span of 14plus years.

Total launch programme cost is stated as $279 million (E307.47m), “NSS-6 is the first New Skies satellite specifically designed to offer interactive broadband multimedia communications,” said Bob Ross, CEO of New Skies.

“This is the ideal satellite for the dynamic Asian market because it can rapidly and flexibly deploy capacity where it is needed.”

NSS-6 has 60 high-power 36 MHz-equivalent Ku-band transponders, that can be switched in orbit to any of six broad beams covering India, China, the Middle East (with South African spot coverage), Australia, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia. The NSS-6 satellite also has 12 super-high-gain Ka-Band uplink spot beams, handling up to 1 Mbit/s data rates from antennas as small as 90cm located at customer sites.

New Skies pulled its planned IPO earlier this year citing unfavourable market conditions, but is still expected to go to market by early next year.