I just got an interesting email:
A fully-operational communications satellite is available for purchase for only a short time (days). If you know an organization that might be interested, please have them contact Richard Van Allen of Microcosm at 310-219-2700 ASAP.
The F2 satellite has been in orbit for about 11 years, during which time it used about 6 kg of propellant. It cost in the multi-hundreds of millions of dollars, and the launch cost was $105M in 1994 dollars. All systems on board the spacecraft are functioning normally, and it has both S-Band and C-Band communications capabilities. Also important, there is a current RF license in place to use the frequencies allocated to it. The current owner has decided it does not want to continue paying about $133K/month to keep it functioning and has been intentionally burning propellant over the last several weeks to deplete the remaining propellant. Currently there is about 30 kg remaining, more than enough for the satellite to last for many years. However, by the end of this week, the remaining propellant will have been used up, and the satellite will be dead.
Info on the satellite can be found here.
“If you know an organization that might be interested, please have them contact Richard Van Allen of Microcosm at 310-219-2700 ASAP.”
I bought a belt from him once…
yuk yuk yuk 🙂
Destroying a fully-functional satellite that isn’t broadcasting shit like MTV’s real life? That makes me sick!
Tempting, but I’m not in need of one at the moment.
Resist the impulse buy.
Surely some third-world governemnt would love to have a cheap com-sat!
I wonder how much trouble the owner has gone through to find customers for the services it can provide.. I like to think that no-one would deliberately trash this asset without first failing to find a use for it.
“The current owner has decided it does not want to continue paying about $133K/month to keep it functioning and has been intentionally burning propellant over the last several weeks to deplete the remaining propellant.”
@Trent: I guess not! If the owners are already burning off propellant, who’s going to want to buy it? How would the new owners move it?
I hope the current owners at least have the sense to keep enough propellant to ditch the satellite into the atmosphere.
When I looked at the satellite info, I was surprised to see that it’s a MEO satellite. MEO (medium earth orbit) typically has a 12 hour period like GPS. You don’t ditch a MEO bird into the atmosphere. There simply isn’t enough propellant. Instead, they boost it out beyond the MEO belt to get it out of the way of other satellites.
From the sounds of it, the satellite’s propellant usage was minimal. The article said they’d only used 6 KG over 11 years. There is no station change for a MEO bird.
It sounds like they’re having a hard time finding enough customers for those old C and S band transponders for a satellite that isn’t geostationary. It says it was on an Intelsat contract, perhaps providing communications to ships at sea or aircraft over the oceans or something like that. It might’ve also provided additional bandwidth on lease to military customers. Being in a 45 degree MEO orbit, it would have good coverage of polar regions for several hours each day.
Is this the SatCom version of a Nigerian scam letter?
.
.
GREETINGS!
We are the legil firm for your late uncle, A,C, Clarke, a great inventer of sattelittess, who has left you $13,000,000.00 …
Excellent! .
Note that this is a MEO communications satellite, in a 10,000 km circular orbit. Those generally aren’t very useful unless you have a constellation of them, as no ground site will get more than 8-10 hours a day of coverage from a single bird. And no worries about ditching it in the atmosphere; that is neither necessary nor possible. I believe it is acceptable to retire it in place at that altitude, provided in fact that the propellant etc is depleted.
I am concerned with the “about 30 kg of propellant remaining” bit, as the margin for end-of-life propellant gauging on a BSS-601 bus using traditional methods is on the order of +/- 15 kg. And I know of at least one case where someone sold a bargain-basement comsat with an unreasonably optimistic estimate of remaining propellant and got away with it – judges seem to expect satellite buyers to perform proper due dilligence, and caveat emptor if you don’t ask the right (very specific) questions.
If this is someone’s attempt to unload a satellite that is really just about dead, that’s pretty sleazy. Doubly so if the real goal is to let someone else take any liability should proper disposal be impossible. And the whole “Must act now, this offer expires at the end of the week” bit isn’t encouraging.
If someone is actually serious about this, have them give me a call – I can put them in touch with people even better qualified than I am to address some of these issues.
I have some Greek bonds to sell ya…
Titus,
do you think they’d trade Greek Bonds for an aged, dodgey satellite?
I’d try to calculate the fair market value of each, but not sure if even SI units go that small…
How many miles does it have on it?
Why does it cost $133000 to run it every month? That sounds like dozens of salaries – probably renting time on satellite dish networks worldwide to keep in contact and control.
It’s probably too late for this particular satellite, but this sort of opportunity is sure to arise again and again. What if there were some sort of open-source specifications for amateur satellite ground stations, each run by a dedicated server connected to the internet? The cost of tracking and controlling satellites could drop dramatically.
ICO F-2 is probably too dumb to be trusted with autonomous operations – particularly if you are trying to either perform end-of-life passivation or transition to a new operational mode with a new owner. If you want two men on console 24/7, that means eight full-time operators, at something like $200K/year fully burdened. There’s your $133K/month right there.
Renting time on the ground stations is part of that burden, but not a huge part – if you can somehow command your satellite with naught but a $300 iphone, you’ve still got to pay for eight people with highly specialized knowledge and experience, with various other sorts of support.
Smarter satellites might change this, but with a comsat on-station starting at something like $200E6 new, it’s going to be a hard sell convincing the insurance company to let you leave it unattended (or your investors to let you fly without insurance).