Ottawa-based Telesat’s recent announcement that it had awarded a 198-craft order with fellow Canadian satellite builder MDA caused considerable surprise with the former Prime Contractor and favoured supplier Thales Alenia Space.

By any measure, Telesat’s challenges with the Lightspeed constellation over the past few years has been to overcome some major bumps in the road, not least financing the low Earth orbiting project.

Telesat has had to trim its ambitions, from an initial 300 satellite constellation to just 198 craft. The delay in obtaining financing has also pushed the project back from a plan to launch this year. The new scheme calls for launches to start in 2026.

Telesat says that it is taking “advantage of key technology advances” at MDS and thus dramatically reducing the overall cost of the constellation. “These technology advances allow each satellite to be slightly smaller than the satellites Telesat was previously considering while still maintaining the highest levels of service performance, resiliency and overall usable capacity in the network,” says Telesat.

The cash savings are said to be about C$2 billion. The overall cost of building and launching the satellites, the associated ground segment and funding the development of user terminals is said to be about C$3.5 billion.

But as recently as July 24th when Thales Group’s chief Executive Patrice Caine suggested that Telesat’s potential contract for its $5 billion order for a fleet of 198 low Earth orbiting satellites was still “very much active”.

In fact, Thales had been appointed Prime Contractor for the Telesat fleet in 2021, although in July 2023 there was no sign of the Telesat/Lightspeed in the Thales Alenia ‘work in progress’ manifest. “If and when they announce the closing for the [financing for the] project, then we will be ready for that, of course. And we would not make any commitment that could not be backed by our supply chain, of course. There is no additional risk. The ball is really in their court, not in ours,” said Caine in July.

In other words, as late as July it would seem that Thales Alenia might have been in the dark as far as the impending contract was concerned going to MDA.

The lost order might be considered the ‘last straw’ for an extremely complicated bidding process for Thales Alenia. Back at the beginning of the Lightspeed saga in 2017 it was Airbus which competed with Maxar and Thales for the contract. Then Maxar and Thales linked up to present a joint solution for Lightspeed. Then, in the words of one observer, “they divorced” and it was a Maxar + Airbus consortium who quoted for the work in competition with Thales. On April 8 2020 Toronto-based investment firm Northern Private Capital bought the MDA assets from Maxar for C$1 billion (€698.7m) and named the new company MDA; the company is headquartered in Ontario, Canada.

Thales then won the pitch, hence the ‘prime contractor’ award, but at the end of the process it was MDA which was awarded the prize. And saving Telesat around C$2 billion from its original estimate is a no-brainer in terms of the order.

But hurdles remain. Telesat says it will commence service by the end of 2027 with 156 satellites funded (out of the planned 198). Tim Farrar (of TMF Associates) doubts that the proposed ‘flat panel’ receivers are certainly not the best solution for a low Earth orbiting fleet. He says: “The real question is what ‘global service with 156 satellites’ actually looks like? The minimum elevation angles will be far too low for cheap and efficient flat panel antennas, so Telesat will have to rely on parabolic dishes.”

Farrar adds: “The necessity to connect at low elevation angles resulting from the downsizing of Lightspeed also means more blockage disruptions for customers: on land trees and buildings, at sea ships’ masts and funnels and in the air aircrafts’ tails and wings will obstruct more frequently.”

Other posts by Chris Forrester:

1. Virgin Galactic in stock split
2. Thuraya-3 suffers major problem
3. AST SpaceMobile hit by Class Action
4. Optimism under threat at SES
5. Rivada visits Terran Orbital’s manufacturing HQ
6. Avanti wins spectrum debt obligation case
7. SpaceX breaks records for re-use launchers
8. IRIS2 already in trouble?
9. Intelsat contemplates next steps

Categories: Blogs, Inside Satellite, Satellite

Tags: canada, lightspeed, mda, telesat