Viasat: “We know what’s wrong with ViaSat 3”
September 20, 2023
By Chris Forrester
Viasat’s founder and CEO Mark Dankberg says that his engineers now have some understanding of what went wrong with the giant antenna on its ViaSat 3 Americas satellite.
ViaSat 3 Americas launched on May 1st but its massive antenna failed to deploy. Viasat has subsequently initiated deliberate vibrations and ‘shakes’ to the satellite to attempt to kick-start the deployment.
Those actions have not been successful. But the satellite is far from being declared a total loss although the craft’s insurers have been formally notified that a major claim is likely.
Dankberg said: “We have a pretty good understanding of what the cause was. The antenna provider does expect that that will be remedied on the second satellite [now under construction]. The third flight is a different antenna, unrelated to that.”
However, Dankberg says that he remained confident that some of the satellite’s functions could be achieved, including the craft’s coverage areas, its beam hopping functions, the capacity per beam — although not necessarily for the entire satellite.
“We are not making any predictions about what those will be until we get the measurements we expect to be able to get, probably by early next quarter,” he added.