The Spaceway system was originally envisioned as a global K_a-band communications system by

Hughes Electronics Hughes Electronics Corporation was formed in 1985, when Hughes Aircraft was sold by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to General Motors for $5.2 billion. Surviving parts of Hughes Electronics are today known as DirecTV Group, while the automoti ...

. When the project to build the system was taken over by

Hughes Network Systems Hughes Network Systems, LLC is an American telecommunications company that specializes in providing satellite-based communication services for consumer and enterprise markets. It is headquartered in Germantown, Maryland and provides satellite i ...

, a subsidiary of Hughes Electronics, it was transformed into a phased deployment initially only launching a North American satellite system. This is in comparison to other more ambitious systems such as

Teledesic Teledesic was a company founded in the 1990s to build a commercial broadband satellite internet constellation. Using low-Earth-orbiting satellites small antennas could be used to provide uplinks of as much as 100 Mbit/s and downlinks of up t ...

and

Astrolink Astrolink was a joint venture for a communications satellite system consisting of four satellites for providing worldwide internet access via satellite. The joint venture was formed in September 1999. It would have been the first system for satell ...

which retained their full global nature and which subsequently failed to complete their systems. Hughes Network Systems working with Hughes Electronics subsidiary

Hughes Space and Communications The Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded on February 14, 1934 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, California, as a division of the Hughes Tool Company. The company produced the Hughes H-4 Hercules aircr ...

(and subsequently sold to Boeing and called

Boeing Satellite Systems The Boeing Satellite Development Center is a major business unit of Boeing Defense, Space & Security. It brought together Boeing satellite operations with that of GM Hughes Electronics' Space and Communications division in El Segundo, Califo ...

and later the

Boeing Satellite Development Center The Boeing Satellite Development Center is a major business unit of Boeing Defense, Space & Security. It brought together Boeing satellite operations with that of GM Hughes Electronics' Hughes Aircraft#Hughes Space and Communications Group, S ...

) completed and built the North American Spaceway system meant to provide

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

capabilities of up to 512 kbit/s, 2 Mbit/s, and 16 Mbit/s uplink data communication rates with fixed K_a-band satellite terminal antennas sized as small as . The broadband Spaceway system was standardized by

Telecommunications Industry Association The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop voluntary, consensus-based industry standards for a wide variety of information and communication technology (Informat ...

and

European Telecommunications Standards Institute The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization operating in the field of information and communications. ETSI supports the development and testing of global technical ...

(ETSI) as the Regenerative Satellite Mesh - A Air Interface. After

News Corp The second and current incarnation of News Corporation, doing business as News Corp, is an American mass media and publishing company headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The company was formed on ...

purchased a controlling interest in

, the company sold off its controlling interest in

but retained Spaceway-1 and Spaceway-2 for use in the

DirecTV DirecTV, LLC is an American Multichannel television in the United States, multichannel video programming distributor based in El Segundo, California. Originally launched on June 17, 1994, its primary service is a digital Satellite television, s ...

satellite television subsidiary of Hughes Electronics. Boeing retrofitted the first two satellites for

bent pipe A communications satellite's transponder is the series of interconnected units that form a communications channel between the receiving and the transmitting antennas. It is mainly used in satellite communication to transfer the received signals. ...

K_a-band communications for use in

high-definition television High-definition television (HDTV) describes a television or video system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since at least 1933; in more recent times, it ref ...

and disabled the regenerative on-board processing of the original system that was to be used for broadband satellite communications. Despite statements to the contrary in the system's initial filings with the

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, internet, wi-fi, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains j ...

, none of the three satellites have inter-satellite links connecting the satellites directly with each other in space. Spaceway-1, Spaceway-2 and

Spaceway-3 Spaceway-3 is a communications satellite which was launched on August 14, 2007, at 23:44:00 UTC. The third satellite in the Spaceway series, it includes a Ka-band communications payload. It is used by Hughes Network Systems to provide broadband ...

have been launched and

had an option to purchase and have Boeing build Spaceway-4. Spaceway-1, after exceeding its design life by two and a half years, was decommissioned in February 2020 after suffering extensive thermal damage to its batteries in December 2019, forcing the satellite to be moved to a graveyard orbit to prevent the risk of it exploding.

Notes

References

* {{cite web, url=http://www.hughes.com/HUGHES/Rooms/DisplayPages/LayoutInitial?Container=com.webridge.entity.Entity%5BOID%5B247EE93EA910FC4882B3105E9AD73791%5D%5D, title=SPACEWAY Technical Specifications , publisher=Hughes Network Systems, url-status=dead, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061030031717/http://www.hughes.com/HUGHES/Rooms/DisplayPages/LayoutInitial?Container=com.webridge.entity.Entity%5BOID%5B247EE93EA910FC4882B3105E9AD73791%5D%5D, archive-date=2006-10-30

External links

Spaceway 3

Communications satellites