Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems (LMCSS) today announced the award of a contract to build a second geosynchronous satellite for New Skies Satellites N.V. The Ku/Ka-band satellite, designated NSS-6, will provide fully interactive access to high-speed Internet and other multimedia communications. Additionally, it will provide direct-to-home broadcasting services as well as the full complement of traditional enterprise telecommunications services in a large coverage area stretching from the eastern Mediterranean and Southern Africa to Australia, Japan and Korea. "NSS-6 is the first New Skies satellite specifically designed to offer interactive broadband multimedia communications," said Bob Ross, Chief Executive Officer 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 — as individual markets develop — from Johannesburg to Sydney and from Tokyo to Cyprus."
 
"The Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems team is pleased that New Skies has selected our A2100 satellite to meet their challenging demands for bandwidth, power and in-orbit flexibility," said Ted Gavrilis, President of Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems. "Considering New Skies’ history of ‘pushing the envelope,’ we are particularly pleased that the A2100 satellite was selected by them to be the best value package for schedule, performance and risk."
 
Scheduled for launch by the fourth quarter of 2002, NSS-6 is uniquely configured to satisfy the changing demands of New Skies customers including Internet Service Providers (ISPs), broadcasters engaged in multicasting and direct-to-home services and private corporations. The special features of the satellite will enable New Skies’ customers to operate fully interactive, high-speed networks of small terminals, capable of carrying Internet and other bandwidth intensive services throughout the coverage area of NSS-6. NSS-6 is also equipped with extra on-board redundancy for critical units, minimizing risk of single point failure throughout the projected 14-year operational life of the satellite.
 
Unique features of the satellite include more than 60 high-power 36 MHz-equivalent Ku-band transponders that can be re-assigned, 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. Additionally, up to 15 highly linearized transponders can be assigned to each of the six beams to respond to changing market demand. Each Ku-band beam is formed by an independent high-gain antenna system, offering 51-53 dBW in key markets.
 
The NSS-6 satellite also has 12 super-high-gain Ka-band uplink spot beams, facilitating data rates of at least 1 Mbps from antennas as small as 90 cm located at customer sites. These high-speed, high-performance Ka-band uplinks are cross-strapped to the broad Ku-band downlink beams, efficiently handling the asymmetric levels of traffic that characterize Internet networks. This design has the added advantage of maximizing efficient use of spectrum and satellite capacity.
 
Headquartered in The Hague, The Netherlands, New Skies Satellite N.V. is the only satellite operator based outside the United States with true global coverage. It is also the only operator that can offer Ku-band wide-area coverage of India, Southeast and Northeast Asia, Australia, China and the Middle East.
 
Owned by more than 180 major telecommunications entities from over 140 countries around the world, New Skies offers worldwide video, voice and data distribution as well as fully integrated Internet services and connectivity through its global network of five geostationary satellites. A sixth satellite, NSS-7, is already under construction by LMCSS and scheduled for launch in late 2001. New Skies has also secured certain rights to use six additional orbital slots and related frequencies to expand its global presence.
 
Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems markets, designs and builds geostationary and non-geostationary telecommunications and remote sensing satellites for customers worldwide. LMCSS is an operating unit of Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, one of the core business areas of the Lockheed Martin Corporation. Lockheed Martin has a 41-year heritage of building reliable spacecraft for commercial and military customers, having launched more than 875 spacecraft and clocking more than 1,500 years of on-orbit performance experience.