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. The surviving parts of Hughes Electronics are today known as The DirecTV Group. On June 5, ...

. When the project to build the system was taken over by Hughes Network Systems, 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 to 720 ...

and Astrolink 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 Hughes Tool Company. The company was known for producing, among other pro ...

(and subsequently sold to Boeing and called Boeing Satellite Systems 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' Space and Communications division in El Segundo, Califo ...

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

broadband In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals at a wide range of frequencies and Internet traffic types, that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. ...

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 Technologies ( ICT) ...

and

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

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

News Corp News Corporation, stylized as News Corp, is an American mass media and publishing company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The second incarnation of the original News Corporation, it was formed on June 28, 2013, following a ...

purchased a controlling interest in

, the company sold off its controlling interest in Hughes Network Systems but retained Spaceway-1 and Spaceway-2 for use in the

DirecTV DirecTV (trademarked as DIRECTV) is an American multichannel video programming distributor based in El Segundo, California. Originally launched on June 17, 1994, its primary service is a digital satellite service serving the United States. I ...

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 (HD or HDTV) describes a television system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since 1936; in more recent times, it refers to the g ...

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 federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdicti ...

, none of the three satellites have

inter-satellite links Inter-satellite service (also: inter-satellite radiocommunication service) is – according to ''Article 1.22'' of the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) Radio Regulations (RR)ITU Radio Regulations, Section IV. Radio Stations and Sys ...

connecting the satellites directly with each other in space. Spaceway-1, Spaceway-2 and Spaceway-3 have been launched and Hughes Network Systems had an option to purchase and have Boeing build Spaceway-4. Spaceway-1 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