SES has announced a change of launch vehicles and launch slots for its SES-12 and SES-14 satellites.
Under new agreements, SES-12 will be launched on a Falcon 9 vehicle from SpaceX in Q1 2018 while SES-14 on an Ariane 5 rocket early in Q1 2018. According to SES, the swap of launches will allow the company to improve service quality and continuity for its customers. Both SES-12 and SES-14 are using electric propulsion for orbit-raising and will enter into service some four to six months after launch.
SES-14, manufactured by Airbus Defense and Space, will be positioned at 47.5 degrees West. Its C-band payload of will replace NSS-806 and support SES’s cable neighbourhood in Latin America. The Ku-band payload augments the Ku-band capacity on NSS-806 with wide beams and high throughput spot beams covering the Americas and the North Atlantic Region. The Ku-band spot beams will allow SES to support the increasing demand for aeronautical and maritime mobility applications, cellular backhaul, broadband delivery, and VSAT services for enterprise and government segments. The Ku-band wide beams are designed to provide video and data services in Latin America, the Caribbean, and across the North Atlantic. SES-14 also carries the Global-Scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) as a hosted payload for NASA.
SES-12, a very large satellite also manufactured by Airbus Defense and Space, will be positioned at 95 degrees East. It will expand SES’s capabilities to provide DTH broadcasting, VSAT, mobility and HTS data connectivity services in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region, including rapidly growing markets such as India and Indonesia. The satellite will replace NSS-6 at this location and be co-located with SES-8. As the largest satellite ever built for SES, SES-12 is capable of supporting requirements in multiple verticals from Cyprus in the West to Japan in the East, and from Russia in the North to Australia in the South.
