Boeing has shipped the Thuraya-2 mobile communications satellite from its Boeing Satellite Systems manufacturing facility to the Sea Launch Company Home Port in Long Beach, California, where it is being prepared for an early June launch.
The Boeing GEO-Mobile satellite is the second spacecraft built and shipped by Boeing Satellite Systems for the Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications Company of Abu Dhabi. The satellite will be lifted into orbit by a Sea Launch Zenit-3SL rocket from the Odyssey Launch Platform positioned on the equator in the Pacific Ocean.
Thuraya-2 will be located at the 44 degrees East orbital slot in geosynchronous Earth orbit. Thuraya-1, deployed by Sea Launch in October 2000, was the first Boeing-built GEO-Mobile spacecraft and is the heart of the Thuraya network.
An end-to-end Boeing-built system, Thuraya provides mobile voice and data communication services to a region populated by some 2.3 billion people, serving more than 100 countries in Europe, the Middle East, North and Central Africa, the CIS countries and South Asia. — (menareport.com)
© 2003 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
