Eutelsat Cuts Satellite Deal With Ukraine, Buys Access To Brazilian Slot

Even as it struggles to resolve orbital-access issues at 26 degrees east longitude with Saudi Arabia and Iran, satellite fleet operator Eutelsat has reached an agreement with Ukraine to develop the 48 degrees east slot and is confident of finding an equitable compromise on a separate Iranian satellite system at 34 degrees east, Eutelsat Chief Executive Michel de Rosen said.
The Paris-based operator is expanding westward as well.

Eutelsat has won an auction sponsored by Brazil’s Anatel telecommunications authority for the rights to a Brazilian orbital position.

Industry officials said the Brazilian slot is at 65 degrees west and that Eutelsat plans to develop it for Ka-band broadband applications.

In a briefing with reporters March 14 here at the Satellite 2012 conference, de Rosen declined to discuss the auction beyond saying Eutelsat won it for “quite an attractive price.”

“We are not ready, today, to tell you how we plan to use this,” de Rosen said of the Brazilian slot.

Eutelsat, which is the world’s third-biggest satellite fleet operator measured by revenue, had been negotiating with the government of Ukraine over access to frequencies around 36 degrees east.

Ukraine had proposed to put its first telecommunications satellite, called Lybid, near that position.

Eutelsat protested that its two spacecraft already at 36 degrees east had regulatory priority.

Ukraine’s national space agency, which is managing the Lybid project, was forced to suspend its $254 million contract with MDA Corp. of Canada for the satellite’s development.

MDA Corp. officials told investors Feb. 28 that the Lybid contract, which was financed in part by Canada’s export-credit agency, Export Development Canada, is now back on track following a resolution of the frequency coordination issues.

De Rosen said Eutelsat and Ukraine will cooperate in the development of the 48 degrees east orbital position.

Eutelsat has two spacecraft at that slot now, one in inclined orbit and nearing retirement, the other a small satellite that suffered a partial failure of its power system and has never generated much revenue for Eutelsat.
We learned one day that Ukraine had this satellite program and that they had underestimated that the program might cause problems for us at 36 degrees,” de Rosen said.

“It could have become a lose-lose situation. We have now discussed with them and it will be a win-win situation.”

Eutelsat Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Wallace said during the briefing that the compromise with Ukraine “will ensure that what we do with Russia at 36 degrees will be clear for Russia and for the large Russian-speaking population of Ukraine, and it gives extra momentum to the development of 48 degrees.”

Eutelsat’s issue with Iran over the 34 degrees east slot, meanwhile, stems from the recent decision by international frequency regulators attending the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) to reinstate Iran’s Zohreh-1 satellite system into a global registry of approved satellite networks.

In what several WRC delegates admitted was a contradiction, the recently concluded meeting also endorsed an earlier decision by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to expel Zohreh-1 from the list because it had missed deadlines for starting service.

If Iran places a Zohreh-1 satellite at its designed slot at 34 degrees east, it will be close enough to a Eutelsat spacecraft to force the two sides into close coordination discussions to avoid frequency interference.

“We believe that the WRC decision was more a political position than one based on technical aspects,” de Rosen said.

“We will now need the help of the ITU to make sure that the presence of an Iranian satellite there does not cause interference. I believe that, with an enormous amount of goodwill on all sides, we can achieve this result.”

Soyuz launched from French Guiana site at second attempt

Russian Soyuz-ST carrier rocket was successfully launched from Kourou in French Guiana,

The rocket is carrying two Galileo navigation system satellites and is fitted with a radar transponder allowing its location to be monitored and controlled in flight.

The Soyuz-ST is a modification of the three-stage Soyuz-2 rocket with a Fregat booster adapted for launch in the conditions prevalent in Kourou where there is high heat and humidity.

“The satellites and the Fregat booster have separated from the carrier rocket at the designated time,” a spokesman for the European Space Agency said.

The satellites on board will be deployed as part of the European Galileo navigation system. At present, two test satellites launched in 2005 and 2008 are working in orbit, and 30 are planned in total.

'Russian' eBook doubles in cost

A Russian electronic reader, which is to be made by a British company in Germany and USA, is to cost twice as much as head of Rosnano Anatoly Chubais announced in his meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin earlier this year.

Plastic Logic’s device will be available in Russian shops for 20,000-25,000 rubles from November, instead of the previously announced 12,000.

At the moment the screens are made in Dresden, the rest of the reader is produced in California.

However, after Plastic Logic sets up a plant in Zelenograd, the device is set to become much cheaper.

Plastic Logic’s pad will have a black and white 10.7 inch electronic ink screen. The screen does not have glass base or any silicon elements, which makes it more damage-proof.

Superjet grounded for days

The hyped up Superjet set to take Russian state airline Aeroflot into the future has had a bumpy take off.

Problems with air conditioning have left the first Sukhoi Superjet 100 (SSJ) for regular use grounded for days.

Superjet’s first Aeroflot flight

The SSJ made its maiden registered flight in Aeroflot colours on June, 16, taking VIP passengers including vice PM Sergei Ivanov, Aeroflot general director Vitaly Savelyev and several other ministers to the St Petersburg economic forum.

However, the VIPs did not notice some technical hitches that limited the plane’s spell in the air.

The plane was grounded for 17 days in its first month with Aeroflot, sources close to the airline and the plane’s manufacturer Sukhoi told Vedomosti.

The plane has problems with air conditioning system, particularly with a sensory element that has been sending false signals about system failure.

However, the fault that could only be determined after long diagnostics of the plane does not affect the flight’s safety, the source said.

Superjet is back in the air

The plane took to the skies again on Saturday and eased into its new schedule. It made six flights on July 17 and 18 – from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod, St Petersburg and Ufa.

The plane completed 60 flights in a month, 101 hours in the air. Aeroflot was hoping for twice as much time in the air, sources said.

Despite being grounded for long periods of time, Aeroflot kept making the leasing payments of $165,000 a month and paid for the repairs.

The bills will later be sent to Sukhoi, keeping with standard global practice.

SSJ has only been put into operation recently. One more SSJ has been in use with Armavia since April. There it made 216 flights (531 hours) and spent only 13 days on the tarmac.

There have been no problems with the aircraft, an Armavia representative said. The plane is used on flights to Athens, Venice, Rome and some Russian cities.

The hopes are that SSJ will take over the baton from TU-134. President Dmitry Medvedev demanded that the old Soviet era aircraft be taken out of service soon after one of them crashed near Petrozavodsk.

Ukraine's Only Astronaut Sad To See Space Shuttle Program End

KIEV, Ukraine -- Leonid Kadenyuk, the only Ukrainian citizen to fly into space on a U.S. space shuttle, has expressed regret at the end of the 30-year-old space program.

"I am sorry that this period is ending. These shuttles could have done a lot more interesting and valuable work in exploring space," Kadenyuk told in an interview on July 21 from his home in Kiev.

Kadenyuk made his flight on NASA's "Columbia" in 1997. He said preparation for the flight and the flight itself was "the most interesting period of my life."

The space shuttle program ended on July 21 when the "Atlantis" landed in Florida, marking the last of the 135 space shuttle missions.

Kadenyuk, 60, is a former Soviet pilot who was selected for the Soviet cosmonaut team in 1976.

However, he made his first and only flight into space only after Ukraine became independent and the U.S. government decided to support a joint space mission.

While aboard the "Columbia," Kadenyuk conducted experiments designed to study how a weightless environment affects plant growth and biomass.

Kadenyuk orbited the earth 252 times, logging a total of 15 days, 16 hours, and 34 minutes in space.

Kadenyuk regrets that no Ukrainian citizen was able to follow him into space.

He puts part of the blame on the Ukrainian authorities who, in his view, are currently using only "3-5 percent" of Ukraine's space industry potential.

Commenting on the end of the U.S. space shuttle program, Kadenyuk said it was commercially unfeasible and there were questions regarding the safety of the flights, but overall "these shuttles have done an immense [amount of] work in space exploration."

Eutelsat: A Tooway Pickup (SatCom)

PARIS, France -- Eutelsat Communications has signed a distribution contract for the Tooway™ broadband service between its Skylogic subsidiary and Eurosat-Ukraine.

Eurosat-Ukraine is an affiliate of Altegrosky, a leading provider of satellite-delivered telecoms services in Russia and CIS countries.

The new contract between Skylogic and Eurosat-Ukraine covers distribution to consumers in Ukraine of the Tooway™ satellite broadband service, which is delivered via Eutelsat's KA-SAT satellite.

With Tooway™ packages enabling users to benefit from download speeds of up to 10 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 4 Mbps, Eurosat-Ukraine can now offer fast and immediate Internet access to users across Ukraine.

Leveraging Altegrosky's extensive experience of providing traditional VSAT solutions in Russia, with 6 500 terminals already deployed, the company plans to focus on rural areas and areas with poor ADSL and mobile broadband coverage.

More than 10 million households in Ukraine's rural and suburban areas are not served by any Internet access, representing a significant addressable market.

The new generation Tooway™ service is provided by Eutelsat's KA-SAT satellite which went into full commercial service in May.

With its total throughput of more than 70 Gbps, KA-SAT is a wireless broadband infrastructure designed to deliver fast, effective and affordable IP applications to users across Europe and the Mediterranean Basin.

Chernobyl: A Nuclear Accident With No End?

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine -- As nuclear workers in Japan struggle to contain radiation from the Fukushima reactor, world attention is turning back to Chernobyl, Ukraine. There, people prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of the explosion that blew the roof off Reactor Number 4.
Soviet planners designed Chernobyl in the 1960s to become the largest nuclear power station in Europe.

Instead, Chernobyl is remembered today as the site of the largest nuclear disaster in the world.

Late on the night of April 25, 1985, Yuri Andreyev left his shift as an engineer at Nuclear Reactor No. 4. Ninety minutes later, a safety experiment went awry. The fuel rods melted down, an explosion blew the roof off, and a raspberry-colored light spewed into the night sky.

When Andreyev returned to work, he saw a scene of devastation. After stepping over the discarded boots, jacket and helmets of fire fighters, he stood in the ruined computer control room and looking up saw blue sky.

Twenty-five years later, Andreyev runs Chernobyl Forum, a political lobby for Ukraine’s 100,000 surviving "liquidators" or clean-up men and women. After weeks of heroic work, the liquidators had succeeded in sealing the plant in an improvised steel and cement "sarcophagus."

But that was not before Chernobyl leaked 10 times the radiation of the Hiroshima atom bomb into the environment.

Authorities mapped out the area of the highest contamination - and closed it to human habitation. About 350,000 were forcibly evacuated from a largely rural area slightly larger than the American state of Rhode Island. Still living in this area are sprinkled about 300 largely elderly holdouts, now called ‘forest people.’

After a quarter century, biologists call this zone "Europe’s largest wildlife refuge." With the presence of humans gone, the new colonists are thriving populations of gray wolves, brown bear, elk and wild boar.

In January, Ukraine opened the area to short, controlled visits by tourist buses.

Twenty five ago, a convoy of 1,000 buses evacuated the entire population of Pripyat. A bedroom community for nuclear power workers, it had once been a Soviet model city - home to 50,000 people.

On a recent afternoon, a lone tour bus made the reverse commute, moving slowly down a deserted Lenin Avenue. A recording of the original evacuation order played to a bus filled with Russian and Ukrainian tourists.

Dense forest covered what once were neatly tended playgrounds. Sturdy trees grew up between rusting swing sets. Bushes and trees made driving down side streets impossible. Through the branches, visitors could make out fading communist slogans - hailing the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union and calling for ‘Atoms for Peace.’

Alexander Sirota lived in Pripyat, until he was 10. Now as a 35-year-old tour guide equipped with a walkie-talkie and digital Geiger counter, he shows tourists - some wearing face masks - his old apartment.

Surrounded by peeling paint, sagging strips of wall paper and light fixtures dissolving in rust, he said he is happy to visit his old home, a place where he spent "the happiest days of my childhood."

Boots crunching over broken glass, Sirota later takes tourists to the gutted cafeteria where he and his mother used to go for breakfast. Then, we go to his elementary school. There, 25 summers and 25 winters have taken their toll, causing a front wall to collapse, exposing old Soviet classroom murals.

For these tourists turned archeologists, the walk takes us below a rusting hammer and sickle sign atop the old administration building and then on to a frozen Ferris wheel - the centerpiece of an amusement park built for May Day festivities that never came.

Maxim, a young man from Donetsk, drops his face mask long enough to say Chernobyl tourism is ‘cool.' But he admits that none of his friends would join him. They said he was crazy to come here: "Insane. They are afraid. Afraid of radiation."

The tour bus rolls on to Chernobyl nuclear power station, stopping 200 yards from Reactor Number 4. Due to high levels of ambient radiation, we have only 20 minutes to pose for souvenir pictures in front of the old sarcophagus of decaying cement and rusting steel.

Laurin Dodd, an American engineer, has come to the site to talk to VOA. He is directing an American-led project to build a new, modern sarcophagus.

"The structure itself is almost a house of cards," says Dodd. "It was built with some robotics and under extreme conditions. And there are large gaping holes. If you go inside, you will see holes the size of picture windows with small mammals going in and out, birds flying in and out."

As scaffolding props up the old ventilation stack, Dodd races to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle.

"There is almost 200 tons of radioactive material still inside the old sarcophagus," said Dodd, who has worked here off and on since 1995. "And the existing sarcophagus was built in six months in 1986 under, I should say, fairly heroic conditions and it had a design life of 10 years - that’s almost 25 years ago."

Built on rails and rising high enough to cover the Statue of Liberty, the new containment structure is to be the largest moveable structure in the world. On April 19, Ukraine officials will hold a donor conference in Kyiv to raise $1 billion to build a structure designed to contain Chernobyl’s nuclear mess for another century.

As authorities in Japan may soon discover, big nuclear accidents have a defined beginning. It is unclear when they ever end.

Russia, Ukraine To Consider Joint Atomic Project

MOSCOW, Russia -- Russian and Ukrainian experts will discuss setting up a joint nuclear generation project on Tuesday, Ukraine's major energy company said.
"A Russian-Ukraine meeting on equipment supplies to power stations in Russia and other countries will take place on July 20, 2010, at the Turboatom headquarters," Turboatom said in statement.

"In addition, the meeting will discuss conditions for the creation of a joint Russian-Ukrainian standard generation unit project to be constructed in a number of countries," the statement added.

The meeting will involve experts from leading Russian and Ukrainian atomic energy companies.

Economic and political ties between Russia and Ukraine have strengthened significantly since Viktor Yanukovych replaced pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko as president in late February.

Ukraine To Launch Satellite For Azerbaijan

BAKU, Azerbaijan -- Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko said on Monday that Ukraine is planning to launch "AzerSat," Azerbaijan's first satellite, with its rocket, according to news reaching here from Baku, capital of Azerbaijan.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov, Gryshchenko said that they exchanged views on strengthening cooperation in the field of aviation and spaceflight, focusing on the joint satellite launch project.

According to an Azerbaijani expert, "AzerSat" will cost 163 million manat (204 million U.S.dollars).

If launched successfully, it will help improve the quality and stability of Azerbaijan's communication and TV transmission.

Azerbaijan will also become the transit country between Europe and Asia in TV transmission if the satellite can cover the European area, said the expert.

Gryshchenko arrived in Baku on Monday after attending the informal foreign ministers' meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Ukraine Seeks To Supply Reactors With Its Own Uranium

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine is seeking to supply its nuclear reactors with uranium mined in the country from 2015, Deputy Fuel and Energy Minister Natalia Shumkova said.
Ukraine aims to increase uranium production to 5,000 metric tons a year in 2020 and 6,000 tons in 2030, from 830 tons, Shumkova said at a conference in Kiev today. The eastern European country needs to invest 9.9 billion hryvnia ($1.25 billion) in uranium output through 2013, she said.

The ministry this week announced a tender to build a uranium plant and will pick a winner by early October, according to Shumkova. Russia’s OAO Tvel and Toshiba Corp.’s Westinghouse Electric Co. have the experience to build the plant, she said.

Ukraine plans to construct a third nuclear reactor at its Khmelnytskyi power plant by 2016 and a fourth by 2017, Yuriy Nedashkovskyi, the president of DP NAEK Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-owned operator of nuclear power stations, said at the same event. The construction is worth 30.1 billion hryvnia, he said.

The country’s nuclear capacity will double by 2030 by extending the lifespan of current reactors by 15 years and by building new generators, Nedashkovskyi said.

Energoatom had first quarter net income of 380 million hryvnia, Nedashkovskyi said, without elaborating. Ukrainian nuclear power plants will produce 87 billion kilowatt-hours of energy this year, he said.

Russian Rocket from Baikonur

A rocket carrying US and Russian crew has lifted off successfully from Kazakhstan, for a mission to re-staff the International Space Station.

The Russian spaceship Soyuz blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome at 01:35am local time on Wednesday, for the 100th mission under the International Space Station (ISS) programme.

Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and NASA astronauts Douglas Willock and Shannon Walker will spend approximately six months at the international orbiting laboratory.

Skolkovo to host Russia’s Silicon Valley

Russia's answer to Silicon Valley will be built in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo, President Dmitry Medvedev announced on Thursday.

The home of the prestigious Skolkovo School of Management, overcame other regions to become Russia's new high-tech hub.

At a meeting with winners of a student Olympiad - the generation on which hopes of modernisation will rest - the president announced that a modern scientific complex would be built in the suburb.

Skolkovo will benefit from a host of investments from leading universities as well as major corporations, while Medvedvev said the region will attract top scientists and engineers from around the world.

The focus will be on the commercialisation of new technologies and the proximity to Moscow will help connect entrepreneurs with the financial centre. Medvedev also said that "speed had a special value" in the project and therefore Moscow was the logical choice, RIA Novosti reported.

"We shall build this centre in a place where we have quite good reserves to do it quickly," Medvedev said. "We shall therefore build it in Skolkovo."
While there are benefits to building it close to Moscow, others saw this the project as a chance to spread the country's wealth with a massive gap in income between the capital and the regions.

"If I were to make the decision I would not [build] it near Moscow," Natalya Kasperskaya, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, told The Moscow News in a recent interview. "I'd move it to central Russia to develop these regions and use the educational opportunities which still exist [there]."

Other experts said it was less important where the technopark was built, but that a network of support for entrepreneurs was developed and that it encouraged economic modernisation.
"[Where it's built] is less important than what they put there," Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure holdings, said in a recent interview. "It should be something that lures people there rather than sticking them there."

Russian mathematician wins Millennium Prize

The Clay Mathematics Institute (Massachusetts, USA) is set to hand Grigory Perelman the Millennium Prize for his solution to the Poincaré conjecture. The Prize is reportedly $1 million.

James Carlson, President of CMI, said today: "The resolution of the Poincaré conjecture by Grigory Perelman brings to a close the century-long quest for the solution. It is a major advance in the history of mathematics that will long be remembered. Mathematics has been deeply enriched."

But it's unclear whether Perelman - ranked ninth on a list of greatest living geniuses in Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper - will accept the prize.

He turned down the Fields Medal, known as the "Nobel Prize for mathematics" in 2006, and lives a reclusive life with his mother in St. Petersburg, refusing to speak publically or give interviews.

The Poincaré conjecture is one of the seven most difficult and important tasks for the mathematicians identified by the Institute at the turn of the millennium.

The conjecture was proposed by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré in 1904 and is fundamental to achieving an understanding of three-dimensional shapes.

Poincaré's test was designed to prove that a three-dimensional manifold is a finite space, like a sphere. Perelman provided proof of the Frenchman's theory, which was confirmed by other mathematicians in 2006.

The remaining six millennium tasks remain unsolved.

Russia 'plans to stop asteroid'

The head of Russia's federal space agency has said it will work to divert an asteroid which will make several passes near the Earth from 2029.
Anatoly Perminov told the Voice of Russia radio service that the agency's science council would hold a closed meeting to discuss the issue.
Any eventual plan is likely to be an international collaboration, he said.
The US space agency said in October that there is a one-in-250,000 chance of Apophis hitting Earth in 2036.
That announcement was a significant reduction in the probability of an impact, based on previous calculations that put the chances at about one-in-45,000. The asteroid is estimated to pass within about 30,000 km of the Earth in 2029.
Mr Perminov, who is the chief of Roscosmos, gave little detail of any plans that the agency has, but was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying that the solution would not entail the use of nuclear weapons.
Other schemes that have been put forth in the past for diverting asteroids from collision courses include spacecraft that nudge the space rocks out of their trajectory through force, or diverting them with "solar sails" that use the wind of particles ejected from the Sun.
"People's lives are at stake," Mr Perminov reportedly told the radio service Golos Rossii.
"We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people."