High-rate production and testing of spacecrafts and active antennas for mobile/personal satcoms

The promising new services (remote sensing, personal & mobile communications, navigation, sound broadcasting, paging & messaging, interactive services etc.) offered by non-geostationary satellites, bring in near future to the commercial exploitation of satellite constellations. The commercial viability and technical feasibility of these novel missions have been already proven and the challenging phase of production has now started. In the field of cellular telephony, several constellation concepts will compete on the market. Time-to-market and cost competitiveness are the success criteria for these commercial ventures. Trusting in the future of non-geostationary satellite constellations, Alenia Spazio made a multimillion dollars capital investment in a new plant, based in Roma, for the high-rate production and test of small satellites and ofactive phased array antennas. In the next few years the plant will be fully devoted to the Globalstar program, in the frame of which Alenia Spazio is responsible for the production of 56 satellites and 112 active antennas, at the very challenging production rate of, respectively, three satellites and four antenna pairs per month.