Overview

A double decker in space

As the biggest public–private space project ever made in Europe, Alphasat was primarily designed to expand telecommunications provider Inmarsat’s existing global mobile network. ESA partnered with Inmarsat for the commissioning of Alphasat, which was engineered and built by Astrium. Its new-generation advanced geomobile communications payload provides access to the extended L-band spectrum and enables deployment of a wide range of high data rate services for aeronautical, land and maritime users across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Alphasat is also the first flight opportunity for the Alphabus platform, a high-power platform that gives European industry a unique position in the world telecom market. It also hosts four Technology Demonstration Payloads developed through ESA’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) programme.