ViaSat Launches Satellite in One Giant Leap for High-Capacity Internet

[Updated 10/20/11 12:45 pm, with ViaSat announcing successful launch.] Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]) says today that yesterday’s launch of its ViaSat-1 satellite was successful, and the spacecraft is now moving into position for its final geosynchronous orbit. The satellite, designed to be the highest data capacity satellite ever built, blasted off from from the Baikonour Cosmodrome, the Russian space launch facility in Kazakhstan.

The company hosted a live webcast of the launch, which took place as planned—shortly before noon in California. A replay is available here.

After reaching space successfully, ViaSat spokesman Bruce Rowe said it would take the 6.7-ton satellite spent another 12 hours to complete a planned sequence of orbital maneuvers. The satellite deployed both sets of solar arrays.

As we’ve reported previously, the $450 million satellite represents one giant step for the company, which has operated mostly as a military contractor that provides secure, satellite-based communications. ViaSat capped its satellite development in 2009 with its $568-million acquisition of Colorado-based WildBlue, which provides high-speed Internet service in sparsely populated areas.

ViaSat says its satellite is designed to operate at 140 Gbps (gigabits per second) total throughput —enough for 1.5 million subscribers. That’s not the data rate home satellite Internet users will see, but it’s more total bandwidth capacity than all current Ku-, Ka-, and C-band satellites over North America combined.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.