Middle East

Troubled Israeli satellite communications company Spacecom could finally have a buyer, but at a much lower price tag than it sought last year. Last week, Israel-based holding company IDB made an offer for a controlling stake in Spacecom, offering U.S.$45.75 million for a 54.7% undiluted stake and an equity infusion of as much as U.S.$11.45 million. According to a report published on calcalist.com, further negotiations have resulted in IDB’s subsidiary, Discount Investment Corporation, agreeing to an equity infusion of up to U.S.$34 million.

The Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, visited the facilities of Virgin Galactic at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California on 2 April 2018. The Crown Prince and his delegation, which included the Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Khalid bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, were hosted by Sir Richard Branson, Chairman of the Virgin Group, and by George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic.

The UAE has become a trailblazer in the Arab world in the field of space and satellite technology, an effort that is a part of a wider economic diversification initiative by the UAE government to ween the Gulf Arab state off of its economic dependency on hydrocarbons. It appears that neighbouring Gulf Arab countries are taking note, as a recent visit to the UAE Space Agency by a prominent delegation from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia demonstrates.

The Israel Space Agency is collaborating with NASA, CalTech, and the Weizmann Institute to develop ULTRASAT in the search for supernovae. The ULTRASAT, or Ultraviolet Transient Astronomy Satellite, is a mission which will launch a small satellite carrying a telescope with an unprecedentedly large field of view.

Precious Payload, the brain child of Russian entrepreneurs Andrei Rebrov and Andrey Maskimov, is aiming to transform the way in which small satellite operators secure their launches. As we heard at Satellite 2018 this year, small satellites are being hit by a launch bottleneck and are mostly reduced to piggybacking on larger satellite launches and settling for what they can get. This can impact negatively on schedules and revenues.

The Azeri ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Shahin Abdullayev, has told reporters that Azerbaijan seeks to enter into cooperative agreements with Saudi Arabia in satellite technology, petrochemicals, energy, agriculture, and tourism. “We launched two satellites and we reached advanced levels in this sector. We aim to be among the top producers of satellite parts,” Ambassador Abdullayev told the Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper on 23 March 2018.

Saudi Arabia is thought to be footing the financial bill for a hypersonic spaceplane concept capable of launching small satellites into low-Earth orbit (LEO) being developed by Ukrainian space company Yuzhnoye, according to Russian space journalist Anatoly Zak writing in Popular Mechanics.

SpaceWatch.Global is providing a new weekly feature that provides a brief summary and roundup of space activities and satellite industry developments in Africa, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Russia and the CIS that have not been reported in-depth by our team.

Following the SpaceWatch.Global report that Israel’s Spacecom is looking to purchase a new satellite to be called AMOS-8, we can now report that Spacecom has selected U.S. satellite manufacturer Space Systems Loral (SSL), a subsidiary of Maxar Technologies, to build the new satellite, instead of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) as many expected.

Israeli fleet operator Spacecom is very close to purchasing a new satellite, named AMOS-8. This forthcoming purchase is a sign of a turnaround for Spacecom, as well as a bet on the troubled company’s future. Back-to-back spacecraft losses in 2015 and 2016 turned Spacecom from an expanding business into a struggling concern. Preceding the destruction of AMOS-6, Spacecom’s Russian-built AMOS-5 satellite ceased working in orbit due to a power system failure in 2015, just four years after its launch.