Lou Josephs reports: US satellite radio firm Sirius says its satellites won’t last as long as first thought. The birds were supposed to work for 15 years — but Sirius says they’ll likely make it to only 13 years. That’s partly because of the way they plan to change their in-orbit configuration. Sirius says “our satellites have experienced circuit failures on their solar arrays” but so far they’re all still operational.
Loral put these 3 birds in highly eliptical orbits, not geostationary - which is why they have 3 satellites instead of two. You can thank the sunspot cycle for the failures on the solar arrays.
on Aug 22nd, 2006 at 15:45
We have been constantly reminding the satellite radio providers that they have to do more than they have been doing to reward shareholders. This morning analyst Robert Peck of Bear Stearns is doing part of XM Satellite Radio’s (XMSR) job for them, and it is even spilling over to Sirius Satellite (SIRI) as well.
This morning in a seachange call, he raised his Underperform rating all the way upo to an Outperform as he thinks the bad news has come to an end. The note also suggests that the street has been focusing only on the negatives. The pending FCC approval for the new devices, the new marketing efforts, and the strong demand are all cited as reasons for an improved fouth quarter.
While this report highlights more benefits that XM has over Sirius, both shares are up on the day. XMSR is up 9.8% to $12.34 and SIRI is up 2% at $3.08.
on Aug 30th, 2006 at 10:11
The SIRIUS orbits pass through the Van Allen radiation belts, whereas the XM geosync orbits are well above this danger zone. The need for special radiation hardening of semiconductors in this environment has been well known for decades. The US Air Force and the old Soviet Union have been operating satellites in similar orbits (think Molniya) since at least the 1970’s.
If SIRIUS or LORAL are trying to blame this design flaw on solar radiation at a time of low sunspots, their efforts are bordering on deliberate deception in my opinion. The engineers who designed these satellites should have taken the space environment into account and used well known techniques for hardening the solar arrays.