Lumen Orbit books a spare payload after a solar-array anomaly

Lumen Orbit will launch a spare Ku-band payload in the second quarter of next year after one of its two East African communications satellites developed a solar-array drive fault in August. The spacecraft is still earning. It is earning on a power budget that gets uncomfortable when the array cannot track as designed, which is another way of saying the rainy season is a risk the company has decided not to admire.

The spare was already built. That is the part of this story that is not a crisis. Lumen ordered it three years ago as a condition of a capacity contract with a group of mobile operators who did not want their rural backhaul sitting on a single satellite. The launch, not the hardware, is what had been unfunded. An insurer’s preliminary view of the August anomaly unlocked it.

“A spare in a clean room is a press release,” said Amina Wekesa, Lumen’s chief engineer. “A spare with a ride is a network plan. We now have the second thing, and we have it before the array does something more interesting.”

The ride is a rideshare, not a dedicated vehicle, which means the orbital slot Lumen wants and the orbital slot the rocket can cheaply reach are in a negotiation. Wekesa said the company can live with a small drift and a longer drift-up if the alternative is waiting a year for a dedicated window. Airline dispatchers who buy Lumen’s weather downlink as a supplement to national services will not notice, she said, unless the wounded array gets worse. The launch exists so they never have to.