Space Systems/Loral Selected to Provide Two High-Power Satellites to Intelsat

PALO ALTO, CA — Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) [NASDAQ: LORL], the leading provider of commercial satellites, today announced that it has been awarded a contract to provide two high-power satellites to Intelsat for Direct-to-Home (DTH) television service in Latin America. The two satellites will be operated by Intelsat, which will provide them to DIRECTV Latin America (Nasdaq: DTV), a leading DTH digital television services operator in Latin America.

“Space Systems/Loral’s high-power heritage and record of reliability make them an excellent choice for this procurement,” said Thierry Guillemin, SVP and Chief Technical Officer of Intelsat, the world’s leading provider of satellite services. “The new satellites will help us support our customer’s expansion plans in this region of robust economic growth with all the bandwidth necessary for today’s most advanced television services.”

“The DLA-1 and DLA-2 satellites fuel the already stellar growth of the DIRECTV business in Latin America for new HDTV services, and provides full fleet redundancy for the reliability of these services for our customers,” said Rômulo Pontual, DIRECTV Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. “By working closely with Intelsat and SS/L, DIRECTV has been able to leverage the spot-beam frequency reuse technologies to greatly expand the capacity into Latin America with the industry’s best technology. The cooperation of these three powerful companies has produced a powerful architecture for our business.”

The Ku-band payloads will be used to expand DTH entertainment offerings and provide backup and restoration services. The two satellites are scheduled for launch in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and will be co-located with Intelsat’s Galaxy 3C satellite at 95°W.

“Today’s highest power satellites maximize the amount of high-definition programming that can be broadcast and provide a better business case for the operator,” said John Celli, president of Space Systems/Loral. “Space Systems/Loral is the only satellite manufacturer with five 20-kW satellites currently on orbit and numerous others scheduled for launch over the next year. We are very proud of our heritage high-power technology and pleased to be able to continue to support the Intelsat and DIRECTV businesses.”

The two satellites are designed based on the decades proven Space Systems/Loral 1300 platform and the first is scheduled to launch in 2014. They are contracted to provide service for a minimum of 15 years.