Globalstar plans to launch the first six second generation satellites in September 2010. This will be first of four launches that will complete the set of 24 second generation satellites that Globalstar has secured financing. The officials financing these first 24 satellites will wait and review the revenue results before agreeing to finance the remaining 24 satellites that will replace the 48 satellite first generation constellations. The first generation constellation has degradation of its two way voice transmitters.
The second generation satellites will have data transmission speeds of up to 256 kilobits per second. The first generation satellites are only capable of 9.6 kilobits per second.
The first six satellites to be launched should be shipped to the Baikonur launch site in July. Globalstar will be using the highly reliable Soyuz launch vehicle. The Soyuz is human rated used to carry cosmonauts and astronauts to the International Space Station. The Soyuz has successfully launched eight Globalstar satellites on eight other occasions.
The second generation Globalstar satellites have been built with redundancy. Each satellite will have back up units of critical components. This with other improvement has doubled the estimated life of the satellites to 15 years compared to the 7.5 years for the first generation satellites.
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