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Thai moonshot plan gets priority-checked by Earthlings


Mekong
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Following other links on same page seems Thailand just launched a meteorological satellite from South America, must have been on Arriane. Also a Thai astronaught? That one seems weird

 

I forgot to mention, for a while Thailand had the largest satellite ever in space, built obviously overseas however a large part of the technical solution was Thai.

 

I love the baked durian. Mind you Musk put his personal Tesla in space. Imagine just after launch and going, "Anyone seen my sunglasses? WTF I left them in the car"?

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Was the largest satellite a Thaicom one? The Bangkok elite on their smartphones relying on Thaksin (before AIS was sold to Temesak Holdings in Singapore) satellites to get a signal, Oh the Irony.

Thaicom 1-5 were launched by Ariana 6;7 and 8 by Spece-X.

 

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Ariane had to wait till they had block 5B ESA before they could launch iPSTAR - ThaiCom 4. iPSTAR built by SSL.

just under 7 tonnes at launch. Heaviest GEO Satellite. Even today a very heavy satellite. Unlike most launches it was a single satellite, not 2. (Ignoring LEO's)

The idea came from the ThaiCom president while playing golf with a friend.

The launch delay caused significant issues to their business plan as it went over by nearly two years, through a few factors not of theirs.

It was the worlds first HTS satellite, what we called then a Spot Beam Satellite, HTS hadn't even been invented as a term.

It's expected life is still another few years, about 7 years after original use by date, that's fairly common in satellites though.

The encoding for the data was so good it was sold of to ViaSat, bit of a sad story I can't write here but if we meet again ask me about it.

Regardless shat people think of Thaksin, he had a great company, now destroyed by the Junta as they believe it is still owned by him. If you ever sold anything to Temesak you'd know once sold, it's gone.

Ironically Thaksin increased the taxes on ThaiCom even while he still owned them.

ThaiCom paid the highest fees to a government than any other satellite company in the world, insanely high fees.

Sadly just about every good ThaiCom person has moved on, which is a great loss to Thailand. Some great minds there.

 

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