The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected Aerojet Rocketdyne’s subsidiary European Space Propulsion (ESP) for flight qualification of the 5kW XR-5E Hall Thruster on telecommunication satellites.

Part of ESA’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) initiative, the contract is categorised under ARTES 3-4.

Discover B2B Marketing That Performs

Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.

Find out more

Supported by the UK Space Agency, the ESP ARTES 3-4 programme will develop, qualify and demonstrate products, as well as explore innovative concepts to produce Satcom products.

Under the €11m contract, ESP will develop a new ThermoThrottle Xenon Flow Controller (XFC), which will be combined with XR-5 Hall Thruster to create a new XR-5E Thruster.

"Supported by the UK Space Agency, the ESP ARTES 3-4 programme will develop, qualify and demonstrate products, as well as explore innovative concepts to produce Satcom products."

ESP managing director Paul Sinton said: "The telecommunications satellite market is trending toward increased use of high-power electric propulsion and improved affordability.

"Our objective at ESP is to meet both those needs by bringing the highest-performance, longest-life, five-kilowatt Hall Thruster together with a simplified XFC and produce it in the lower-cost environment in Northern Ireland."

GlobalData Strategic Intelligence

US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?

Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.

By GlobalData

The company will create a document covering requirements of Geosynchronous (GEO) Comsat platforms and other key satellite programmes.

A series of engineering and flight qualification model hardware will be built with validation testing conducted at each phase.

The XR-5E Thruster capabilities will be evaluated as part of final flight qualification test programme, as well as system integration tests and power processor coupling tests.

XR-5 is said to be the only electric propulsion product that demonstrated electric propulsion orbit-raising of a GEO Comsat from geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) to GEO.

Aerojet Rocketdyne delivered 16 flight XR-5 Hall Thrusters and logged 64 orders for XR-5 Hall Thrusters covering three GEO Comsat platforms.