SES-5, EchoStar 17 To Launch Despite Mishap

Rarely has the delicate balance between risk and reward been so clearly on display as it has been since the unexplained May 31 failure of a large commercial telecom satellite to deploy one of its two solar arrays. While the owner of the Intelsat-19 satellite, Luxembourg- and Washington-based Intelsat, is able to analyze what went wrong at its leisure, such is not the case for two fleet operators preparing to loft similarly built satellites from two separate launch sites in the coming days ...