AUSSAT-1 was deployed by during the first day of the STS-51-I mission.
The B-Class satellites were launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center by Long March rockets.
Optus B1 was moved to Junk orbit in May 2008.
On 21 May 2005 services were temporarily lost when the Primary Satellite Control Processor failed. The satellite was switched to use the Backup SCP in order to restore services. Thereafter the satellite continued to operate from the Backup SCP.
March 2006 Positioning Failure
At 06:52 GMT on 30 March 2006, a routine repositioning manoeuvre failed, resulting in loss of pointing control of the satellite. Although communication with the satellite was not lost, transmission services provided by the satellite failed due to its incorrect positioning. Services were progressively restored between 18:00 and 20:00 GMT.
Local time at the time of the start of the outage ranged from 14:52 AWST to 18:52 NZST, a peak time for listeners and viewers of the radio and television broadcast and subscription services provided directly or indirectly by the satellite.
The launchcraft containing Optus B2 exploded on launch and was subsequently destroyed, for reasons that the designer Hughes and the Chinese (Launch Location) authorities were unable to determine.
However, according to one source, shortcomings in the launch vehicle guidance system meant that it failed to compensate for wind-shear effects within the first minute after launch.
Optus B3 was launched as a replacement for the failed Optus B2.
This satellite is owned by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and leased back to Singtel Optus. It was replaced by Optus D2.
Partially funded by the Australian Government (Defence Department) - Optus C1's use is shared between Defence and Telecommunications, in particular the supply of Television services to Australia. Mitsubishi Electric was the prime contractor responsible for manufacturing all the Optus C1 communications systems.
The D1 and D2 satellites replace and expand the services provided by the B1 and B3 satellites respectively, which had both been operating beyond their design lifetimes. The D3 satellite is to be co-located with C1 to expand capacity.
D1 was successfully launched by an Ariane 5 ECA on 13 October 2006 at 20:56 GMT.
Customers on D1 include the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), the Seven Network, the Nine Network, Sky Television New Zealand and New Zealand's Kordia (formerly known as BCL). D1 also supports VSAT users.
Kordia is leasing a full transponder for sublease to TVNZ (TV1 & TV2) and CanWest (TV3 & C4) for the Freeview service. The Kordia transponder will be on 12.4697 GHz.
As many existing receivers did not have the ability to receive horizontally aligned signals, Sky Television was unable to transfer services from Optus B1 to this beam as expected. Sky was instead assigned capacity on the more general Australia/NZ beam. Due to restrictions on broadcast rights (in terms of both broadcast licensing and copyright), the unencrypted Freeview service could not make a similar allocation switch and was set up as a horizontally-aligned service on the New Zealand spot beam.
On 2007-07-31, Sky successfully performed an over the air software upgrade to all of its customer set-top boxes, enabling them to receive the horizontally-aligned signals from the New Zealand spot beam. Accordingly, Sky was able to return to their original capacity allocation.
Optus D2 replaced Optus B3, which had been in operation for 13 years at the time of D2's launch.
D2 also carries a large number of Free To Air channels, many in languages other than English
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