The
award ceremony was held in the Royal Aeronautical Society in London
on Wednesday 5 November 2008.
Patrick
Wood, former
Skynet 5 Project Director, now Astrium Satellites’ Chief Technical
Officer,
said, “It is great for the whole Skynet team to be recognised and
rewarded for its remarkable achievement. It really was a team effort
– with more than 600 people involved overall – and we succeeded
in getting the complete communications system fully operational on
time and to cost.”
The
three Skynet 5 satellites, based on Astrium’s highly successful
Eurostar E3000 communications spacecraft and launched in March and
November 2007 and June 2008, complete the space segment for the UK
MOD’s Skynet 5 secure communications system. Astrium Services,
through its subsidiary Paradigm Secure Communications, is responsible
for the £3.6billion Skynet 5 service provision contract, which
extends to 2020. It is one of the MOD’s largest and most complex
PFI contracts to date.
