A special container with this spacecraft was, as scheduled, sent on a cargo plane on September 20 from Krasnoyarsk to the Baikonur space center. The blast-off of the new satellite into geostationary orbit is fixed for October 30, RIA Novosti was told on Wednesday at the press service of the Academician Mikhail Reshetnyov Applied Mechanics research and production association. Its shops manufacture up to 70 per cent of all Russian satellites of different types.
Gennady Keselman, deputy director-general of the association, remarked that the latest Express is a third satellite in this series. It was made jointly with the Japanese firm NTSpase. The maximum period of its operation in orbit is 12 years.
"These are the most sophisticated Russian spacecraft of this class," Keselman stressed. "They are designed to upgrade the Russian orbital group to provide digital television, Internet access, and other communications services."
He recalled that the first such craft, Express-AM22, was orbited on December 29, 2003. It had earlier been contemplated to launch five such satellites, but a contract was recently signed with the federal state unitary enterprise Kosmicheskaya Svyaz for the additional launching of another two similar satellites - Express-AM33 and AM-44.
