Satellite News

French state savings bank Caisse des Depots et Consignations (CDC) has agreed to buy 25.5 percent of Eutelsat from investment company Eurazeo for EUR862.7 million (US$1.15 billion).

Rupert Murdoch, who controls News Corp., reportedly has reached a verbal agreement with Liberty Media Corp.’s John Malone to swap News Corp.’s 39 percent interest in DirecTV for Liberty’s 19 percent voting stake in News Corp.

NASA’s GeneSat-1 is set to launch into orbit on an Air Force rocket on 11 December from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island. The launch window extends from 1200 to 1500 UTC.

The service module of ESA’s Herschel spacecraft has passed its assembly and verification tests, and is now ready to move towards its final integration and test phases.

Aerojet, a GenCorp Inc. company, announced the company has signed a teaming agreement for rights in the United States, Japan and South America to integrate Russian-built Hall-effect thrusters into Aerojet’s existing portfolio of electric propulsion systems for commercial and scientific satellites.

COROT, the upcoming mission to detect exoplanets and probe the interior of stars, is now scheduled for launch on 27 December 2006 aboard a Soyuz 2-1b/Fregat from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Technical problems that threatened to delay the launch of space shuttle Discovery on the STS-116 mission have been resolved, but bad weather still remained an issue. Notwithstanding, the countdown to the scheduled 0235 UTC lift-off continued at the time of writing.