Satellite News

The law firm of Schatz Nobel Izard, P.C said that a lawsuit seeking class action status has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of all persons who acquired common stock of Worldspace, Inc. since the company’s IPO on 4 August 2005.

The European Commission has given the eight companies that are to build and run the Galileo satellite navigation system until 10 May to create a single company and choose a chief executive for it.

EU regulators will reportedly clear Thales’ plans to buy the satellite interests of Alcatel-Lucent.

Spacehab, Incorporated announced that the company has filed for a formal dismissal with prejudice of all litigation against NASA relating to losses incurred by Spacehab as a result of the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia accident.

Mexico’s telecommunications regulator Cofetel has approved bidding rules for a second attempt to auction a license to operate a Ka-band satellite at 109.2 degrees West, the regulator said in a statement.

Mobile Satellite Ventures LP (MSV) announced that it has been awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,181,161 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This is the nineteenth patent issued to MSV protecting the company’s hybrid satellite-terrestrial system including Ancillary Terrestrial Component (ATC) technology.

Recent remarks of Thailand’s Council for National Security chairman, Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin, have been met with irritation. The general, who led last year’s military coup, had described the Thaicom telecom satellites as “national assets” that should revert back to Thai control from Singapore’s Temasek Holdings.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that reviews NASA’s top 10 dollar value award-fee contracts active from fiscal years 2002 through 2004 and identifies a number of problems with the agency’s management of those contracts.