French satellite giant Eutelsat has completed the end-of-life operations of its longest-serving satellite, Eutelsat 139 West A.

Final passivation and re-orbiting procedures to place the craft into its graveyard orbit were undertaken at Eutelsat’s control center in Issy-les-Moulineaux on April 12, at 21:46 UTC, in full compliance with French Space Law and international space debris mitigation guidelines.

Launched in March 2004 as W3A, the geostationary (GEO) satellite maintained an availability rate exceeding 99.99 percent, serving customers at multiple orbital positions and commercial identities over two decades.

“Maintaining a GEO satellite in service for more than 22 years with such outstanding availability is no accident,” Daniel Kroboth, VP of satellite operations at Eutelsat, said in a statement. “It speaks directly to the skill, commitment, and pride of Eutelsat’s operations teams, whose careful stewardship allowed this spacecraft to deliver reliable service far beyond expectations.”

The satellite’s design suggested an operating lifespan of 12 years, but the GEO platform continued reporting more than 10 years beyond that threshold. Satellite longevity is a cornerstone of economics in space, with so many costs associated with design and launch, the longer a satellite can spin around the planet without incident maximizing its ROI, something easily forgotten amid the quantity-over-quality LEO boom that has consumed the last decade of the industry.

The satellite was the first Eurostar 3000 satellite, and the first GEO satellite to field lithium-ion battery technology, now a boilerplate standard, as well as the first satellite to see its launch and orbital positioning conducted at Paris-based Eutelsat’s Rambouillet teleport.

Graveyard orbits are the gold standard for space sustainability, not only mitigating all space debris and sparing the upper atmosphere of burnup pollution, but also preserving the craft in the pure vacuum of space as virtual time capsules for future beyond-Earth resourcing, or even study by astro-archeologists.

Out with the old?

For all the nostalgia, Eutelsat is one of many legacy providers seeing harsh demand signals around the GEO satellite market.

Following the completion of its €1.5 billion ($1.7bn) re-financing plan in March, combined with a recent loan from the French export credit agency (ECA), the company possesses the capital required to fund the 440 replacement OneWeb satellites Eutelsat has ordered to meet expanding European satcom demand.

In the six months ending Dec 31, the company saw low-Earth orbit (LEO) activity account for a growing portion of its income, swelling to a fifth of the company’s total revenue, as its geostationary TV business continues to shrink in a post-streaming world.

Video revenues at the company fell 12.3 percent to €267m ($306m) in the period, as connectivity revenues from the GEO fleet fell 4.5 percent to €197m ($225m). Added together, revenues are only up 0.1 percent to around €592m ($678m), thanks to the performance of OneWeb, which prior to the merger, saw many difficulties of its own, including going bankrupt in 2020.

Without the right technological or commercial innovation, GEO markets could continue to wane.

Eutelsat completed its all-share combination with LEO operator OneWeb in September 2023, creating a merged entity that possessed a multi-orbit fleet of satellites with a long history of service provision.

In other news, the company signed a multi-year agreement with MTN Côte d’Ivoire, a subsidiary of South Africa’s MTN Group, the nation’s largest telecommunications operator, last week, leveraging Eutelsat Konnect's capacity to expand broadband access.