So Long, Farewell Thuraya 3: Saying Goodbye To An Old (Satellite) Friend

On the 15th of April 2024, users of the Thuraya satellite phone and packet data services in the eastern hemisphere were left without network coverage when an on-orbit failure occurred on the Thuraya 3 satellite. Launched to space in 2008, it made 98.5 degrees east it's new home in geostationary earth orbit soon after. Since then, it has been providing voice and data services to Australia and Asia reliably for the better part of two decades.

By the 23rd of March, Thuraya 3's owner Yahsat informed stakeholders that the communications payload, or a subsystem that the communications payload relied upon had failed. Yahsat said it was working closely with Thuraya 3's manufacturer Boeing to troubleshoot the failure, and at least, restore a partial service with a reduced capacity.

After a week or two of silence from Thuraya and Yahsat, along comes Thursday, the 2nd of May 2024. Pivotel, an Australian provider of satellite communications drops a bombshell via it's website: Thuraya had severed the 'Service Provider Agreement' between the two entities, and that it's voice and data service to Australia had been indefinitely suspended for the foreseeable future.

As of the recording of this video, Yahsat has not made an official public announcement confirming that the Thuraya 3 satellite is unrecoverable. Perhaps they are trying to protect their stock price? Another weird detail in the saga is the fact that the serviceable lifespan of Thuraya 3 (and it's insurance contract) was due to expire in December 2023. It's remarkably rare for a geostationary communications satellite to experience mission ending failures in the exact year their design life was due to expire. Most satellites exceed their proposed lifespans by a number of years, to decades.

Speculation aside, Thuraya 3 was a favorite of mine when it came to receiving and decoding L-band radio signals. Osmo-GMR is the software I am using in this video to decode a spot beam that provided coverage for China. This was the last recording of Thuraya data I ever made, and I figured for the purposes of archival, I would honor the memory of an old friend and record the entire 35 minutes the decoding tool takes to demodulate this very busy spot beam.

There is no planned replacement for Thuraya 3 for the eastern hemisphere at the recording of this video. Satellite monitoring enthusiasts on this side of the world will have to look to GPS, Inmarsat, Iridium to get their fix of L-band decoding. The end of an era. Goodbye Thuraya 3, you will be missed!

Thanks for watching!