The Alphasat I-XL, launched in 2013, included beyond its main task several ESA TDPs (Technology Demonstration Payloads). TDP5 includes a Q-/V Band communications experiment to assess the feasibility of these bands for future commercial applications.
The Galileo Project is Europe's initiative for a state-of-the-art global satellite navigation system, providing a highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning service under civilian control. The fully deployed system will consist of 30 satellites and the associated ground infrastructure.
In the early 2000s, more and more satellite missions were planned to collect large amounts of data or to enable broadband communications. At that time, however, only few ground stations…