XTAR LLC is a satellite communications company headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, with offices in Madrid, Spain and Palo Alto, California. It is a joint venture between Loral Space & Communications, which owns 56 percent, and HISDESAT, which owns 44 percent. The company is the first U.S. commercial provider of services in the X-band frequency, and specializes in providing customized X-band communications services exclusively to U.S. and Allied governments worldwide, in support of military, diplomatic and security communications requirements.[1]
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XTAR owns and operates the XTAR-EUR satellite, located at 29 degrees East longitude, and offers additional X-band capacity on XTAR-LANT, a payload on HISDESAT's SPAINSAT satellite located at 30 degrees West longitude. Together, these unique X-band satellites represent the emergence of a new offering in government communications services. The XTAR satellites were designed and built by private financing.
XTAR shares support resources with Loral Skynet, allowing each to cross-market satellite capacity and services to governments around the world. Loral Skynet Government Services and Network Operations Center is located in Rockville, Maryland.
On October 5, 2007, Loral Space & Communications, Inc., and the Public Pension Investment Board of Canada received the final regulatory approval necessary to complete the acquisition of Telesat from BCE Inc. for CAD $3.25 billion. The acquisition closed on October 31, 2007, with Loral owning 64 percent of Telesat.
At the same time, Telesat Canada merged with Loral Skynet, a subsidiary of Loral Space & Communications. This resulted in the transfer of all of the assets of Loral Skynet to Telesat.
On 5 November 2007, XTAR announced that it had received a new contract from the US General Services Administration. The contract has an unlimited spending ceiling and may be used by any federal, state or local agency to acquire XTAR's high-powered X-band bandwidth and services.
Intelsat has leased 16 MHz of X-band capacity on the XTAR-LANT payload[2]