The spacecraft was designed and manufactured by Boeing on the BSS-601 satellite bus. It had a launch mass of and a mass of at the beginning of its a 15-year design life. When stowed for launch, it measured of height and on its sides. Its solar panels span when fully deployed and, with its antennas in fully extended configuration it is wide. It had two wings with four solar panels each that used dual-junctionGsAssolar cells. Its power system generated 9.9 kW of power at beginning of life and 8.9 kW at the end of its design life and had a 30-cell NiH battery for surviving solar eclipse. Its propulsion system was composed of an R-4D-11-300LAE with a thrust of. It also used had 12 bipropellantthrusters for station keeping and attitude control. For North-South stationkeeping, its primary method was an electric propulsion system with four XIPS 13, with four of the chemical thrusters acting as backup. It included enough propellant for orbit circularization and 15 years of operation. It had two Gregorian antennas and two gridded shaped antennas. Its Ku band payload is composed of twenty four active plus eight spares 36 MHz transponders powered by TWTA with an output power of 108 Watts. It covers North America, Puerto Rico, Alaska, Hawaii and Mexico and is known as Horizons-1. The C band payload had another twenty four plus eight spares 36 MHz transponders powered by 40 Watts TWTA. It covers North America, Puerto Rico, Alaska, Hawaii and Mexico and is known as Galaxy 13, which was used to replace Galaxy 9.
History
Horizons Satellite was originally an equal share joint venture with PanAmSat. On September 4, 2001, it ordered from Boeing its first satellite, Horizons-1/Galaxy 13. It was a spacecraft with 24 C band and 24 Ku band transponders. It had a 10 kW power generation capacity and 15 years of expected life. On the same day of the satellite order, Boeing disclosed that it had received an parallel contract from PanAmSat, where the latter had exercised an existing option to launch Horizons-1 from its Sea Launch subsidiary. It was successfully launched on October 1, 2003 at 4:03 UTC, aboard a Zenit-3SL rocket from the Ocean Odyssey platform stationed at the 154°W over the Equator in the Pacific Ocean. In late 2005 PanAmSat was taken over by Intelsat who continued the joint venture.
