Mabuhay Satellite Corporation

» see mabuhaysat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Mabuhay Philippine Satellite Corporation was formed on 10 November 1994 to build and operate an international satellite facility for a country that had never had one. PLDT, the dominant telephone company, was behind it. PLDT had also been the largest member of the rival consortium, Philippine Agila Satellite Inc., before breaking away to set this one up, which tells you how small the pool of Philippine capital interested in orbital slots was at the time.

The first satellite the company flew under the Agila name was not new. Palapa B-2P was bought from the Indonesian operator Pasifik Satelit Nusantara and renamed, which made it the first spacecraft owned by a Filipino entity but not the first one built for the job. Agila 2 was the real article: a Space Systems/Loral LS-1300, 3,775 kilograms at launch, 30 C-band and 24 Ku-band transponders.

It went up on 19 August 1997 at 17:50 UTC, on a Long March 3B from Xichang. The rocket mattered as much as the payload. Its maiden flight the year before had gone catastrophically wrong seconds after liftoff, and Agila 2 was the first flight of that vehicle to work. The satellite settled at 146 degrees east and stayed there, run from a control station in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone.

Agila is the Filipino word for eagle, and specifically for the Philippine eagle, which is the national bird and critically endangered. Naming a national communications satellite after it was about as unsubtle as these things get. For twelve years the company was the only one in the Philippines operating a communications satellite at all.

~ the case file ~

~ the slot at 146 east ~

An orbital slot is a scarce and politically awarded thing, and for a middle-income country in the 1990s, holding one was a statement about not renting capacity from your neighbors forever. The coverage Agila 2 delivered was genuinely regional rather than national: C-band reaching from India across to Indonesia and up to Japan, plus a spot beam over Hawaii to carry traffic toward the United States. The Ku-band side covered the Philippines and the coast of China.

That footprint is also why it was worth selling. A satellite that covers a region is an asset in a regional market, and the company flying it was a subsidiary of a telephone operator that had other priorities. On 6 November 2009 PLDT announced it would sell its 67 percent stake to Asia Broadcast Satellite. The terms were not disclosed, and the closing waited on United States regulatory approvals.

~ the subic dish ~

The ground half of the operation was two sites: the Mabuhaysat Subic Space Center as the main hub, with a backup at Zamboanga City. Subic is a former United States naval base turned freeport, so the space center sat inside an economic zone built out of a military withdrawal, which is a reasonably Philippine set of circumstances for a satellite control room to find itself in. None of it reached Turkey while it was happening, and what makes the story datable at all is that Philippine corporate filings are public.

ABS kept the facility and the spacecraft. Agila 2 became ABS-5 in 2009, then ABS-3 in 2011 when it was moved to 3 degrees west, a long way from the slot it had been launched for. It was retired from the geostationary arc in August 2017, after nearly twenty years in service against a design life of fifteen.

~ what was left to rename ~

The company kept existing after the satellite left. On 10 April 2003 the board had already voted to drop "Philippines" from the name, on the grounds that it meant to be an international operator, which in hindsight reads as the first step away from the thing that made it worth founding. After 2009 there was no satellite to operate, and a satellite operator with no satellite is a holding company that has not admitted it yet.

The admission came on 13 January 2012, when the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the amendment to its articles of incorporation and Mabuhay Satellite Corporation became Mabuhay Investment Corporation. Nobody announced a shutdown and nothing went bankrupt. There was a filing, and then a different name doing a different job. The old website at mabuhaysat.com still resolves and answers nothing.

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