Raytheon's selection of a commercial telecommunications satellite owned by SES of Luxembourg to host a GPS augmentation payload for the U.S. government means that two of the three satellites providing GPS corrections and GPS error notifications will be Boeing all-electric satellites. The SES-15 satellite, now under construction by El Segundo, California-based Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems, is scheduled for launch in 2017 and to operate at 129 degrees west in geostationary orbit. Tewksbury, Massachusetts-based Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems, the prime contractor for the GPS augmentation system, called Wide-Area Augmentation System, or WAAS, and SES agreed to a three-phase contract. The first phase starts now, with the satellite's construction by Boeing, and continues for three years to satellite integration, final testing and a mid-2017 launch plus the six to eight months it will take for the all-electric spacecraft to climb to its final geostationary position.
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