AZERSPACE 2 (IS-38)

AZERSPACE 2 (IS-38) is a geostationary communications satellite operated by the Azerbaijani state space agency Azercosmos. Catalogued by NORAD under identifier 43632 and carrying the international designator 2018-074A, the spacecraft was launched in September 2018 and remains operational in geostationary orbit. The satellite is also designated Intelsat 38, reflecting a dual-management arrangement with international satellite operator Intelsat, and represents Azerbaijan's continued investment in sovereign space infrastructure following its first communications satellite.

Mission and Purpose

The satellite's primary role is telecommunications, providing communications capacity over regions served from its geostationary position. As with most geostationary communications platforms, AZERSPACE 2 is designed to support services such as direct-to-home television broadcasting, broadband internet access, government communications, and corporate data links across its coverage footprint. The dual designation — Azerspace-2 for the Azerbaijani national program and Intelsat 38 under the Intelsat commercial framework — reflects a cooperative arrangement in which Azercosmos manages the satellite's national mission profile while Intelsat participates in the commercial operation and capacity management of the spacecraft.

Azerbaijan's decision to invest in a second national satellite underscores the country's strategic interest in maintaining independent telecommunications infrastructure. Relying solely on leased capacity aboard third-party foreign satellites carries political and commercial risks; owning and operating a dedicated geostationary asset gives Azerbaijan greater control over how bandwidth is allocated across government, broadcast, and civilian networks. The satellite effectively extends and supplements the capacity introduced by the country's first geostationary satellite, expanding the range of services Azercosmos is able to offer domestically and potentially to regional partners and commercial customers.

Although the mission type and current operational status are not formally recorded in the public satellite catalog, the satellite's continued presence in geostationary orbit — more than six years after launch — is consistent with an active, functioning communications platform. Geostationary communications satellites of this mass class are typically designed for service lives of fifteen years or more, meaning AZERSPACE 2 would be expected to remain a working asset well into the 2030s under normal operating conditions.

Orbit and Tracking

AZERSPACE 2 occupies a near-perfect geostationary orbit, one of the most precisely maintained orbital regimes in use today. Its tracked apogee stands at 35,800 km and its perigee at 35,789 km, yielding an extremely circular orbit with a difference of only 11 km between the highest and lowest points of each pass. The orbital inclination is recorded at 0.0°, meaning the satellite travels almost exactly along the equatorial plane, and its orbital period is 1,436.2 minutes — very close to the 24-hour rotation period of the Earth itself.

This combination of altitude, near-zero inclination, and period matching Earth's rotation is what defines geostationary orbit and gives it its practical value for communications. A satellite in such an orbit appears to remain stationary relative to any fixed point on the Earth's surface, allowing ground-based dish antennas to point at a single fixed position in the sky without the need for tracking mechanisms. For broadcast and telecommunications applications, this property is essentially irreplaceable: a single satellite can continuously illuminate a broad geographic region without interruption, making geostationary orbit prime real estate in the electromagnetic and physical sense alike.

The geostationary belt is shared among hundreds of active satellites, and orbital slots — defined by longitude — are regulated internationally through the International Telecommunication Union. The specific longitudinal slot occupied by AZERSPACE 2 is not detailed in the catalog entry, but Azercosmos and Intelsat would have coordinated its placement through established ITU procedures to avoid radio frequency interference with neighboring satellites.

Tracking AZERSPACE 2 through conventional visual observation is not practical. At an altitude of approximately 35,800 km, the satellite is nearly one hundred times farther from Earth's surface than the International Space Station. Objects at geostationary altitude are extremely faint and, because they move synchronously with Earth's rotation, they appear entirely stationary against the star field rather than drifting across the sky the way low-orbit objects do. Specialized optical equipment and careful technique are required to distinguish a geostationary satellite from a background star. For most purposes, radio-frequency monitoring and catalog-based tracking through organizations such as the 18th Space Control Squadron — which maintains the NORAD catalog — represent the only practical means of verifying the satellite's position.

Design and Operator

AZERSPACE 2 was manufactured by Lanteris Space Systems and has a recorded mass of 3,500 kg. This places it firmly in the category of large geostationary communications satellites, comparable in scale to many other high-capacity platforms serving regional and international broadcast and data markets. Satellites of this mass class typically accommodate sizeable solar arrays, substantial onboard propellant reserves for station-keeping over a long service life, and a payload complement capable of operating across multiple frequency bands simultaneously.

The operational responsibility for the satellite rests with Azercosmos, the state-owned enterprise that manages Azerbaijan's national space assets. Azercosmos was established to oversee the development and commercial exploitation of Azerbaijani satellite infrastructure, and the country's geostationary satellites represent its flagship programs. The dual Intelsat 38 designation indicates that Intelsat — one of the world's largest commercial satellite operators — has a management or capacity-sharing role in the satellite's commercial operation, a common arrangement in the industry whereby a national operator partners with an experienced international company to optimize revenue from available transponder capacity.

The satellite was launched on Monday, September 24, 2018, and has been in orbit continuously since. The launch vehicle and launch site are not specified in the catalog record, but geostationary satellites of this mass and era were typically delivered to orbit by heavy-lift launch vehicles capable of reaching geostationary transfer orbit, from which onboard propulsion would have raised the satellite to its final operational altitude.

Significance and Current Status

AZERSPACE 2 holds a noteworthy position in the history of Azerbaijani space development. Azerbaijan is a relatively small country by population and territory, and its decision to develop and operate geostationary satellites places it within a limited group of nations that have independently pursued national satellite programs. For a country in the South Caucasus region, maintaining sovereign telecommunications infrastructure carries particular strategic weight, providing resilience against dependency on foreign systems for broadcasting, data transmission, and government communications.

The satellite's dual identity as both a national Azerbaijani asset and a unit within the Intelsat fleet illustrates a broader trend in the geostationary communications industry, in which national programs and commercial operators increasingly collaborate. Such arrangements allow smaller national operators to benefit from the procurement expertise, established orbital slot portfolios, and global distribution networks of major commercial players, while the commercial partners gain additional orbital assets and geographic reach.

With NORAD catalog ID 43632 and international designator 2018-074A, the satellite is actively tracked as part of the broader catalog of Earth-orbiting objects maintained by the United States Space Force. Its continued presence in the catalog with no decay or reentry date recorded confirms that as of the time this article was compiled, the satellite had not been decommissioned, deorbited, or lost. Geostationary satellites that reach the end of their operational lives are typically moved to a slightly higher "graveyard" orbit above the geostationary belt rather than being deorbited into the atmosphere, a practice that preserves the valuable geostationary zone from debris accumulation while disposing of the aging spacecraft safely.

Given the 3,500 kg mass and the typical engineering margins built into satellites of this generation, AZERSPACE 2 carries onboard propellant budgeted for years of north-south and east-west station-keeping maneuvers — the continuous small thruster firings required to counteract gravitational perturbations from the Moon and Sun and maintain the satellite's assigned orbital slot to within a fraction of a degree. When that propellant is eventually exhausted, the satellite will likely be raised to a graveyard orbit, formally ending its service life.

For Azerbaijan and Azercosmos, AZERSPACE 2 represents not only a functioning telecommunications asset but also a tangible expression of national technological ambition and the institutional knowledge gained through operating complex space infrastructure over a sustained period.