Three American companies and one Italian company were in the $1.3 billion joint venture, which included: The original plan was to have launched the first satellite in 2002 with the three subsequent satellites launched at six months intervals.
[1] Customers for the system were envisioned to be “multinational corporations and government, and small to medium enterprises”.
[2] The program was intended to work together with Motorola in order to create ground-based infrastructure for the satellite communications network in order to provide full ground and satellite services to customers.
[5] According to a report by the aviation magazine FlightGlobal, Astrolink likely failed due to a downturn in the communications satellite market that made the plan nonviable.
According to the Lockheed Martin Space Systems president Pete Kujawski, Astrolink would have allowed customers to purchase only throughput they needed rather than a much wider throughput, allowing clients to transmit data more affordably.