In 2003, the contract was changed to allow the addition of more transponders to support the US Government's Geostationary Communications and Control Segment (GCCS) Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), a US Federal Aviation Administration navigation program.

Between 12 and 13 July 2010, it passed Galaxy 13/Horizons-1, a satellite located at 127.0° West which is owned jointly by Intelsat and SKY Perfect JSAT Group.

[24] On 9 December 2010, it was reported that Galaxy 15 had potentially caused an outage to a National Weather Service NOAAPORT feed via SES-1 located at 101 west.

[25] Then on 12 December 2010, the following advisory was issued, A RISK HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED WHEN THE GALAXY 15 ROGUE SATELLITE TRAVERSES THE SES-1 ORBITAL POSITION WHICH MAY RESULT IN A POSSIBLE LOSS OF DATA VIA THE NWS AWIPS SBN/NOAAPORT FEED.

[27] Throughout the failure and drift period of Galaxy 15 status information regarding the continued operation of the two L-Band Wide Area Augmentation System Space Segment transponders once utilized by the FAA for aircraft precision location remained unknown.

These techniques were successfully able to reduce, mitigate and minimize for commercial satellite operations most interference potential during a Galaxy 15 fly by.

[23] This event was originally predicted for late August or early September 2010,[28] then Intelsat revised its estimate to sometime between 28 November and 29 December 2010.

[1] The hypothesis used to calculate the timeline of any potential occurrence of loss of power was imprecise, due to the fact the satellite has experienced erratic loading conditions of radio frequency signals since it began to drift.

[29] Six months after the initial failure date published timelines for shut down proved to be more hopes of a public relations campaign based in theory, and in an interview conducted in October 2010 during the Satcon Conference, both Intelsat & Orbital admitted that the hoped timeline scenario was, in theory and this has been an unprecedented situation, and we are learning as we go.

[30] On 23 December 2010, Intelsat successfully regained control over the satellite after the Baseband Equipment Command Unit reset following a loss of lock and full discharge of the batteries, reportedly the most critical phases of the recovery of Galaxy 15 have been completed.

The emergency command patch which would allow ground controllers to gain access to redundant BBEs in the event of a similar failure in the future had also successfully been applied to Galaxy 15 according to Intelsat.

[2] Galaxy 15 was relocated at 93° West[31][32] in order to conduct further in orbit testing of the viability of the payload and return to service of the satellite.

[citation needed] On 18 August 2022, Intelsat submitted a filing with the FCC requesting permission for the satellite to exceed its station keeping limits, indicating that control had been lost.

[33] On 31 August 2022, the spacecraft muted its transponder payloads, as it was programmed to do automatically in case of loss of ground control (21 days after last command).