Arabsat Brand Guidelines: The Arab League’s Riyadh Operator and Its Badr Satellites

Twenty-one states and one headquarters.

Arabsat is the short name of the Arab Satellite Communications Organization, a satellite operator set up by the states of the Arab League and headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. English Wikipedia traces the idea to 1967, when the information ministers of Arab states agreed a set of principles for a shared satellite network, and to the founding of the Arab States Broadcasting Union in 1969.

The organisation itself dates from 1976. Arab News, in a 2020 history of the Arab world’s space age by the astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum, gives the date as 14 February 1976 and says it was founded by 21 member states of the Arab League; English Wikipedia gives 14 April 1976, so we note both dates. Both sources say Saudi Arabia was its main funder and that Riyadh became its home.

Its ownership is shared among governments. English Wikipedia says every Arab League state except the Comoros is a shareholder. Both sources give Saudi Arabia 36.7% and Kuwait 14.6%, together slightly more than half, with the rest spread across the other member states; English Wikipedia lists Libya, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan as the next largest holders. English Wikipedia describes its purpose as delivering public and private telecommunications services to the Arab states, and Arab News says it became known mostly for satellites carrying hundreds of television and radio channels across the Middle East, much of Africa and Europe.

From Arabsat-1A to Badr-8.

The first generation was built by an international team led by Aérospatiale of France, English Wikipedia says. Arabsat-1A was launched on an Ariane rocket from French Guiana on 8 February 1985; it suffered a solar-panel malfunction soon after launch, was kept as a backup and was abandoned in late 1991. Arabsat-1B followed on 17 June 1985 aboard the American space shuttle Discovery, and Arab News records that it was deployed by the Saudi astronaut Prince Sultan bin Salman, the first Arab in space. Arabsat-1C was launched in February 1992 as a stop-gap until a second generation was ready.

That second generation also came from Aérospatiale, under a contract signed in April 1993; Arabsat-2A and 2B were launched in July and November 1996, and in 2002 the organisation leased two more satellites, one of them the former Hot Bird 5 from Eutelsat, English Wikipedia says. The third generation brought a new name: Badr-3, technically Arabsat-3A, was launched on an Ariane 4 on 26 February 1999.

Later generations used the Eurostar platform of Astrium. English Wikipedia records that the first fourth-generation satellite, Arabsat-4A, was lost to a launcher failure, and that its replacement, Badr-6, was launched on an Ariane 5 on 7 July 2008, after Badr-4 in November 2006. The fifth generation followed in 2010 and 2011: Badr-5, launched on a Proton to the 26° East position used for direct-to-home television, then Arabsat-5A and 5C. Badr-7 was launched on an Ariane 5 in November 2015, and Arabsat-6A on 11 April 2019 on a Falcon Heavy, the rocket’s first commercial launch, Arab News says.

The seventh generation is split between two builders. SatNews reported in August 2020 that Airbus would build Badr-8 on its Eurostar Neo platform, the first seventh-generation Arabsat satellite and, according to Airbus, its first Eurostar Neo for Arabsat after six earlier Eurostar satellites, with an optical communications payload on board. English Wikipedia dates its launch, on a SpaceX Falcon 9, to 27 May 2023, and records an April 2022 contract with Thales Alenia Space for Arabsat 7A on its software-defined Space Inspire platform.

Design and documentation.

Satellite operators sell something nobody can see. The product is capacity on a spacecraft tens of thousands of kilometres away, so the pictures have to stand in for it, and over six decades the industry has settled on a small, recognisable set of images.

The first is the satellite itself, usually a render rather than a photograph: a box wrapped in gold-coloured foil, solar panels spread wide, hanging against the black of space with the blue curve of the Earth below. The second is the ground. Dishes at a teleport, often shot at dusk with the sky turning orange behind them, show that the network has a physical home, and control rooms full of screens show the people who run it.

The third is the map. Coverage maps, beam footprints and orbital diagrams turn an abstract service into something a buyer can point at, and many operators use them as decoration as much as information, with glowing arcs and honeycomb spot beams laid over a darkened globe. Launch-day photographs supply the drama: a rocket on the pad, then a column of flame, then a mission patch.

Finally there are the users. Because so much of the business now serves people on the move, operators show cruise ships and cargo vessels at sea, airliners above the clouds and passengers with laptops in the cabin, alongside soldiers, broadcasters and remote villages. The same visual vocabulary fills the stands at trade shows such as SATELLITE in Washington, DC, and CABSAT in Dubai, where operators compete for attention with models of their spacecraft, wall-sized coverage maps and screens of live footage. Within that shared language, colour, type and naming do most of the work of telling one operator from another.

Three positions over the Arab world.

Arabsat’s fleet is grouped at a few orbital positions. English Wikipedia says that in January 2023 the organisation owned eight operational satellites at 20°, 26° and 30.5° East, with four Badr satellites clustered at 26° East, and lists direct-to-home television, backbone links for broadband and telephony, satellite internet and VSAT networks among its services. In that list the two names run side by side: the Badr satellites sit at 26° East, while those at 20° and 30.5° East carry the Arabsat name and a generation letter.

Its record also includes a trade dispute. In June 2020 a World Trade Organization panel report, in a case brought by Qatar against Saudi Arabia over the pirate sports channel beoutQ, found that the channel had been carried on frequencies transmitted by Arabsat, and endorsed a 2019 French court decision to the same effect, Advanced Television reported on 17 June 2020. The report’s findings were directed at Saudi Arabia’s obligations under the TRIPS agreement on intellectual property.

Arabsat is an intergovernmental body owned by the governments of its member states. Its fleet has been built mostly by European manufacturers — Aérospatiale, Astrium, Airbus and Thales Alenia Space — and launched on European, Russian and American rockets, from the Ariane and Proton to the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.

For a design guide, Arabsat shows how an intergovernmental operator can build a brand from two names — the organisation and the Badr satellites — across five decades. Compare Yahsat, another Gulf satellite operator, and Eutelsat, whose former Hot Bird 5 satellite Arabsat leased in 2002. For this guide we use a Gulf teal, a night ink and a desert gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Arabsat’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.