Yahsat Brand Guidelines: Al Yah Satellites, Thuraya and the 2024 Space42 Merger

A Mubadala company with its own satellites.

Yahsat is the short name of Al Yah Satellite Communications Company, an Abu Dhabi satellite operator owned by Mubadala, the investment company of the United Arab Emirates. English Wikipedia dates the company to 2007 and gives its incorporation as January 2008, with the aim of running communications satellites for both government and commercial users across Africa, Europe and West Asia. It was later listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, with Mubadala keeping control.

The company ordered its own satellites from the start. In July 2008, English Wikipedia says, it chose a consortium of EADS Astrium and Thales Alenia Space to build its first two spacecraft in Europe. Al Yah 1 was launched on 22 April 2011 on an Ariane 5 from Kourou in French Guiana and placed at 52.5 degrees East, carrying C-band, Ku-band and Ka-band payloads. Al Yah 2 followed in April 2012 on a Proton rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, for the 47.5 degrees East slot.

Television came early too. In 2009 Yahsat and the European operator SES set up a joint venture under the brand YahLive to offer direct-to-home television capacity across the Middle East and North Africa, English Wikipedia says. A third satellite, Al Yah 3, built by Orbital ATK, was launched on an Ariane 5 ECA on 25 January 2018 and placed at 20 degrees West.

Thuraya and mobile satellite services.

The main step before the merger was Thuraya. Founded in 1997 and named after the Arabic word for the Pleiades star cluster, Thuraya runs an L-band mobile satellite network for satellite phones and data terminals, English Wikipedia says. On 5 August 2018 Yahsat, then wholly owned by Mubadala, completed the purchase of a majority and controlling stake, Mubadala announced. SatNews described Thuraya the next day as the UAE’s first home-grown satellite operator, and both reports said the deal took Yahsat into mobile satellite services alongside its fixed satellite business.

Thuraya brought its own satellites and its own history. English Wikipedia says its first satellite, Thuraya 1, was launched by Sea Launch in October 2000 and was used for testing and backup until it was retired in 2007; Thuraya 2 went up from the same sea-based launcher in June 2003 and sits at 44 degrees East, and Thuraya 3 followed in January 2008. Every Thuraya handset carries a GPS receiver, and the network has its own international calling code, +882 16, in the international networks range rather than any one country’s code. English Wikipedia also says that Thuraya 3, at 98.5 degrees East, had a payload anomaly on 15 April 2024 after which coverage in parts of Asia and the Pacific could not be restored and services there were withdrawn. A replacement generation followed: Thuraya 4 was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on 3 January 2025 to take over from Thuraya 2 at 44 degrees East.

By late 2023 Yahsat offered broadband, video broadcasting, backhaul and mobile voice and data services with a fleet of five geostationary satellites and three more spacecraft in the pipeline, SpaceNews reported in December 2023. It was also moving into Earth observation: in May 2023, the same report said, Yahsat and the Emirati geospatial company Bayanat ordered five synthetic-aperture radar satellites from the Finnish operator ICEYE, and the first was launched in August 2024, English Wikipedia says, citing Gulf News.

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.

Satellites and geospatial AI under one name.

The partnership with Bayanat became a merger. On 19 December 2023 the two companies, both listed in Abu Dhabi, announced an all-share combination under the name Space42, SpaceNews reported. Bayanat had been carved out of the UAE Armed Forces by Mubadala more than a decade earlier and was majority owned by the Abu Dhabi artificial-intelligence group G42; under the plan Bayanat shareholders would hold 54% of Space42 and Yahsat shareholders 46%. Karim Michel Sabbagh, a former chief executive of SES, left E-Space to lead the proposed company, the same report said.

The merger was completed in 2024, forming Space42, listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, The National reported in July 2025. With that, Yahsat stopped trading as a separate listed company; its satellites, Thuraya and its services became part of Space42, which The National described in July 2025 as an Abu Dhabi space technology company formed when Yahsat merged with Bayanat. The same report said Space42 had signed a 17-year contract with the UAE government and arranged financing for two new satellites, Al Yah 4 and Al Yah 5, expected to launch in 2027 and 2028 and eventually to replace Al Yah 1 and 2.

The Al Yah and Thuraya names live on as the names of Space42’s satellites, from Thuraya 4 to the planned Al Yah 4 and Al Yah 5.

For a design guide, Yahsat shows how a state-backed operator can build a fleet, buy a mobile network and then fold its own name into a larger group. Compare Inmarsat, another mobile satellite operator, and Arabsat, another operator from the Arab world. For this guide we use a night blue, a dune sand and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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