Astrium and EADS North America have jointly announced the creation of Astrium Americas, America's newest space company. A subsidiary of EADS North America, Astrium Americas will bring broad global space capabilities to North America. Astrium Americas will also provide government customers with secure satellite communications services formerly marketed by Vizada, Inc.

"The creation of Astrium Americas as a U.S. company is an important step in better serving our North American customers," said John Schumacher, President of Astrium Americas.

"The space marketplace is increasingly global, and we want to provide U.S. government and private sector customers with the benefits of our commercial approach to providing space capabilities from complete space systems to state of the art satellite services."

Astrium Americas, headquartered in Herndon, VA will provide Astrium's advanced telecommunications, geo-information, space transportation and satellite capabilities specifically tailored to meet the demanding requirements of U.S. and Canadian government customers.

Government telecommunications services will initially be the most prominent activity of Astrium Americas, combining the team and assets from former Vizada Inc., and Astrium Services (formerly Paradigm) solutions. Based in Rockville, Md., the team will work closely with U.S. government and Department of Defense agencies to service the satellite-based communications needs of a wide range of government users and operations worldwide for their most critical missions.

In addition to offering mobile satellite solutions (L-Band services from providers such as Inmarsat, Iridium and Thuraya), it will provide services from Astrium Services' military satellites (X-Band and UHF) plus services from industry leading fixed satellite service providers (in C, Ku and commercial and military Ka-Band).

In the coming weeks, Astrium Americas will provide additional information on its space transportation, geo-information, satellite and hosted payload capabilities.