Bermuda can finally start cashing in on a piece of prized real estate thousands of miles up in space after Government struck a deal to rent the spot out to a satellite operator.The Royal Gazette understands that Government has leased the lucrative spot — which is located at 96.2 degrees west in the geostationary arc some 22,000 miles over the equator — to Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES. The company will create a Bermuda subsidiary to manage the EchoStar 6 satellite which it has hired from US-based company EchoStar.According to the SpaceNews.com website, EchoStar moved the satellite to its new address — now known under an International Telecommunications Union filing as Bermudasat-1 — last month, after signing a contract with SES and Government.The deal, which was agreed just weeks before Bermuda’s reservation on the slot expired, is expected to bring in millions of dollars of revenue, and is the culmination of years of work and legal wrangling by successive administrations to get Bermuda involved in the satellite industry.Government would not respond to The Royal Gazette’srequests for comment yesterday, although Economic Development Minister Grant Gibbons will be making a statement in the House of Assembly on the development tomorrow.But according to SpaceNews, the Bermudasat-1 coverage area “includes the southeast quadrant of the continental United States, the Gulf of Mexico and a large swath of the Atlantic Ocean east of the Caribbean”.“In their FCC [Federal Communications Commission] filing, EchoStar and SES say they intend to use the ageing EchoStar 6 ‘to evaluate and develop new market opportunities in the Caribbean, Latin American and North Atlantic maritime markets’ for video and maritime services broadcasts,” an article on the website said.“EchoStar 6 was launched in 2000. Since 2011, EchoStar has operated it in inclined orbit, a fuel-saving manoeuvre often employed to extend the life of otherwise healthy satellites by no longer stabilising them on their north-south axes. EchoStar earlier had told the FCC that EchoStar 6 would be retired when its operating licence expired in mid-2014.”EchoStar said that apart from its advanced age — it was designed to last 15 years in orbit — EchoStar 6/Bermudasat-1 is in good health. Bermuda has rights to operate 16 broadcast channels from the 96.2 degrees west slot and has a pending application with the ITU to operate all 32 of the satellite’s available channels.”As part of the agreement with the Bermuda Ministry of Economic Development, SES created a subsidiary called SES Satellites (Bermuda) Ltd to develop the Bermudasat-1 business. SES spokesman Yves Feltes said SES views the market as promising but too uncertain to enable the company to commit to a new satellite, at least for now.”The UN designated three satellite slots to Bermuda in 1983, but they remained unused for 20 years. And when the former Progressive Labour Party Government did try to activate the slot in 2003, it ran into a dispute with its space neighbour, the Isle of Man, over possible signal interference.In 2006, Bermuda was brought under the umbrella of Britain’s Outer Space Act, giving the Island the legal framework to attract the satellite industry, and in 2011 Government announced that, with its conflict with the Isle of Man resolved, it would soon be in a position to announce an operator for the Bermuda slot.A further update was provided last July, when then-Infrastructure Strategy Minister Marc Bean said that Government was in negotiations with an unnamed operator to get a satellite into the slot before this year’s deadline.Describing the slot as “one of our most valuable assets”, Mr Bean said: “It is on the top of our priority list. Our view is that this should be attractive to several operators.”Last night Michael Scott, Telecommunications Minister under the former Government, confirmed that Bermuda had been in negotiations with SES Luxembourg since the mid-2000s. SES is the world’s second-largest telecommunications satellite operator by revenue and operates a fleet of 52 geostationary satellites.“We were at pains to have our orbital slot hosted by a reputable operator and were working with SES,” Mr Scott said, adding that he was pleased the deal had finally been signed.