Never mind the pager problem. Hughes Space and Communications Co., which launched the satellite that resulted in last week’s near-total pager blackout, has more business than it knows what to do with.

And despite the major mishap, which resulted from the failure of both the satellite’s on-board control mechanism and its backup, demand is not likely to slow.

In fact, the increasing dependence on satellites for television transmissions and telecommunications has resulted in a backlog of 42 satellites on order with 13 of those scheduled for launch by the end of the year. There currently are 65 satellites in orbit.

The increase in orders at Hughes one of the last surviving pieces of L.A.’s once-massive aerospace industry has forced the company to raise its output from one satellite a month the last few years to a total of 16 this year.

That output might be further stepped up possibly to 24 a year at the end of this decade, said Jeffrey E. Grant, a Hughes vice president, during a recent tour of the company’s El Segundo satellite plant.

To meet increasing demand, Hughes has been staffing up. It employs about 7,500 engineers, managers and other workers today, up from about 5,000 in mid-1995.

Paul Nisbet, president of Newport, R.I.-based research firm JSA Research Inc., said Hughes is on a roll in satellite orders.

“They won all competitions during the first quarter for this year for satellites, and received $1.3 billion in orders, which increased their backlog to $4.6 billion,” Nisbet said, adding there is little to indicate that demand will not continue to ramp up.

“For a while, it looked like the Far East (economic problem) would have stronger reverberations on the world economy than it did,” he said. “It’s not enough to put much of a dent in the outlook for Hughes.”

Neither is last week’s incident on the Galaxy IV the first satellite in Hughes’ 37-year history of building and launching satellites to completely fail after deployment.

“We’re looking at everything because we have not seen this kind of error,” said Diana Ball, a Hughes spokeswoman. “We’ve got something on the order of 900 years of in-orbit experience. For this kind of thing to happen is incredibly unusual.”

In fact, the company’s satellites have delivered an average operational lifetime that is 150 percent of their contracted service lives meaning most satellites continue to operate well beyond their expected lifetimes.

Late last week, PanAmSat Corp. was working to move two other satellites into proper orbits to compensate for the services lost as a result of Galaxy IV’s failure. Greenwich, Conn.-based PanAmSat is 80 percent owned by Hughes Electronics Corp., also the parent of Hughes Space and Communications.

PanAmSat owns and operates Galaxy IV, as well as other communications satellites. It then leases transponder space to pager companies, broadcasters and others.

James Reynolds, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, said communications satellites are typically heavily insured, meaning that both Hughes and PanAmSat are financially protected. Furthermore, Hughes’ stellar reputation will protect it from being marred by one such incident, he said.

“Their satellites have been very reliable. It’s really a non-event for Hughes,” Reynolds said. “This is part of the business, but it’s rare that they lose a satellite for good once it’s in orbit. Getting it in orbit they have a much higher failure rate, but once they’ve been in orbit, they’ve been pretty good.”

In fact, Reynolds said, the failure of the PanAmSat satellite will likely result in even more business.

“Hughes will get to build another satellite for them,” he said.

Given the backlog in orders, it may take a while.

Earlier this year major upgrades were made to the Hughes plant, which is as big as 12 football fields and housed in the same building where Nash automobiles were assembled in the 1940s. The upgrades included a new thermal stress chamber, and a new thermal vacuum chamber where two satellites can be tested at once. In the chambers, satellites are tested for the extreme heat and cold and oxygen-free conditions to which they will be exposed in orbit.

The testing equipment including the new double-capacity vacuum chamber, which looks much like a metal-walled aircraft hangar, but with a 105-ton sliding metal door across its front is among the most advanced high-tech equipment at the plant.

That’s because testing is the most important part of satellite assembly. At least three months of testing is performed on each satellite, Grant said.

“We build one, and now it’s got to last 10 to 15 years. There’s no other company I know that does that. One of the ways we do that is through a lot of testing,” Grant said.

Another way is by installing redundancies. For example, if 18 transponders are needed on a particular satellite, Hughes might install 24. “We play the statistics, depending on what it is,” Grant said.

Considering the durability and longevity of Hughes’ satellites, they are surprisingly light and delicate. Each additional pound adds about $30,000 to the cost of getting a satellite into orbit.

The actual computer equipment that makes up much of the payload is not protected by a metal box such as a desktop personal computer might be but is covered by thin thermal blankets of materials such as Kevlar, the same material used in bulletproof vests. The material protects the payload from the heat produced during the satellite’s rocket launch into space.

One drawback to making the satellites so lightweight is that their most crucial elements are fragile and exposed. For example, the motor that connects the satellite’s wing-like antennas to the satellite itself is about the size of a tennis ball.

“You can literally put your hand around it,” said Wil Bertram, a senior staff engineer with Hughes and one of the factory’s managers. “These mechanisms are very delicate.”