Sat-ND, 16.9.1997 – Bedtime for Bonzo
Today's Headlines
The International Telecommunications satellite Organisation (Intelsat) has announced a major re-deployment scheme for several of its satellites following an anomaly in Intelsat 605's telemetry.
According to Intelsat, its 605 spacecraft (24.5° West) experienced a deficiency of telemetry which may eventually affect Intelsat's ability to monitor the satellite in a normal operational manner. There is no effect on the traffic carried on the satellite and none is anticipated, the organisation said in a press release.
A new deployment plan has been developed as a precautionary measure. The 605 spacecraft will continue to be operated at 24.5 degrees West until the new deployment plan is implemented. Customers on the 605 spacecraft will be transferred to the Intelsat 603 spacecraft when it assumes its operational role as noted below.
An Intelsat VIII will be deployed to 27.5° West to release Intelsat 601.
Intelsat 601 will be relocated to 34.5° West to release Intelsat 603.
Intelsat 603 will be relocated to 25.5° West to replace Intelsat 605.
Intelsat 605 will be relocated to perform a new operational role.
[I admit I should visit the "news releases" section of Intelsat's Web site more often. So, this piece of news actually was a few days old. The following one, however, is not – it contains details published by Intelsat today.]
Intelsat successfully increased capacity in the Pacific Ocean Region (POR) by transferring services from Intelsat 701 to the newly deployed Intelsat 802 at 174°E and relocating the 701 to replace the older Intelsat 511 at 180°E.
Intelsat 802 became fully operational at 174°E on 24 August, 1997, after a flawless transition of services from the 701 satellite. More than 700 digital carrier services were transferred, using the Pass-in-the-Night technique (Pin). The 802 satellite has a total of nearly 800 MHz more C-band capacity than the 701 because of six-times frequency re-use, rather than four. in addition, the Intelsat 802 has been put into operation in inverted mode, allowing the beam shape to be better tailored to the region.
"With the Intelsat 802 satellite service transfer complete, Intelsat was pleased to be able to relocate the 701 to the important 180°E location," according to Mr. Sung Lee, Manager of the Technical Operations Control Center (TOCC) for the Pacific Region. "All services were successfully transferred from the 511 to the 701 satellite without any interruption on 3 September 1997, using the more difficult Pointover technique. This type of transition was required because the two satellite orbits are quite different."
Being a much newer and more powerful satellite than the Intelsat 511, the 701 is an ideal satellite to meet East-West connectivity requirements, plus growing demand for Ku-band business services and satellite News Gathering (SNG). The Intelsat 701 has three Ku-band spot beams, instead of the conventional two, so that it permanently covers both Asia and the west coast of the U.S., while the third beam can be temporarily relocated anywhere in the POR.
End customers have already noticed a difference in the region. According to David Haigh, owner of Southern Cross satellites in Australia, "The Intelsat 802 and 701 have greatly increased picture quality and coverage of the South Pacific, and we are happy that the stability of these satellites means tracking is not required. We have found that their signal strength is as good or better than that of Panamsat 2 here in Sydney."
[I apologise for reprinting almost the complete press release, but I do find the technical details interesting.]
There's no news on the fate of NASA's Lewis satellite that started spinning for unknown reasons three weeks ago. As reported, the spacecraft was automatically shut down because its solar panels did not generate sufficient energy anymore.
The ground controllers' strategy so far was wait and see – there was (and is) the hope that the on-board batteries may have been recharged as the sun shines on the satellite at more favourable angle now. However, time is now running out.
NASA spokesman Doug Isbell said.that Lewis should continue orbiting until at least Sept. 23 at a height of 300 kilometres above Earth. Without any further intervention, it would then start to come down slowly under the influence of the Earth's gravity and finally be incinerated when re-entering the atmosphere. [Hopefully, in that case – I don't really want it to come down in my garden.]
Currently, NASA tries to re-establish contact to Lewis via its Tracking and Data Relay satellite System. Should communications be restored, the satellite's thrusters will be fired in an attempt to stop the spinning. Subsequently, nonessential systems will be shut down to save power.
Should all this be to no avail, there will be questions raised on the new technologies NASA wanted to test with this TRW-built satellite – among them the automated operations mode the spacecraft was in when it started spinning.
Russian Mission Control says the Mir space station has avoided a collision with a U.S. military satellite that reportedly appeared out of nowhere.
News agencies said that the satellite was not in its expected orbit when it passed Mir at a distance of just 470 metres. Of course, Mir itself was not quite on track following the well-known problems with its main computer.
Deputy flight director Viktor Blagov played the incident down: "Many clumps of metal are flying in space. Every time an object Gets closer than 1.5 kilometres to our station we ask cosmonauts to go to Soyuz just in case. It happens on a regular basis and is not linked with Mir's computer problems."
However, those of you with a more imaginative nature might want to read Sat-ND, 7.11.96. However, as I strongly hope you do not not collect this garbage, here are the main points again.
A report in the science magazine "New Scientist" indicates that the USA may have found a "secret" orbit to hide their spy satellites in. At least, that's what some enthusiast satellite trackers think after the mysterious disappearance of four U.S. satellites within a period of just a few weeks back in 1990, [...] the year of the Gulf war. Observers don't believe they simply went out of order for several reasons. First of all, they would have been left in their current orbit. And then, sooner or later, U.S. Congress members would have complained about wasting money for malfunctioning satellites even if those spacecraft were destroyed.
Well, somebody had to have this idea sooner or later, especially as it's not that new. According to the New York times, U.S. space shuttles may soon capture old satellites and bring them back to Earth for refuelling.
At least that's what James C. Adamson, chief operating officer of the United space Alliance, the company that NASA has put in charge of running the space shuttles. United space is a joint venture of the Boeing Co., the shuttle's maker, and the Lockheed Martin Corp., a major shuttle contractor.
in October, the United space Alliance is to present the National Aeronautics and space Administration a detailed plan for privatising the shuttles. A main agenda item is the return of shuttle flights and services to commercial missions. commercial payloads like communication satellites were banned from the spaceships after the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Privatisation would save U.S. taxpayers almost the annual budget of US$3.15 billion. The shuttles could launch commercial satellites just as they did until 1986, but they would be unique in their ability to bring back spacecraft from low-Earth orbits. You may still remember the spectacular rescue action for an Intelsat satellite that got stuck before it could be transferred to a geostationary orbit.
If the shuttles "bring a lot of these dead birds back" for refurbishing, Adamson said, they could be returned to work in space and his company would make a tidy profit. However, there may not be too much business in that – Low Earth orbit satellites, especially the next-generation of them such as Iridium, Teledesic, etc. may not be worth the effort of refurbishing. They're designed as cheap mass products anyway. It may be different with advanced "Earth observation" satellites, and in that case, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office might be highly interested.
EchoStar Communications Corporation announced that EchoStar III, their first A2100 direct broadcast satellite from Lockheed Martin Telecommunications, has arrived at Cape Canaveral Air Station, Florida for launch.
Pending satellite final test and check-out, fuelling and final mating and check-out activities with the launch vehicle, EchoStar III will be launched on a Lockheed Martin Atlas IIAS rocket. EchoStar has requested a launch date of October 6, 1997 and is awaiting range approval from Cape Canaveral Air Station.
EchoStar III is the company's third Lockheed Martin-built satellite and the first A2100 to be completed in Lockheed Martin's new commercial satellite Centre in Sunnyvale, California. The A2100 is Lockheed Martin's latest commercial satellite offering and the most powerful commercial communications satellite available today.
EchoStar III, to be located at 61.5 degrees West Longitude, will include programming complementary to that offered by the DISH Network on EchoStar I and EchoStar II, including expanded educational and business television. The programming line-up has the potential to include international and niche channels, data delivery applications and re-transmission of local channels to select large markets. [Still pending regulatory approval.]
Canada's Financial Post has published a lengthy article last Saturday that is highly critical of ExpressVu, the country's new digital TV service. Titled "Satellite TV gets lost in space", the paper stated that "ExpressVu has launched its service, but its airy promises may turn out to be pie in the sky."
There's probably no way ExpressVu President Michael Neuman can reach his aim to "put a dish on every home in Canada" as even in the U.S., Direct-to-Home (DTH) TV is at best a niche competitor with cable. "In its present form, DTH will appeal to only a small segment of the population," the paper stated. "At the same time, the DTH companies will continue to face competition from the U.S. grey market, in particular DirecTV, which now offers more channels than Star Choice or ExpressVu, although almost none of them are Canadian."
Satellite television dealers were quoted as saying U.S. systems remain more popular than the Canadian services. Customers were also interested in ExpressVu's and Star Choice's lowest-priced set-top boxes, but neither of them are available.
ExpressVu so far has attracted some 2,000 customers most of which are former former Tee-Comm subscribers. Tee-Comm's AlphaStar's Canadian and U.S. services went into receivership recently. The paper estimated that "the potential DTH market is probably no more than four million households, including 2.1 million that could subscribe to cable but don't, either because they don't watch much television, can't afford it, or are in areas where conventional television antennas will pick up enough channels to satisfy them."
To meet the growing demand for digital set-top boxes, the Finnish company Nokia announced a contract with SCI Systems, Inc, a U.S.-based electronics manufacturer, to have its Mediamaster set-top boxes produced there.
The Mediamaster is currently manufactured only in Motala, Sweden. According to Nokia, the plant there was running 24 hours a day. Heikki Koskinen, president of Nokia Multimedia Network Terminals, said "This agreement with SCI means that we are increasing significantly our production capacity for digital multimedia terminals."
Recently, Nokia announced the launch of its Mediamaster 9600 S which it claims is the world's first digital satellite receiver with a common interface. Such set-top boxes allow the reception of different digital platforms. No surprise that, for instance, Spain's Via Digital has placed a major order last June – Spanish legislation requires digital services to be receivable with just one set-top box.
And so, the demand for Nokia's boxes is not really generated by the public but by companies who order, say, one million of those gadgets at a time. Just like Germany's Leo Kirch, who probably has still to get rid of more than 900,000 of Nokia's d-boxes he ordered earlier.
Wanna claim your stake on Mars? A U.S. company is currently selling the planet by square miles.
Marcello Berengo Gardin has forwarded me a junk mail that promotes a Web site which offers not only that for just 30 bucks (i.e., "a beautiful 11 inch by 14 inch parchment Certificate of Deed Registration staking a claim for 1 square mile of prime Martian real estate on the Planet MARS!") but also coffee mugs ("Our Polar-Cap White Mug is guaranteed to reflect more than 97% of incoming laser radiation {visible wavelengths only; IR, UV, and X-Ray laser results may vary – Gamma ray laser results unknown at this time.})"
Well yeah, how funny. The site is f**kingly – I mean, painstakingly slow and full of frames, Marcello writes. I myself could not access it at all. Fortunately! By the way: your claims will be "presented to a legitimate government on Mars when such a government is established." I guess this will take quite some time, probably more than you and I have.
Visit Mars at http://www.martianconsulate.com/ or Marcello's home page at http://www.satellite.it/
Yours truly recently wondered "why [Deutsche Welle TV] hired news readers for their English service who had such a ghastly American accent. Come on, you're not CNN, just an international broadcaster, wasting German tax payers' money while you don't have much to say. Yawn! Vooldn't it be much funnier if zey hat a Cherman accent?]"
Oh no! They read me. At least, one of them. How embarrassing. Philip Crookes (not an employee at DW, just a freelance, as he says) wrote:
"As one of the news people concerned, tho' without the American accent, it's an issue of audiences. Our viewers (yes, we do have them) will accept North American and British / Australian / New Zealand accents, and our viewing figures respond to that."
[Oh well, so it's every kind of accent there to keep anybody on Earth happy from time to time? I don't know what other viewers think but that definitely confuses me, even though I don't belong to the targeted audience.]
"As far as I know, we don't try to be, or beat, CNN. What we do try to do is to be an alternative voice presenting world and German news to the international audience, something that no-one else is prepared to do."
[Let's hope so as domestic German media, including the commercial ones, have a slightly different understanding of news than most other democratic countries have. Domestic news usually consist of up to 90 percent of politician's blurb and are definitely more a ritual than a source of information. The rest comprises the usual merry mixture of spectacular car accidents, plane crashes, the latest news on Mad Cow Disease <Mooo!> and the weather report.]
"Or would you prefer that all international reporting is mediated by the media monopolies of Time-Warner (CNN), Microsoft (NBC), Rupert Murdoch and the BBC?"
[Even though... no, just because this is a rhetorical question, let me answer it in a provocative way: why not? Do you really think Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates control the output of their media companies in detail? Good heavens, they've got far better things to do than that, i.e. counting their money. Mr Murdoch's news channel Sky News is, as far as I know, produced by Financial Times TV, while Mr Gate's MSNBC relies fully on NBC's news resources and has no intentions to muddle with its contents anyway. And Time-Warner's CNNI offers international broadcasters quite some space for their views, maybe even DW-TV.]