ESA to Give New Life to Old Satellites

JPNews writes "The European Space Agency is designing a program (www.esa.int) to re-configure dying television transmission satellites to be used as a XM Radio-like satellite radio network. 'Once in position, 35,000 km away in space, TV satellites will remain in orbit forever, but their useful life amounts to 15 years or less... further life can be squeezed from a low-propellant TV satellite switched over to mobile digital radio broadcasting where precision position control is less important.'"

Comments

I thought...

[meme_police]

...the N-Gage was going to wipe out satellite radio?

Just when you thought it was safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit. Where'd I put my tinfoil hat.

Re:internet

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't want internet access from an elderly satellite that's going to be wobbling all over the place in its orbit after running out of propellent.

I can get just as unreliable access down here on the ground, thanks.

Re:To summarize

[nounderscores]

good points.

One thing: when the battery dies, could you just use the bird when it's in sunlight? what's the orbit period like up there? would you have the content dropping out in the middle of the transmission, or could you hand it off to another old bird that just passed the daylight terminator?

Costs of big programs (semi-OT)

[billstewart]

The Bush Administration would like to spend $200-300B for Gulf War 2. If we spent the money educated a few million scientists, they'd have the ability to do a huge amount of good for society, which won't happen if we spend the money taking people away from productive jobs to bomb other people, or turn a good chunk of US factory production into making missile and tank engines instead of car and Cessna engines. That doesn't even begin to count the costs of the destruction done to Iraq during Gulf War 1.0, or the ~200,000 people killed directly during that part (that was the US government estimate), or the ~500K-2M people who died during the decade of Gulf War 1.1 (UN estimates), mainly from bad water (because we bombed their water systems) or starvation (because the destruction further trashed their economy, as well as killing off a lot of productive people, and because the embargo prevented them from getting medicine or imported food or water system repair parts.

I'd rather have privately-built space stuff, but even blowing the $100B on the space station or a really great fireworks show would be better than blowing it on a war. And if we don't buy college educations for a million or two scientists, we can just as well buy college educations for a million or two liberal arts students so we'll get better literature or at least better-written computer manuals and television shows...