Telstar 4 is Down

An anonymous reader writes "Sometime this morning (Sept. 19) Telstar 4 had a major onboard failure. I just checked a few minutes ago and there are CW carriers up on 11700 MHz V & 12200 MHz H, so the spacecraft would appear to still be in its orbital slot - just no traffic. The Loral Skynet site has no mention of this yet, but supposedly Telstar 8 was already scheduled to replace T4, so they may just speed the process up. This turn of events will no doubt be of some small concern to Intelsat, who recently agreed to purchase most of Loral's US domestic fleet, including T4."

Comments

Re:Effect ?

[afidel]

The last time a Telstar satelite went out of alignment about 3/4ths of the credit card processing in the US went offline. Many banks and gas stations relay their CC processing through transpoders on one of the Telstar satelites instead of dedicating a phone line on each end of the connection. It looks like T-4 is used by ABC and CBS for network programming. See This for more info.