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TerreStar Launches World's Largest Telecom Satellite
An anonymous reader sends news that TerreStar-1, the largest satellite ever made for the purpose of telecommunications, successfully launched earlier this week from a European spaceport. Its launch weight was 6,910 kg, and it is "distinguished by a giant, 60-foot (18-meter) wide S-band antenna that will be unfurled in the coming weeks. Once the satellite's two solar wings are deployed, TerreStar-1 is expected to have a wingspan of about 106 feet (32.4 meters). ... It is designed to provide mobile voice and data communications in North America to smartphone-size handsets using the 2-gigahertz, or S-band, portion of the radio spectrum. The system is designed to function with a network of ground-based signal amplifiers to permit service in areas the satellite cannot reach, such as urban canyons and areas outside the line-of-sight view of the spacecraft." Video and details of the launch are available from the ESA.
Satellites aren't like kotex - they don't have wings. Even drinking Red Bull won't change that.
No. From a South American spaceport. As far as I know there are no spaceports in Europe. Though you *could* call it a French spaceport...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"Run! Run! Run!"
"Beware, coward!" "I hunger!"
LOS will be lost in most of any downtown urban region. Tall skyscrapers eat signals, film at 11. And under bridges. Or inside. Anything beamed from geosyncronous orbit's going to be very weak. How do you think it'll work reaching into a staircase in a 50 story skyscraper? Or in a grocery store? S-Band is the same band WiFi uses, and you need a pringles can to get more than a mile. What do you think the signal attenuation's going to be on something 26,200 miles away? O.o
Yeah. Ground based relay stations. You're gonna need 'em.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
it was cheaper to launch the Earth in the other direction.
Many people are wondering wtf would anyone use this for... and interestingly enough I was just watching a news report that was describing why ranchers out in the middle of nowhere were against the US government's upcoming law that may require them to tag and track every beef cattle during its travel from the birth canal to the slaughter house. Most ranchers said they have no way of uploading tagging and tracking data when out in the middle of their 1000 acre land, and would cause most small beef producers to go out of business because they couldn't be compliant with the law.
Problem solved with this solution. Hand held scanners, satellite based data relays - done.
How can she afford to launch a satellite (for pirate purposes, of course) after being dinged by the RIAA for over a million?
should we care ? this thing has no business need for its services.
ground based cells cover 99% of what everyone wants. for the rest there iridium.
Wow, are thy building cities into cliff faces now? That's so cool!
I thought the United Planets council outlawed Terror Stars. Hmph.
Link to the handset specs (PDF)
windows mobile and assorted normal windows smartphone apps, multiband (with the sat freqs, some GSM freqs, wifi, hifi, lowfi, french fri...), MicroSD, USB, 2.6 inch screen, qwerty keyboard, camera, plays some vids and tunes, etc. Basically a normal smartphone that also can do the satphone gig. No mention of cost or subscription plan cost that I could see on the site (might be there, just not seeing it easy). An interesting device and network idea, a little convergence there.
For a second there, I thought the world's biggest music pirating satellite was launched.
how many HD channels can this sent out?
I thought the geostationary model for satellite phones had finally come to an end... the latency is just too high to comfortably carry on a conversation. The LEO satellite constellations are a much better way to work for a phone, the delays aren't really much more than a cell phone (apparently to the user). I've actually been looking forward to someone doing a LEO constellation for satellite broadband, it could finally make it useful. I've been quite impressed when using the Iridium network. Globalstar though has some work to do yet, too many holes in their constellation.
As others have pointed out though, Satellite alone has some major coverage problems (anywhere sheltered or indoors) but combined with the cell network this could be a powerful tool (though a pretty pricey one I bet!)
beowulf cluster of these and i won't drive off that bridge onto the river again!! enough w/ suicidal GPSes, plz!!
What market do they think they have for this? Unless you are out in the countryside away from any wireless coverage, why would you want to use a geosynchronous satellite? The lag is incredibly annoying. For data connections it won't matter so much, but who has different providers for voice and data?
Unless there is something I am missing, this is concept is DOA.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
NAIS eventually will apply to all livestock, even chickens. A ten cent tag would add considerably to the cost (the labor, plus the cost of the tag, think 25,000 cluckers per house, times many houses, and that's just one farm, with a brand new flock every 8 weeks or so..it would start to add up quick. I have no idea how they would read them fast as they got caught to go to the packing houses either. If you have ever watched how this is done you'd see why). It would wipe out the profit margin there (which usually is a few cents per bird for the grower if everything goes good, and no guarantees anymore what with mass commodities speculation and so forth), which is very slim today, so slim that a lot of the packing houses have closed facilities, it simply cost more to produce than what they can be sold for, and there are only a half a dozen or so big buyers in the US and they dictate the price. It's a cartel that would make the RIAA or MPAA proud...
As to the cattle, with those wild cattle, you have to physically catch each one out there and rope it down or something to install the tag, plus with every calf born, like in the olden days. Lotta work.. then try to get next to the calf later on, close enough to read the tag again? They split, they run like hell, they think they are like wild big deer or something, they are mostly wild, especially the frisky calves. I have a few beefers like that, almost impossible to get them into the barn. Most are OK with coming in to get a little corn, some are just wild, and a severe lack of trained horse here to go do some cowboy thing with a lasso... ;)...don't even know if I could do that, never tried really.. It can take me quite some time to get them all tamed up enough to be regular travelers into and out of the barn. Can't just snap some fingers and say "do it", and if they insist on that and push some huge fine per day or something..screw it, I just won't do it them, wouldn't be possible, couldn't take the chance on getting fined. You don't make very much anyway with this today, prices are abysmal compared to production costs, I know for me it is well below minimum rage if I look at hours worked, minus expenses of all sorts and what is left over. Not really sure how much less a lot of us are supposed to make in this economy and still stay in business, but it got rather dicey some time ago.
There really is no reason to do this tagging-if at all really- until such a point as they are corralled up for transport and delivered to the auction or finishing lots, and they could be tagged there *much* easier once you have a string of them in the chute. And right there you get tied to the critter, so there's your tracking, this is already in place. They slap a number on them as soon as they are off your trailer. That the big processing plants get contaminated and run a million lbs production through without catching it...the tag in the critter will do *nothing* to stop that, not a dang thing, and once the cow is cut up, there's no individual tag per chunk 0 beaste, so they couldn't "track it back" anyway.
The whole idea is either pure dumb (clueless government make work busywork), or pure sinister (create a few big food monopolies), or both, not sure, but it's cuckoo.
Cows are herd animals, it is actually loads easier to move a lot of them at once rather than one at a time. *Loads easier* Doing it out on the range would be a severe PITA, I can see why those big western ranchers are opposed to this when they have to deal with hundreds or thousands of cattle. The whole thing seems like it was thought up by some city dudes who never worked on a farm or ranch and think cows are like big stationary cabbages or something, or are all as tame as old dogs or something, or like berssie the moo cow on some TV commercial. That just isn't the case. Now dairy cows can get pretty tame eventually, they are moved in and out of the milking barn two or three times a day and have close human contact all the time, but beef cattle..nope, the best
According to the European Space Agency (ESA) article, the Ariane 5 ECA was designed to launch a payload up to 9.6 tonnes. The TerreStar 1 weighs 6.91 tonnes leaving about 2.69 tonnes unaccounted for. Anyone know what other satellite was along for the flight?
How could an antenna for frequencies with a wavelength of a few centimeters be 18 meters wide?
This may be the biggest commercial satellite, but 40 years ago we sent space craft weighing a lot more than this to the Moon. The Apollo LM, alone, had a mass of fifteen tonnes. They lobbed the CSM (30 tonnes) to the Moon too.
That was with 1960s technology, though with lots of money to spend.
...laura
Now that the Ion Cannon is up and running, Europe announces formation of the Global Defense Initiative ;)
Next you're going to say that Red Bull does give you wings ... it doesn't ... same as sanitary napkins don't have wings either ... just like the satellite doesn't have a "wingspan".
You could to a limited degree, but the big buyers represent the fast food chains and the supermarkets, something like 95% or better of the market. You just have to have someplace to sell, else no reason to be a grower. Also you have to remember, the farmers/growers don't own the birds, ever, a few producers own that segment of the market (tyson,pilgrims pride, etc, a small handful), they are the ones who negotiate the contracts with the buyers cartels, because all of this is done at mass quantities levels. mass in a HUGE amount. So in other words, there are two cartels over the farmer/grower. The offered cash from any of the packers is roughly identical. The big buyers offer what they offer, that is almost identical all the time.
Farmers/growers grow on a flock to flock contract basis, the baby birds are supplied, the feed is supplied (that costs directly), any other ancillary costs are picked up by the farmer, propane, electricity, water, etc, then they are harvested and you get paid so much for good bird. After expenses..a few pence per bird net profit, if *lucky* and the gods of the market have smiled that month. A lot of times, a net loss.
The producers and packers run the packing plants, which are very expensive to license/build/operate, many millions. A small coop couldn't get up that sort of scratch and would be hard pressed to find anything but a teeny fragmented market.
There are some smaller fully independent growers who have carved out extremely limited little niche markets, but that's about it, and the combination of federal laws and state laws (which vary widely) on how hard this is to do make it quite the challenge. It goes from hard to "OMG, why bother..."
Here's another example about how this has been cartelized. If you go to buy a big farm, you won't even get a loan for it unless you have a contract in hand from some recognized producer/packer, and even if you have it cash, that's no guarantee you'll ever get a contract. You could theoretically pay 10 million cash for a small to medium farm and have some operating expenses in cash and still get stuck with a white elephant if you have no proven market upfront.
Another factor to consider is most big farmers/ranchers mindset..they HATE being organized, they don't like it, say the word union or coop and they want to draw a gun and start talking about hippie environmentalists and go on a rant. I've heard it from too many farmers to ignore, it's just reality, they been brainwashed way beyond the point of rationality about this. They are almost totally opposed to organizing in a cooperative fashion with each other (believe me, I thought of this and have brought it up before, a coop, etc), even if they keep getting screwed into bankruptcy by another "organization", the cartels, which they bitch about all the time. It seems an obvious solution but they simply will not do it, too "hippy" "communist" "socialist" "libruhl", and etc. I know I have to assume artificial redneckerson manners just to maintain in my community, it is camouflage. Bad enough I have a yankee accent...heh
Go figger, I long ago stopped trying to figure it out beyond "Stockholm Syndrome" seems to be hard coded in their psychology. Brainwashed deluxe by the big ag business boys and dudes like rush limbeau, that they listen to, and so on. Anything that seems to make sense "hey, how about doing some small scale alternative energy projects like this here.." NO! THAT HIPPY SHIT DON'T WORK!!
I gave up years ago, ain't worth it. A few are reasonable, most are just too boneheaded and will adopt being screwed over and over again as a lifestyle choice. Anything a few select pols and monsanto and a few other corps tell them, they take as gospel, end of story. Any chemical released is automatically safe as mommas milk. any seed with gene alteration, perfectly safe, never a problem, etc.
You can point out dozens of things taken off the market after the fact of being proven too dangerous, ne