Word: globalstar
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Dates: during 1998-1998
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Iridium's chief competition for a piece of this pie-in-the-sky is Globalstar, based in San Jose, Calif. The company, which will build a rival constellation of 48 satellites 879 miles up, was founded by Loral Space and Communications and by Qualcomm, a leader in cellular technology. Its European partners include France Telecom, Daimler-Benz Aerospace and Britain's Vodafone Group. Globalstar's plan is much less expensive than that of Iridium, which has built intelligent satellites that route calls among themselves, sometimes halfway around the planet. That kind of smarts makes for a system that's more...
Coming second is Globalstar's chief drawback. Its service is not scheduled to kick off until 1999--a year behind Iridium's schedule. And this month Globalstar ran into a potentially more serious snag. Minutes after a Ukrainian-built Zenit-2 rocket carrying 12 Globalstar satellites thundered skyward from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sept. 10, its engine failed. The 460-ton rocket fell back to Earth, showering debris across southern Siberia and driving Globalstar's stock down 40% overnight. The $190 million payload was covered by insurance, but the disaster delayed the system's debut even further...
...Modem technology has a habit of improving beyond what anyone thought possible, and satellite's competitors--digital phone lines and cable modems--are getting cheaper and better, making it unlikely that most city dwellers will opt for satellite or blimp connections anytime soon. How well ventures like Teledesic, Globalstar and Iridium will do depends largely on the answer to one question: Are they offering something radically new, or just another incremental feature for an existing technology...
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