Word: intelsat
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...ELEPHANT THAT IS spinning overhead by grabbing onto three makeshift handholds the size of soup cans. Then consider performing this feat swaddled in a 255-lb. rubber suit, suspended in midair, with no net. It , was a comparable challenge that confronted the Endeavour astronauts last week when they rescued Intelsat, a 4.5-ton 17-ft.-long telecommunications satellite, from its useless orbit 230 miles above the earth. In a record 8-hr. 29-min. space walk, with the world rolling by beneath them, Commander Pierre Thuot, Richard Hieb and Lieut. Colonel Thomas Akers wrestled the satellite into the shuttle...
...satellite in distress is Intelsat-6, designed to carry international telephone traffic. It was launched in 1990 but was stranded 345 miles up -- about 22,000 miles short of its assigned orbit. The astronauts will pull the 4.5-ton satellite into the shuttle's cargo bay, strap a booster rocket onto it and send it on its way. Then four of them will suit up and go outside to try out construction techniques that will be used on the U.S. space station, Freedom, scheduled to be built by the late 1990s. They will also test the "astrorope," a device astronauts...
When a $150 million communications satellite was stranded in space last week, the fledgling U.S. commercial launch business may have been set adrift with it. Owned by Intelsat, a Washington-based consortium of 118 countries, , the satellite, which was to handle phone calls and television transmissions, failed to separate on schedule from its booster and tumbled into a useless low orbit. Though Intelsat technicians managed to lift it a bit higher, the five- ton payload nonetheless seemed destined to plunge back to earth within a few months, unless NASA can arrange a rescue by the space shuttle...
Rescue or no, the mishap dealt a blow to all three U.S. companies that build rockets for commercial use. Martin Marietta, which made the booster for the Intelsat mission, had completed its first successful launch in December but may now have to delay plans for a second Intelsat lift-off this summer. The episode could also tarnish McDonnell Douglas, which carried out a commercial launch last year and has nine more on order, and General Dynamics, whose first venture is planned for June. The three aerospace giants entered the commercial field after former President Ronald Reagan took the U.S. Government...
...Marietta and Ariane incidents may drive the already prohibitive cost of launch insurance even higher. Insurers typically charge up to 30% of the combined value of a satellite and rocket, which would have brought the premiums for last week's mission to nearly $50 million. Faced with that bill, Intelsat set up a self-insurance fund to absorb the cost of the failure...