Word: orbitals
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They are not alone. A clutch of new satellite-based services from a half-dozen similar corporate alliances is launching into orbit. They are likely to turn the earth's lower atmosphere into a space jam of communications links promising to keep us in touch--anytime, anywhere. The systems rely on a new version of an old (at least for the aerospace business) and proven technology...
...first to suggest a band of geosynchronous satellites, dubbed "extra-terrestrial relays," hovering 22,000 miles above the equator and bouncing signals back to the ground. Until recently, most communications satellites have imitated that high-cost-and-high-altitude model, drifting in what scientists call the Clarke orbit...
Boosting heavy chunks of metal that high is expensive, however, and Iridium and its brethren are trying to fly into space on the cheap, relatively speaking. They rely on so-called low-earth-orbit satellites that zoom just a few hundred miles above the planet's surface. They're cheaper to launch since they weigh less; and since the satellites are closer to the ground, devices with small antennas and comparatively small battery packs can reach them. Most important, signals can go up and return with no perceptible delay, which is vital for voice communications. But more of them...
...with almost everything else these days, the most promising future growth area for the low-orbit-satellite phone market will be the Internet. If the Net keeps expanding at its current pace, companies figure that demand for digital connections will skyrocket. Currently, firms in the U.S. pay about $1,000 a month for a 1.5 megabit-per-second pipeline to the Internet. Eventually, satellites should be able to provide an equivalent uplink at one-tenth the cost. Some analysts even see rates plummeting to $50 a month in the future...
...Wallace fired himself into a larger orbit, kindling a Confederate defiance in ethnic and blue-collar Middle America. The later Wallace--chastened and penitent--claimed that the uprising was not about race or hate but rather about states' rights and the forgotten middle class. That was partly true; it was also a Vietnam-era class war against draft-dodging, policymaking elites. Wallace pioneered the fed-up anti-Washington line that other politicians, from Nixon to Carter to Reagan, took up and carried into the respectable mainstream. Wallace in a sense expanded American democracy rightward...