Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hughes Aircraft Co. and owned by Telesat Canada, a partly public, partly private Canadian firm, and Satellite Business Systems, formed as a joint venture by IBM, Aetna Life & Casualty Co. and Comsat. Each of the two companies will pay NASA about $9 million to launch its "bird." Once in orbit, the satellites will form links in what is rapidly be coming a vast and complex corporate telecommunications highway 22,300 miles above the surface of the earth...
...reason for the industry's bright business outlook is, in a word, economy. A typical telecommunications satellite can cost up to $75 million to manufacture, launch and monitor while in orbit above the earth. But that expense is small compared with the burdens involved in laying thousands of miles of cable across a continent or even an ocean...
Scrapping over transponders is especially intense among cable television-programming companies, which see the devices as a way to cut costs and gain on the competition. For them, by far the most popular and sought-after transponders are the 24 aboard RCA's Satcom III-R, launched into orbit last November. They can carry two dozen different channels of cable TV programming. The satellite's customers include the pay TV channels Showtime and Home Box Office as well as Warner Amex and Turner Broadcasting System...
...motor from a solid-fuel Minuteman missile. The firm's owners now plan to go into commercial service in 1984, with monthly launches starting two years later. With space technology rapidly advancing and the competition for launches beginning to perk up, prices may start dropping out of orbit long before the satellites do. -By Christopher Byron. Reported by Jerry Hannifin/Washington and Stephen Koepp/New York
...intense family pride, Maj. Brewster H. Shaw Jr. will climb aboard the jewel of America's space program sometime next September for a flight which may be the shuttle's first round-trip voyage--from Cape Canaveral, Fla. and back again. With Brewster finally having his day in orbit after five years in the space program, relatives and friends look to the shuttle with pride and excitement. The overall purpose of the ninth mission will to them to be irrelevant. However, this flight--along with the others, including this week's--will likely neither prove relevant nor exciting to others...