Word: spacenet
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Dozens of NASA clients have been forced to shop around for other launchers. Among the more than 150 scheduled payloads left grounded by the U.S. space agency were satellites owned by GTE-Spacenet, RCA and Western Union, and by communications services in Canada, Britain and Indonesia. Many companies turned to Arianespace, the French-led European space consortium, which quickly booked all its flights through 1989. But the European concern could not take on all of NASA's customers, partly because it can handle only about ten lift- offs a year at its launch pads in the jungles of French Guiana...
...launching fee of up to $40 million each. Since NASA has scrapped that plan, several customers have started shopping around. Western Union was forced to postpone the June trip of its Westar VI, a 24-channel communications satellite designed to replace an older, twelve-channel model. GTE Spacenet had planned to send up its G-Star III, which would relay telephone and television signals, on the shuttle in November. Says C.J. Waylan, the company's president: "We're not abandoning the shuttle, but we're not going to wait inactively either. We have customers to satisfy...
...center at Kourou in the equatorial jungles of French Guiana to an orbit of 22,300 miles above the equator. There the rocket deposited two communications satellites. One of them, like many of Ariane's payloads, was sponsored by an international communications agency. The other satellite, however, was Spacenet 2, the second device that Ariane has carried into orbit for a U.S. customer, in this case General Telephone and Electronics Corp. With a combination of technological prowess and shrewd marketing, Arianespace had won the Spacenet 2 contract away from NASA in the latest round of what promises...
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