Word: westar
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...moment, however, NASA'S attention was more pressingly diverted. Just eight hours into the flight, Mission Specialist Ronald McNair, 33, a physicist making his first flight, successfully sent Western Union's $75 million Westar VI spinning out of Challenger's big cargo bay. But soon all contact with Westar, built by Hughes Aircraft, was lost. Its transmitters were silent. Ground-based trackers could not tell whether its booster, which was to have propelled it into a geostationary "parking place" 22,300 miles above the equator, had misfired or some onboard electronics had failed. Desperately trying to bring...
...failure immediately confronted NASA with the question of whether it should go ahead with the launch of Westar's twin, Indonesia's Palapa B2, scheduled for the next day. Palapa is to be used as a telecommunications link between the 13,677 islands of the sprawling Indonesian archipelago. At week's end, NASA decided to postpone the launch at least for a day while ground controllers probed the Westar accident. If Indonesia requested a deferral until a later mission, the shuttle would have to bring the satellite back to earth. The added weight would speed the shuttle...
...possible hitch for TNN is that it is beamed from Westar V, a relatively new satellite that is picked up by fewer cable operators than RCA's Satcom III-R. With its almost 40 hours of original programming a week, TNN will have its hands full keeping production costs down. Still, country and cable seem like a good match. For one thing, they share the same rural roots. Indeed, an advertising slogan for the new network claims that it is a service "for people who really love their country." Music, that is. -By Richard Stengel
...access to one of those transponders, you have reached 90% of the cable homes in the country." Tagliaferro's company, a subsidiary of Gulf & Western, is not on Satcom III-R, but he wishes it were. The company rents four transponders on several Western Union Westar satellites and sells time on them to customers seeking temporary services, primarily for sporting events...
There are other communications satellites now in orbit (Westar 1, Comstar D2), but cable programmers like Warner Amex and HBO regard the Satcoms as particularly desirable. Reason: their customers, the cable operators around the country, have antennas that can pick up signals from only one satellite at a time. Naturally, the cable operators would rather invest in a single antenna and still receive the widest possible variety of programs to pass on to home subscribers. Since the Satcoms carry almost nothing but cable signals, they offer such a variety. Thus for programmers, leasing a transponder on a Satcom is like...