William J. Cook

While Baghdad was being hammered during the Persian Gulfwar, Peter Arnett made his dramatic CNN broadcasts over a portable satellite telephone. Advanced for its day, Arnett's Phone wasn't for everyone. It took a suitcase to carry, required a separate antenna the size of an umbrella to send a signal, and cost an arm and a leg to operate.

Calling from war zones—and many less dramatic but equally out-of-the-way places, too—is about to become a whole lot easier. Starting late next year, satellite phone users will be able to pull a tiny flip phone from their pocket and dial from literally anywhere on Earth to anywhere else. Their calls will zip to one of 66 Iridium satellites whirling overhead and be passed along, satellite to satellite, to the receiving party. The cost: $3 a minute.

Iridium, developed by Motorola, is only the beginning of a new generation of satellite-based services that promise to change the way we work and live. Between now and the turn of the century, companies from start-ups to the biggest and most established are expected, by some estimates, to spend up to $50 billion to build and launch new
satellites — and twice that for antennas, phones, switches, and other gear to support their birds aloft.

The implications are revolutionary for those with no access to telephone service—which is to say, half the world's population. For them, the launch of the new satellites may be akin to the laying of the rails to the American West—an epochal new infrastructure that creates the potential for rapid economic development. In the not-so-distant future, people living in remote Indonesian islands, in central China, and in villages in India that haven't changed much in a thousand years should be able to phone a nearnby village or a relative in New Jersey. Or surf the Internet.

Lost And Found

The impact on advanced economies will be more immediate, if less grandiose. By midsummer, for example, upscale hikers, boaters, hunters, and other wilderness enthusiasts will never again have an excuse to become lost or be out of touch with the rest of the world. With a $999 hand-held device from Magellan, a subsidiary of Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., they'll be able to type a short message to an Internet address anywhere in the world. The message will be carried via a constellation of 28 tiny Orbcomm satellites that will be lofted this year and next. "Help, I've broken my leg, and I'm stranded on the side of Mount Denali." The text will always include the exact location of the transmission, determined by a global positioning satellite receiver in the gadget, so rescuers will know just where to look. TV reruns of Gilligan's Island may never seem the same.

For those who despair that terrestrial telephone companies will never provide more than sluggish connections to the Internet, cellular phone tycoon Craig McCaw and the world's richest man, Bill Gates, have proposed the most audacious satellite scheme of all, Teledesic — Internet in the sky. As planned today, Teledesic would use 840 satellites—more than five times the 150 commercial satellites today in orbit—to provide the same kind of broadband, multimedia connections, such as video conferencing, that work best over fiber-optic cables. And do it from anywhere in the world, The $9 billion service will be aimed initially at linking far-flung international corporate offices. Individual speedaholics who choose to sign up will be able to download multimedia data from the Internet at a sizzling 28 megabits per second—1,000 times faster than a dial-up telephone connection.

Before that happens, however, Teledesic must find enough rockets to launch all those satellites. "It's going to be a challenging task, admits Jeff Finan, Teledesic's launch manager. But he argues that it's possible because world launch capacity is growing very fast, new rockets are coming to market, and a brief surplus of launch capacity forecast for the turn of the century will be used by Teledesic. Others aren't so sure. "A lot has to go right for Teledesic to get all their satellites up, says Marco Caceres, space analyst for the Teal Group of Fairfax, Va. He predicts it will be at least 2005 before Teledesic gets them all launched and working. Teledesic officials, however, deny published reports that they plan to begin operating their system with fewer than 300 satellites.

Even if Teledesic is on schedule, it may be late to the party. "McCaw and Gates have a terrific vision, which I share, says Steven Dorfman, president of Hughes Telecommunications & Space Co. "We're going after exactly the same markets. In 2000, Hughes, the dominant satellite builder and a major service provider, plans to offer its own $3 billion global broadband system called Spaceway, utilizing eight of its giant HS 702 satellites. Loral Space & Communications hopes to have its version, called CyberStar, operating in 1999. Motorola and Alcatel also are planning similar services.

Early adopters already are using satellite services to change the way they do business. Today in Tennessee, for example, Quality Transportation Services of Kingsport uses American Mobile Satellite Corp. to provide instant two-way voice communications with its 220 vehicles that carry medical patients around the state. Opting for the satellite rather than building ground relay towers throughout the state saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars" says Ronald Burke, vice president for operations. Nagle Line, a Toledo, Ohio, trucking company, uses AMSC to transmit data back and forth to its 50 refrigerated 18-wheelers. In the past, it took a Nagle driver half an hour to make a two-minute call by the time he pulled off the road and found a phone. Now it takes less than five minutes for the driver to stop, type a note into a laptop computer, and send it to Toledo.

All the new satellite services are aimed primarily at business users and affluent individuals. But the biggest long-term beneficiaries are likely to be the 2 billion or more people who can't reach out and touch anyone because they live in areas where phone service is not available.

"Satellites provide the same coverage to Africa as to Washington, D.C., whether we want them to or not," says Russel Daggatt, Teledesic's president. "It's an inherently egalitarian technology. " Because satellites can take the place of hundreds or even thousands of miles of terrestrial phone lines, says Mel Brashears, president of the space and strategic missiles sector of Lockheed Martin, "commercial space telephony is the most cost-effective way to `wire' the planet."

Globalstar, for example, forecasts that half its revenues will come from providing regular phones to areas not now served. Remote villages could be served by portable and mobile units that will cost about $750 apiece, the company says. Public phone booths, powered by solar panels and linked directly to satellites, could cost $2,500, depending on how many are connected to a single antenna.

Last week's historic agreement by 70 nations at the World Trade Organization to open up their telecommunications markets will speed the process dramatically. Half the signatories are countries from the developing world where the phone systems typically are inefficient government monopolies. The countries have conceded that deregulation, competition, and admission of foreign companies will benefit their economies by providing cheaper communications via satellites, fiber-optic cables, and other means. The agreement was a victory for U.S. negotiators, who had good reason to play tough. U.S. companies are the most competitive providers in the world, said Charlene Barshefsky, the acting U.S. trade representative, "and they are in the best position to compete and win under this agreement.

Dramatic changes in technology, politics, economics, and consumer demand are responsible for the coming boom in satellite services. "We couldn't have dreamed of this stuff 10 years ago, marvels Bernard Schwartz, CEO of Loral Space & Communications, the lead partner in Globalstar, a 48-satellite space-phone system that should be operating in late 1998 and competing directly with Iridium (by, among other things, charging lower rates). The same advances in microelectronics that make personal computers so powerful and cheap apply to satellites, too. An Iridium satellite, built on a Motorola assembly line, is expected to cost less than $20 million—one tenth the cost of past birds laboriously built one at a time by hand.

The end of the cold war means that huge rockets from Russia, Ukraine, and China now compete with French and American boosters to launch satellites. In the past 10 years, more than 1,250 payloads, including manned missions, were launched worldwide; 40 percent were Russian spy satellites. This year alone, Teal Group estimates, 76 purely commercial satellites will be orbited, up from 20 in 1995. An additional 121 are expected to go up in 1998. Over the next decade, roughly 1,800 new satellites are proposed to be launched, three fourths for commercial use. Lockheed Martin, in fact, is marketing Russian Proton launches. It plans to install Russian-designed engines on its latest Atlas booster and is considering whether to invest in upgrading the Baikonur launch facilities in Kazakhstan to increase its capacity. Boeing, meanwhile, has teamed up with Ukrainian and Russian rocket builders and Norwegian shipbuilder to start launching from a modified offshore oil-drilling platform in the Pacific Ocean in June 1998.

The other big change is how satellites be deployed. The new idea is to put up constellations of satellites that operate close to the Earth's surface, 400 to 1,000 miles up, in low-Earth orbit, or LEO. Most commercial satellites that today handle long-distance phone calls, relay cable television, and provide direct-broadcast television are in goesynchronous orbits 22,300 miles up. At that altitude and location, they move around the Earth at the same rate as does the Earth's surface, making them appear to hover over the same point and allowing them to act like very tall transmission towers.

Getting in synch

The problem, however, is that few positions are available on the geosynchronous arc, which is precisely above the equator. It takes powerful, costly rockets to boost heavyweight satellites into that position. And because they are so far away, it takes a quarter of a second for a signal to travel from Earth to a geosynch satellite and back to Earth. The delay doesn't matter for television broadcasts or data transmissions, but for voice phone calls it can interfere with a lively back-and-forth conversation.

There's practically no limit, however, to the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit. Some of the techniques for managing big constellations—dozens or hundreds of satellites working together—were hypothesized initially for Star Wars missile-defense schemes. Since satellites in LEO are close to Earth, there is essentially no delay to the signal, less radio energy is required, and phone batteries can be smaller. The satellites themselves can be smaller, cheaper, and easier to launch. A big booster like Russia's Proton, for example, is able to carry up to seven Iridium satellites on a single trip. Most of the new and proposed satellite services, including Iridium, Globalstar, Orbcomm, and Teledesic will operate in LEO. But there will be plenty of action at higher altitudes, too. ICO Global Communications, for example, a private company spun off from INMARSAT, will operate its space phone system from satellites 6,430 miles up in medium-Earth orbit, or MEO. At that altitude, only 10 satellites, similar to those used in geosynchronous orbit, are required, and the signal delay is minimal. The first satellite will be launched in 1998.

When the shootout in the skies is over a decade from now, some of the players with big plans doubtless will be also-rans. And some of the immensely complex systems, like Iridium and Teledesic, may not work quite as expected. Certainly, there will be problems with launches. The recent explosion of a Delta II rocket carrying an Air Force payload has caused other Delta II launches, including one carrying Iridium's first three satellites, to be delayed from January this year (1997) until at least May.

But there's little doubt that a new world infrastructure is about to be constructed. No question, it will benefit the most advanced citizens—like Peter Arnett and his CNN colleagues. For the disadvantaged regions of the world, however, the coming satellite communications revolution could be one of those rare technological events that enable traditional societies to leap ahead and long-dormant economies to flourish.

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* Reproduced from US News & World Report, March 3, 1997. Copyright, 1997 US News & World Report.