henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/17/84)
From Electronics, 12 July 1984:
...Following a year of intense lobbying by the Geostar Corp.,
Princeton, NJ, the FCC has decided to allocate frequencies to
an operational satellite system for radio-location services.
The firm is the first, and, up to now, the only company with
both a design and an application pending for approval by the
FCC...
Hooray!
[For those of you who don't know what this is about, Geostar is Gerard
O'Neill's latest bright idea: a location and communication system that
uses a few satellites and a big ground-based computer to provide very
accurate position information and (perhaps) communications service
to simple and cheap mobile terminals. Quite apart from the intrinsic
merits of the scheme (it's a much better navigation system than, say,
the US military Navstar system) and its potential applications to things
like air traffic control, a substantial fraction of the profits from
Geostar go to the Space Studies Institute. SSI was the first, and is
still the most forward-looking, source of private funds for research on
space development.]
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
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