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 {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry