dietz%USC-CSE@ECLA.ECLnet (02/12/84)
I'm sending the following letter to President Reagan. You may want to rephrase it and do likewise. ---------------- Mr. President, I'm writing you this letter to tell you about a project that could save US taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, save thousands of lives and bring billions of dollars into the US economy. It's called Geostar. Geostar is a system using four satellites in geosynchronous orbit to precisely determine the position of aircraft. Invented by Gerard O'Neill at Princeton, Geostar is far cheaper than any other proposed air traffic control system. Geostar uses triangulation to determine the position of aircraft to within a few meters, once a second for every aircraft. The positions of all aircraft are kept track of in a ground computer, which detects possible collisions. Messages can be relayed back to the aircraft through the satellites. Geostar is very inexpensive. The transceiver unit that would fit in the aircraft would cost $500. The satellites would be similar to currently available communications satellites and would cost several hundred million dollars. The ground computer systems would cost a few tens of millions of dollars. In contrast, the FAA's current plans for upgrading air traffic control will cost tens of billions of dollars and will be far less reliable, far less accurate and will take far longer to bring on-line. The FAA's system will be labor intensive, inefficient and, as you well know, subject to crippling strikes. If Geostar had been guiding Korean Air Lines flight 007 it would never have strayed into Soviet airspace. Two hundred and sixty nine lives would have been saved. Geostar would allow full instrument landing capabilities at any airport in the US (or, in an emergency, on any farmer's field). Mid-air collisions would be greatly reduced. A competitor to Geostar is the military's Global Positioning System (GPS). Geostar tranceivers will be far less expensive than GPS units, and Geostar cannot be used surreptitiously by an enemy to guide missiles or bombers. In addition, Geostar will allow transmission of messages to individual aircraft, something GPS cannot do but that is necessary for air traffic control. The Geostar satellites will be much cheaper than the GPS satellites. Geostar is being developed by Geostar, Inc., a start up company organized by Gerard O'Neill. Investors in Geostar include Nobel Prize winner Dr. Luis Alvarez and Dr. Tom Paine, former NASA administrator and president of Northrup Corporation. Geostar has successfully tested a mockup of their system in California, with mountain top stations substituting for orbiting satellites. The United States has an undeniable lead over any other country in the key technologies needed for Geostar (communications satellites, high speed computers and microwave technology). The potential market for Geostar overseas is large -- many billions of dollars. Many jobs would be created and the trade deficit reduced. Ultimately, the market for Geostar could be much larger. Truck companies and railroads could use Geostar units to track trailers and boxcars. Lightweight Geostar tranceivers that one can hold in one's hand will guide ships and cars, police and rescue personnel. Geostar could make personal automated aircraft feasible by allowing automated takeoffs and landings. Bureaucratic inertia and lack of imagination at the FAA are preventing the adoption of Geostar. I urge you to prod the FAA into using Geostar. Not only would this cut the budget deficit over the next decade by tens of billions of dollars, but it would also provide business for the space shuttle and eventually provide satellite repair business for the space station. The Geostar system would provide a clear symbol of American technological prowess, a demonstration to the rest of the world that there are still things that Americans, and only Americans, have the skill, know-how and imagination to do. Information on Geostar can be found in the March 1981 issue of @i(Astronautics and Aeronautics), the July 1982 and September 1983 issues of @i(AOPA Pilot) magazine.