Here's some more recent information (exercpts as entire copy is too lengthy) on the issues of satelite life
Copyright 1999 Federal Information Systems Corporation
Federal News Service
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APRIL 7, 1999, WEDNESDAY
SECTION: MAJOR LEADER SPECIAL TRANSCRIPT
LENGTH: 6463 words
HEADLINE: SPACE TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION (STDC)
NEMO SATELLITE PRESS CONFERENCE
PARTICIPANTS:
LLOYD PRESLAR, VICE PRESIDENT, STDC
PAUL SETZE, CEO AND CHAIRMAN, STDC
BRUCE BERKOWITZ, PRESIDENT, STDC
TOM WILSON, NAVAL RESEARCH LAB, PROJECT MANAGER, NEMO
NATIONAL PRESS CLUB OF WASHINGTON, D.C.
LISAGOR ROOM
8:30 AM EST
BODY:
MR. PRESLAR: Well, first I should say that our plan is to launch a new satellite about every 30 months. NEMO 2, if you will, will be different, but the difference in the sensing and the kind of imagery will be dependent upon technology. You can conceive all kinds of combinations of sensors that might come along.
QUESTION: Same bus?
MR. PRESLAR: Conceivably. Bruce mentioned what he calls a model of buying an off-the-shelf bus and fixing it. Buying something off the shelf, or off an assembly and changing it into a remote sensing satellite. We would hope or expect to do that for our second satellite. And that could be a Globalstar type, it could be an Iridium type, it could be some other sort of off- the-shelf satellite. We think, and I think the industry thinks, and you all know this perhaps better than we, but the time has come in which the satellite, or the bus, is sort of a standard item. And what you put in it and what you do with it is the new frontier.
QUESTION: In your Globalstar discussion, it's a single satellite, and it would be accurate to say you're not wedded to Globalstar for anything else, is that right?
MR. PRESLAR: That's correct.
MR. SETZE: Well, we certainly don't preclude using a Globalstar for the next one.
MR. PRESLAR: That would depend on their interest, ours, the capabilities a few months or a year from now, how much power we will need for our new sensor, how much power they or another satellite could make available. But, we think this model of using something off the shelf as your basic bus is a good one, not only for us but also for others.
QUESTION: Is the 30 months, is that the expected life of your power supply?
MR. SETZE: No, NEMO should have a five-year life. So after the second satellite is launched, we would expect to have two operating satellites in orbit at all times. In other words, the second will go up in 30 months; the third one will go up essentially five years after the first NEMO launch. So it would be two on orbit, and so on. For the most part, we think that's about how much time we would need. |
