Yikes! You know, as soon as you sell, a stock will go up, and as soon as you make a public statement, information will come out to prove you are wrong. Case in point, from a recent post of mine:
"Note that I* isn't perfectly polar, but for practical purposes of this discussion, it is close enough to make precession useless to move satellites from one plane to another. That means when I* launches a satellite to a certain plane, it is going to stay there."
And then followed by a post on the IRIDF board from Jeff:
".effectively giving plane six two spares, while the final bird in its payload will be drifted over to plane five to replace the failed satellite there."
Well, how can this be? I have to confess that I never did the numbers, but my gut reaction told me that to drift planes it would take I* over a year, which I assumed would be too impractical to even consider. But, after reading the post I finally did do the numbers. I can't see how they can do it in much less than a years time. There is uncertainty here because I don't know how much fuel Iridium is carrying, nor do I know how much they would be willing to use on such a maneuver. But, it still doesn't add up. One year is 20% of the satellites life, and it would take much less time to get a replacement launch into that plane. It doesn't seem like a good use of ones space based assets.
Any comments?
Mr A |
