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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Koplik who wrote (12992)	5/21/2000 1:45:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29987

TMann, sorry I didn't answer your 'where will the money come from question?' The existing shareholders will put in another $1bn by way of a rights issue if needed. That would be 25% extra compared with the present market capitalisation, which is no big deal. It's disappointing, but if it's necessary, it's not much different from the cost of the Zenit crash in that there was a one year delay from that as well as the actual losses. If we public investors decline, Vodafone and QUALCOMM will certainly increase their stake at the expense of other existing shareholders [at the right price]. Q! has just shown willingness to commit $500m in vendor financing at about $10 a share, so you can bet they'll take over the rest of the company if necessary, at $5 a share if we are stupid enough to sell it to them for such a low price. Not that Vodafone would let Q! get their hands on it for such a low price. Until the Service Providers are really up and running and stop hiding a couple of handsets behind the counter and offer service at about or just below terrestrial pricing, we'll have a slow rollout. That doesn't mean it's the end of the business. To me the Service Providers could have gone a lot faster, but they seem to be old-time telecom style marketers. Slow and steady and not worried about huge opportunity cost. Vodafone just bid $36bn for some spectrum in Pommyland. They can easily put $1bn into G! if they think it worth it. I bet they do think it is worth backing. Maurice PS: Jon, the Zenit rocket actually burned and THEN crashed, rather than crashed and burned. Yes, there were 12 satellites. It wasn't 'a few minutes into the flight', it was okay for 4 minutes and then an 'anomaly' happened. I hope you don't think me nit-picky. I'm not sure how many seconds after 4min it went wrong. Maybe we could pin that detail down too. Here is G*setters_Globalstar Users Forum Subject 34677 in case anyone can't find it.

To: Jon Koplik who wrote (12992)	5/22/2000 5:52:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 29987

Jon, an even more nit-picky [and knowledgeable] person than you or me has PM'd me the following. < Sorry Maurice, I just couldn't resist. The Zenit never really "burned". The failure went something like this: The Zenit had 3 on-board computers to control the major functions of the powered flight: ignition, fairing separation, stage separation, etc. As a means of redundancy, each time a critical event in the flight was about to occur, the 3 computers would "vote" on what to do. When it came time to light the 2nd stage (about 5 minutes into the flight), two of the three computers had failed, leaving only one remaining. The 3rd computer, functioning properly, voted to ignite the stage. However, it did not hear any other votes (from the failed computers) and declared itself a minority (1 out of 3). Since only a minority voted to light the stage, all propulsion systems were shutdown. Had the 3rd computer been programmed correctly, it should have counted its vote as a majority (1 out of 1), not 1 out of 3, and all would have been well. So, in the final analysis, the rocket flew for 282 seconds, shut itself down, and coasted into some swampy land in Siberia. The correct term would then be "crashed and sank". As far as I know, no explosion or combustion caused the failure.> Full, broken-english explanation available at: yuzhnoye.kiev.ua ... at the very bottom of the page. So, once again we learn about the limitations of democracy as the most wonderful institution in existence. I do NOT like the expression 'crashed and sank' in relation to Globalstar. The stock price seems to be operating a little like that. At least it's in good company with the Nasdaq. Anyone's knuckles starting to whiten a little? This is getting to be quite a bit of fun. Mqurice PS: Thank you to the cyberspace lurker who supplied that information.