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Technology Stocks : Orbital science (ORB) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (1869)	7/13/1998 3:09:00 PM
From: John B. Jensen	Respond to of 2394

All, Noticed this on spacer.com: spacer.com Basically the idea is that the bird keeps the messages on board until it crosses the groundstation a little later. This seems like interesting competition for some of OrbComms market. Clearly it will not work for tracking of vehicles etc., but for utility monitoring it would work just fine. Does anybody have an opinion of the tradeoffs involved: + You need fewer groundstations - Increased satellite complexity - Increased satellite power consumption (?) - Increased satellite cost (How much is a couple of gigs worth of rad-hardened ram anyway?) - Increased message latency. -- John

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (1869)	7/13/1998 10:35:00 PM
From: Dr. Ezzat G. Bakhoum	Respond to of 2394

Any new satellite design must have bugs. If it doesn't, that will be very unusual (just like any other new product). Notice that the Teledesic sat was an "experimental" one. It's not unusual for a satellite manufacturer to launch one or more of a particular new satellite design just to learn where the bugs are. And that's exactly what (I think) they're doing now with the Orbcomm sats. For your information, I learned from some engineers involved with Motorola that the high-flying Iridium project had suffered enormous losses (many of the sats have stopped functioning), though MOT is not talking about it! I think MOT wasn't careful and launched too many of them before doing very thorough testing. Again, it is my opinion that Wall Street gets very jittery when they hear those issues because they don't understand the technology. These projects require lots of testing before they become reliable, but this doesn't mean that we should start by labeling them "unsuccessful". Frankly, I think most of the risk lies in the marketing of these services later on, not the engineering. regards..