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To: E Haiken who wrote (4180)	8/8/1998 9:58:00 PM
From: stantheman	Respond to of 10852

re blimpies forbes.com fr.5/97, sounds kind cool, but feasible???? fyi ST

To: E Haiken who wrote (4180)	8/8/1998 10:06:00 PM
From: Sawtooth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10852

E H: Here's Red Herring's recent article on Sky Station. Article indicates that the blimps are periodically lowered for fueling and maintenance. Not saying it's so (I don't know) but another perspective as people try to get their arms around the details. ...Tim BLEEDING EDGE Al Haig backs a bloated concept. By Constance Loizos The Red Herring magazine August 1998 A startup called Sky Station thinks that it has found a cheap alternative to astronomically expensive telecommunications satellite networks: helium-filled balloons. Based in Washington, D.C., and founded by a group that includes former secretary of state and White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, Sky Station is developing air stations the size of a football field that will float in the upper atmosphere and provide high-speed data communications to subscribers under the system's 7,500-square-mile shadow. Slated to launch its first balloon in late 2000, Sky Station hopes to beat to market prospective satellite competitors like Teledesic, Alcatel's SkyBridge, and Lockheed Martin's Astrolink. The company is touting its stations' 13-mile proximity to Earth as a great cost advantage. When commercial satellites, which hover more than 450 miles above the Earth, malfunction or become obsolete--the typical life span is about ten years--they simply become space garbage. Sky Station, by contrast, claims that its low-flying units could be pulled to the ground for maintenance and technology upgrades, then easily returned to the sky. Most analysts, however, say that Sky Station should never take flight. David Cooperstein of Forrester Research notes that with the air stations' very low orbit, "you'd need a hell of a lot of them to cover the ground." And worse, analyst Bob Egan of the Gartner Group contends that Sky Station's balloons could cause a commercial airliner disaster. Though planes fly at altitudes of 30,000 feet, or less than six miles, "trying to pull down one of Sky Station's airships for maintenance or refueling could cause serious problems with flight paths," according to Mr. Egan.