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Technology Stocks : Loral Space & Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeff Vayda who wrote (5709)	4/7/1999 3:01:00 PM
From: Valueman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10852

....and there you go again Jeff, buying ANOTHER million shares at 2:34 Eastern.

To: Jeff Vayda who wrote (5709)	4/7/1999 3:53:00 PM
From: Sawtooth	Respond to of 10852

Space Travel Not So Far Out by Polly Sprenger - (Wired) 12:00 p.m. 6.Apr.99.PDT COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado -- Most people would laugh at the idea of a Jetsons-like future, where interplanetary travel is as commonplace as flying cross-country is today. But nobody's laughing at the National Space Symposium. Here, people believe it will happen. The attendees, a veritable Who's Who from the aeronautics and space fields, were titillated with promises of space tourism, consumer space transport vehicles, and '50s-era talk of colonies on Mars and the moon. And they were buying it. The space industry is plunging headlong into the world of commercialization. With the end of the Cold War and Reagan-backed investments in space, agencies are searching for new revenue streams. Telecommunications satellites, television satellites, espionage satellites, space tourists ... You name it, we'll launch it, said Major General Gerald Perryman, commander of Vandenberg Air Force Base. Perryman said the Air Force is giving itself a "spacelift." After 15 years of budget cuts, the USAF sees commercial launches as a lucrative, and permanent, source of revenue. "The Air Force is embracing a commercial style approach to meeting space launch requirements," Perryman said. "But there will be an increased responsibility for private firms." The Air Force's new plan, he explained, was to build more launch sites, and hand over operation of those sites to private companies and service providers. The plan calls for the service to spend US$1.2 billion to reconfigure Air Force launch pads for newer types of commercial launch vehicles. Noted futurist Alvin Toffler told the assembled crowd that the space industry needed to follow the route of the Internet. For years, the Net was the private domain of the military. Then the universities came along. But it was only after the private sector adopted Internet technologies that the online world blossomed. By privatizing space, Toffler said, the future of space development is assured. One of the technologies that will take the space industry into the commercial sector is a launch craft under development at Lockheed-Martin. Called Venturestar, this craft is a single-stage-to-orbit, reusable rocket. Unlike the bulky launch vehicles in use today, Venturestar is a one-unit ship that can enter orbit, deliver a payload, and return to earth to be used again. Perryman said the the Air Force is investing in new launch pads that will support craft like Venturestar. The new technology promises to reduce launch costs to one-tenth of their current cost, opening up space for new commercial possibilities. "If we can dream it, we can achieve it," said General Richard Myers, commander in chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. "The future is ours for the taking."