Communicating by satellite sparks a spirited race to space
When the Columbia space shuttle rises from its Kennedy Space Center launch pad this week, some anxious businessmen in the U.S. and Canada will be glued to their television sets, and not just to marvel as the reusable spacecraft's twin Thiokol rockets thrust it up and over the blue Atlantic. The launch, fifth in the Columbia series, will be the first in which the shuttle begins earning money from private, corporate customers for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Aboard the craft will be two satellites, each weighing about 1,400 lbs., built by Hughes Aircraft Co. and owned by Telesat Canada, a partly public, partly private Canadian firm, and Satellite Business Systems, formed as a joint venture by IBM, Aetna Life & Casualty Co. and Comsat. Each of the two companies will pay NASA about $9 million to launch its "bird." Once in orbit, the satellites will form links in what is rapidly be coming a vast and complex corporate telecommunications highway 22,300 miles above the surface of the earth.
Along this highway already flows a torrent of information, from stock and bond quotes for banks and brokerage houses, to telephone conversations, to sitcoms and first-run movies for networks and cable TV companies. Telesat's new Anik C3 will speed the flood along by strengthening Canadian telephone service, as well as by bringing addi tional pay television programming to cable operators and, through them, to the homes of cable TV subscribers throughout Canada. Meanwhile, SBS's satellite, SBS-3, will be targeted toward the U.S. market, offering long-distance direct-dial service to consumers at rates lower than AT&T's.
In total as much as 10% of all long-distance telecommunications and data-relay traffic in the U.S already moves via satellite at one stage or another of its journey. That in turn is generating revenues that last year exceeded $11 billion, and telecommunications industry experts now estimate that technologically advanced applications, like relaying computer data, could keep growing at a 25% annual rate through the remainder of the decade. Says Al Parker, vice president for marketing at Ford Aerospace & Communications Corp., which, along with Hughes Aircraft and RCA Corp., is a leading manufacturer and marketer of satellites and telecommunications systems: "This is already a large business, and it is going to get much larger. How big is anybody's guess."
The reason for the industry's bright business outlook is, in a word, economy. A typical telecommunications satellite can cost up to $75 million to manufacture, launch and monitor while in orbit above the earth. But that expense is small compared with the burdens involved in laying thousands of miles of cable across a continent or even an ocean.