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Navy details huge unmanned aerial vehicle program
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=34109&dcn=todaysnews
DAILY BRIEFING
May 18, 2006
Navy details huge unmanned aerial vehicle program
From CongressDaily
The Navy Wednesday gave a large audience of defense contractors details on what might be a multibillion dollar contract for an unmanned air reconnaissance system that would require scores of sophisticated flying drones, an array of high-technology sensors and communications systems and the associated ground control and data-receiving stations.
At a briefing near the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in southern Maryland, senior Navy officers and defense officials described the requirements and schedule for a major program called the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance system to more than 200 aerospace industry representatives.
"BAMS is a huge undertaking" that presents "tremendous growth opportunities" for the aerospace industry, said Vice Adm. Walter Massenburg, commander of the Naval Air Systems Command.
Massenburg emphasized that what they wanted was not just an unmanned vehicle but an unmanned aerial system capable of providing persistent maritime surveillance and data collection.
Dyke Weatherington, director of the Defense Department's UAS Planning Task Force, noted that the Senate Armed Services Committee put language in its fiscal 2007 defense authorization bill urging the Defense secretary to push the development of unmanned systems. "This program has a very high level of congressional interest," he said.
The Navy program requires a large unmanned aircraft capable of flying 2,000 nautical miles each way. It must remain at its destination for at least 24 hours while surveying large areas of open ocean or coastal areas with state-of-the-art sensors that relay intelligence to both land-based command posts half a world away and to Navy task forces operating nearby, Massenburg and the other officials explained. BAMS also might fill in as a communications relay asset, they said.
The Navy aviation officials said final requirements are expected to be approved this summer, with a request for proposal following by January and a contract awarded by September 2007.
The first of the aircraft and sensors are to be ready for testing in 2011. The system should be ready for use in 2013.
Although none of the briefers would estimate the number of aircraft required or the potential cost of the contract, the specifications call for enough systems to cover five major areas of the world on a 24-hour basis.
That clearly would require dozens of aircraft and associated systems that might cost more than $50 million each.
And the officials stressed that the program has attracted interest from at least nine foreign nations, which might increase the size of the contract.
Wind..believe this to be different case
Look at the header on the link you gave:
U.S. District Court, W.D. Penn
That's US District Court Western District Pennsylvania, not Boward County Florida as shown in previous link GTE vs AT&T
Different cases.
VozBrasil hiring in classifieds of Brazilian newspaper
Well, nice to see for the first time the use of our logo on a third party site, and for HIRING customer service rep's even better!!
Are we liken what we're seeing? Time, people, just give it some time. In a bit we'll be hiring Japanese/English bi-linq's, and won't that be nice$
pete
http://www.acheiusa.com/acheiusa/asp/listar/class_300.asp
39134 - TELECOM CONTRATA: PORTUGUÊS+ENGLISH
Nome: Recursos Humanos
Fone: (561) 213-8510
CUSTOMER SERVICE - TELECOM - www.vozbrasil.com - Fluência em Português e Inglês, boa dicção, colegial completo e visto para trabalhar nos US. Local: Pembroke Pines FL33074 - enviar currículo para temanorth@temanorth.com (Data: 6/11/2006) enviar e-mail
FAA moving forward on UAV certification (article)
With troops headed to the US/Mexico border this summer, and major aerospace contractors bidding on a radical border security system to replace those very same troops, the FAA is having to march double-time to the beat of progress. Unmanned & manned airspace will converge over some parts of the continental US in the near future.
Personally am hoping the Strat falls into the category of "standard" reserved for the newer (assuming more complex autonomous systems) UAV's. Will be looking further into this.
pete
http://www.flightglobal.com/Articles/2006/06/13/Navigation/177/207171/FAA+studies+three-category+UAV...
US FAA studies three-category UAV classification and certification system for integration into civil airspace
By Peter La Franchi in Paris
6-13-06
The US Federal Aviation Administration is exploring potential establishment of a three-category classification and certification system for unmanned air vehicles as part of a roadmap for UAV integration into the US national airspace system planned for release in October.
The new classification system would include provisions for “file and fly” of new-generation unmanned systems under a category known as “standard”, with this representing UAVs that comply with all elements of the code.
However, the FAA is warning that few systems are likely to achieve “standard” classification in the near term. It expects virtually all existing UAV systems to be classified under a revised “restricted” classification.
The new classifications would also include a category being referred to as “lightly restricted” to cover aircraft currently restricted to flight within visual sight as the primary basis of risk mitigation. This category includes radio-controlled model aircraft, particularly model helicopters adapted for commercial use in aerial photography; small blimps used for advertising; and agricultural UAVs.
The “lightly restricted” classification represents systems that “are giving us a good deal of problems right now and we are really wrestling, on a daily basis, with this particular group”, says Steve Swartz, from the FAA’s recently established unmanned aircraft programme office.
He says that the agency is aware of a flying jet-powered model Airbus A380 airliner in the USA that is larger than a single-seat light aircraft. “We are worried about where a model stops being a model,” he says.
UAV's/Strat:making sense for sensors (article)
http://www.space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_060612.html
From shoot to root:
We've read of the (USFS)forest micro-sensor monitoring testbed using Hotzone ground sites, now sample a nice soil measurement article on NASA's need for an aerial relay system representing the next sequential step in unmanned surveillance technology
-the UAV.
It's coming, and he who carries the mostest, for the longest/cheapest, wins. Autonomous aerostats (lighter-than-air vehicles) appear to be the perfect platform for long duration persistent surveillance.
Let's see if GTE's connection to NASA carries the day for the
Strat/Delta A.S craft, for this and other similar endeavors....
pete
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6-12-06
NASA Eyes UAVs, Microsats for Measuring Soil Moisture
By Missy Frederick
Space News Staff Writer
NASA scientists are studying the possibility of placing microwave sensors aboard unmanned aircraft and microsatellites as a way to obtain soil-moisture measurements at a bargain price.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., issued a notice May 16 seeking potential ideas and sources for outfitting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and microsatellites with advanced L-band antennas for gathering soil-moisture measurements.
“Antenna design must be scaled to the proper weight and size to be deployable from current UAVs with future follow-on work to embed the antenna into a microsatellite,” NASA said in the solicitation.
Respondents should assume operating altitudes of 150-10,000 meters for UAVs and 700 kilometers for microsatellites, and scale their sensors accordingly to meet the resolution requirements and other technical specifications, the notice said.
Climate and environmental scientists have long had an interest in soil-moisture measurements, which can aid in long-term weather forecasts and which also have potential applications in agriculture and resource management, according to Charles Laymon, a research fellow at Marshall. “If we can increase the resolution and frequency of observation, there’s a wide breadth of other disciplines that could make use of this information,” he said.
Up until this year, scientists interested in soil-moisture measurements were looking forward to NASA’s $175 million Hydros mission, which was funded as an alternate under the agency’s Earth Systems Science Pathfinder series of small environmental-science satellites. But the agency axed Hydros at the beginning of the year due to a funding crunch affecting its science programs across the board.
UAVs and microsatellites are now seen as promising low-cost alternatives for gathering the measurements.
“With the recent termination of the Hydros mission, we started looking at exploring whether some of these platforms might serve as a technology bridge until the next opportunity to re-propose the mission came along,” Laymon said in an interview.
The challenge, Laymon said, is to design L-band microwave sensors that are small enough to fit on UAVs. NASA is still determining what size UAV would be compatible with this kind of experiment, according to NASA spokesman Rick Smith. “There are some new technologies out there that are being developed we can quickly harvest and modify slightly to serve our needs,” he said. Marshall has a history of using remote sensing techniques to obtain soil-moisture data, according to Steve Roy, a spokesman for the center. In recent years scientists have relied on direct measurements combined with data collected by sensors aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite, launched in May 2002, he said. But the data collected by Aqua is not particularly effective for obtaining the information the scientists need, and they hope that data collected on the UAVs will help scientists make better long-term weather forecast predictions, Smith said.
UAVs and microsatellites could significantly reduce the cost of gathering these measurements, Laymon said.
“The traditional science platform that NASA builds for a science mission has a long life of three to 10 years, incorporates a large number of instruments, and costs hundreds of millions of dollars,” Laymon said. “These technologies can do things more cheaply. … A UAV is a stepping stone in getting to a microsatellite.”
UAVs do not provide the global, broad-area coverage of satellites. But they can be deployed relatively quickly as dictated by weather conditions or other events and focus in on areas of particular interest, Laymon said.
Laymon expressed hope that the responses to Marshall’s request for information will lead to funding for technology demonstrations in the next two years or so. “The [request] is a first step in identifying who wants to play, and who has something to offer in the arena,” Laymon said.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., working in conjunction with the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., already has had some success incorporating microwave instruments on UAVs, according to Larry Hilliard, an engineer at Goddard and principle investigator for the project.
Hilliard said the Goddard instrument is a simplified system, with the intention of adding more capabilities to the instrument as the project proceeds. Scientists encased the antenna in a type of foam structure that was of very low mass, allowing the UAV to handle the weight of the payload. The vehicle has not yet been flight tested, but could potentially be in the fall, Hilliard said.
Hilliard’s team is a potential collaborator for Marshall for the project outlined in the request for information, Hilliard said.
Solstice: Sun & Strat standstill in the heavens?
[For giggles & laughs only]
Don't you find it interesting that our annual shareholder's meeting falls on the Summer Solstice, June 21nd?
As investors, we are fairly fixated on launching the Stratellite, and once airborne, to have it positioned as close to the Stratosphere as technologically possible. Further, powered flight longevity would also be nice -say overnight.
But the real trick is none of these particular events.
The real science is in holding an airship fairly steady within a particular quadrant; no meaningful Telecom or surveillance without this ability. Standing Still (sort of) in mid-air by-way-of onboard electic motors is a beautiful thing indeed.
Oh, it's been done before -for a few hours by the Japanese at a few thousand feet, yet their respective program (JAXA's stratospheric platform) has not tested since late 2004. This is what's called "hard science";^).
So, perhaps it's just coincidence that GTE is meeting the 21nd.
Or maybe, with a wink-and-a-nod, it's Tim's way of saying to us,
"Look to the heavens, oh man"!
pete
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Solstice
Solstice is derived from two Latin words: sol meaning sun, and sistere, to cause to stand still. This is because, as the summer solstice approaches, the noonday sun rises higher and higher in the sky on each successive day. On the day of the solstice, it rises an imperceptible amount, compared to the day before. In this sense, it stands still.
Why does the summer solstice happen?
The seasons of the year are caused by the 23.5º tilt of the earth's axis. Because the earth is rotating like a top or gyroscope, the North Pole points in a fixed direction continuously towards a point in space near the North Star. But the earth is also revolving around the sun. During half of the year, the southern hemisphere is more exposed to the sun than is the northern hemisphere. During the rest of the year, the reverse is taken place. At noontime in the Northern Hemisphere the sun appears high in the sky during summertime, and low during winter. The time of the year when the sun reaches its maximum elevation occurs on the summer solstice -- the day with the greatest number of daylight hours.
Significance of the summer solstice:
In pre-historic times, summer was a joyous time of the year for those Aboriginal people who lived in the northern latitudes. The snow had disappeared-the ground had thawed out-warm temperatures had returned- flowers were blooming- leaves had returned to the deciduous trees. Some herbs could be harvested, for medicinal and other uses.Food was easier to find. The crops had already been planted and would be harvested in the months to come soon. The first or only full moon in June is called the Honey Moon. Tradition holds that this is the best time to harvest honey from the hives. This time of year, between the planting and harvesting of the crops, was the traditional month for weddings. This is because many ancient peoples believed that the grand (sexual) unio" of the Goddess and God occurred in early May at Beltaine. Since it was unlucky to compete with the deities, many couples delayed their weddings until June. June remains a favorite month for marriage today. In some traditions, newly wed couples were fed dishes and beverages that featured honey for the first month of their married life to encourage love and fertility. The surviving vestige of this tradition lives on in the name given to the holiday immediately after the ceremony- The Honeymoon.
pszme, article is GTE pr from 5-15-english
GlobeTel Launches VozBrasil(TM) to the Growing US-Based Brazilian Community; Feature-Rich VoIP Network Eliminates Investment In Customer Premise Equipment
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 15, 2006--GlobeTel Communications Corp. (AMEX:GTE), today announced the launch of VozBrasil(TM) (http://www.vozbrasil.com), a service which will allow Brazilians to call their friends, relatives and business associates in the US through a local number, at local rates, without the need for broadband internet access or any special equipment. Also, separately, over the next two weeks, GlobeTel will be launching a service that allows Brazilians to obtain a US phone number that, when called, will forward those calls to their local phone number in Brazil -- all at low VoIP rates. This is the first of many services that will allow people across the globe to attach US phone numbers -- and thereby forward local US calls -- to their local phone numbers in their own countries.
VozBrasil(TM) is a customized, VoIP-based communications network developed by GlobeTel's VoIP Division for the US-based Brazilian community. The Company believes this is the first commercially available VoIP system that eliminates the need for Customer Premise Equipment ("CPE"), resulting in increased savings and flexibility for both the telecom provider and for the end-user customer.
VozBrasil(TM) customers in the US who would like their friends in Brazil to be able to call them - without incurring the enormous charges of calling from Brazil to the US -- can now get a local Brazilian number issued to them by GlobeTel in any of the most populous areas of Brazil. This local Brazilian number can be linked to any US telephone number the US customer chooses -- that is: his home phone, his business phone or his cell phone -- and when his local Brazilian number is called by his Brazilian friends, that "linked phone" will ring instantly in the US. And, when the call to the "linked" U.S. number is completed, the Brazilian caller is charged only for a local Brazilian call. For even greater savings, the US customer has the option of having both a Brazilian and a US number attached to his VoIP service, although this dual-service requires that the customer have a broadband connection and a small, home-installed VoIP device. This further refinement provides the customer with the extremely low calling rates available throughout the world using voice over IP calling.
For our commercial partners, VozBrasil(TM) is the first commercial VoIP implementation based on GlobeTel's proprietary voice platform known as StrateVoIP(TM) -- a carrier-class platform designed to provide country-specific calling plans and customized packages to its commercial partners. The StrateVoIP(TM) platform enables our ISP and telecom partners around the world to offer their local customers the benefits of voice over IP calling without the need for them to expend huge amounts of capital on the development of a VoIP platform or on an investment in customer premise equipment ("CPE"). StrateVoIP provides a billing and management backend software system that allows any of our partners to be highly competitive with incumbent telcos by offering easy-to-configure calling plans, prepaid phone cards, and least cost routing.
Within minutes of signing up, a VozBrasil(TM) retail customer can have his own US or Brazilian number attached or "linked" to his existing phone number. This real-time feature is one of the many components of the StrateVoIP system that makes it so appealing to ISP's and to telecom companies seeking to provide voice over IP services to their own customers.
Dan Erdberg, President of GlobeTel VoIP, stated, "The US-based Brazilian community is large, growing and vibrant, and it maintains very close ties to its business and personal networks within Brazil. We have designed the platform with real-time features including a user-friendly method of assigning local Brazilian phone numbers to any US-based Brazilians who desire such a local, home-country number. Our US clients can easily select a phone number throughout Brazil and have that local number ring directly to a VoIP phone or cellular phone located in any other location, anywhere in the world, through our system. Instantly, our customers in Brazil will now have the ability to call their families in the US as easily and inexpensively as if they were calling them next door. Also, using the VozBrasil local access number, our U.S. customers are able to call Brazil directly from their U.S. location and inform their friends and families of their new local Brazilian numbers, allowing them to communicate at local tariffs. And this can all be done within minutes of signing up for our service."
Timothy Huff, Chief Executive Officer of GlobeTel Communications, stated, "Arguably, this technology makes international long distance calling a thing of the past. The largest barriers-to-entry facing our competing VoIP service providers are the integration costs and the cost of providing Customer Premise Equipment to their customers. And, importantly, our competitors' systems are able to interact with only those customers having high speed, broadband Internet access. The StrateVoIP platform completely eliminates all of those costs and concerns. And, as a result, our service is accessible by both those who have access to Broadband connections and those who don't. This represents a remarkable breakthrough: mobile VoIP without the need for any computer interface."
By making contact through http://www.VozBrasil.com or by calling 1-888-6Brasil (1-888-627-2745), both business clients and individual customers anywhere in the US can subscribe to high-quality, low-cost telephone service featuring local Brazilian telephone numbers and unlimited calling plans to and from Brazil. With plans starting at under $15 per month, customers can sign up and register for the service in real time, allowing them -- within a matter of minutes -- to communicate with Brazil and save money.
About GlobeTel VoIP
Brazilian Times carries GTE VozBrasil release
On the home page of the Brazillian Times, under
Comunidade brasileira, carries a link to a page on their site offering the full 5-11-06 GTE Press Release for VozBrasil.
Comunidade brasileira
- Brazilian Times mostra onde assistir aos jogos da Copa 2006
- Hospital dos EUA e de Recife fazem parceria contra leucemia
- GlobeTel Lança VozBrasil para a Comunidade de Brasileiros nos
Check it out here:
http://www.braziliantimes.com/
Foot-in-door for UAV-US FEMA flights
“The good of the people, is the greatest law”
Cicero, Roman philosopher (106-43 BC)
http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,100537,00.html
It starts with disasters, then moves on to border duty, and finally domestic commerce -unmanned airships fully intergrated into manned airspace. Laws change -It's for our own good!$$$pete
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Air Force UAVs Cleared for Domestic Duty
InsideDefense.com NewsStand | Carlo Munoz | June 09, 2006
Senior Air Force Northern Command and Federal Aviation Administration officials have hammered out a pact that will allow the service to deploy unmanned aerial vehicles over the continental United States during major disasters, according to the AFNORTH commander.
“I'm positive that we have an agreement now,” Maj. Gen. Scott Mayes told Inside the Air Force June 5. “If a national disaster is declared, we will be able to use unmanned aerial systems such as Predator and Global Hawk over a disaster area.”
He told ITAF that Pentagon and FAA officials have placed their respective signatures on documents that outline the preliminary agreement. The domestic airspace in which unmanned aircraft would be allowed to operate would be determined by AFNORTH, but in conjunction with its parent organization U.S. Northern Command and the FAA, Mayes added. Senior government officials must still approve the plan.
“The geographical dimensions of the disaster area would be worked out” at his outfit's air operations center, the AFNORTH chief added.
Aside from securing access to U.S. airspace during times of disasters and conducting air support missions for NORTHCOM, Mayes said the command's third priority is carrying out Air Force humanitarian assistance missions. The two-star noted the use of unmanned aircraft will be vital in that role because the autonomous aircraft can provide real-time images and data to federal, state and local first responders coordinating rescue and relief efforts.
He added that senior AFNORTH officials have already begun exploring UAV usage in U.S. skies during natural disasters in coordinated interagency drills -- most recently during the command's Ardent Sentry 2006 exercise (see related story).
But Mayes said the Air Force command was unable to transition the aircraft into the AFNORTH toolkit in time for the rescue and recovery effort in the destructive wakes of hurricanes Rita and Katrina. The storms, which cut a swath of destruction across the Gulf Coast last year, forced the command's top brass to re-engage with the FAA on forging an agreement on domestic use of military-operated UAVs.
“We had some hurdles with the interagency, the FAA in particular, that we were unable to overcome” as relief efforts were underway last year following the two storms, Mayes recalled. “Since Rita and Katrina, as part of the lessons learned, we have worked very hard with the FAA.”
At press time (June 8), AFNORTH officials had not responded to inquiries seeking further details.
Prior to the new agreement, senior service officials had for some time championed the use of UAVs in civilian airspace to perform critical homeland security and other domestic missions. Officials involved in the interagency debate, however, reached an impasse over the ability of the military's unmanned aircraft to meet FAA flight certification standards. Defense Department and aviation administration officials sought to create a way ahead for unmanned aircraft to fly over the continental U.S. in late 2005, with provisions included in the latest version of the Pentagon's Unmanned Aerial Systems Road Map (ITAF, Aug. 12, p11).
That Pentagon strategy sought to increase performance and reliability rates of the current UAV fleet, with the overall goal of evolving such figures to become on par with those of manned platforms. Aviation agency officials also wanted assurances that military UAVs would be fitted with “see and avoid” capabilities, according to the August document. The “see and avoid” concept is based on the notion that pilots can make split-second decisions using their field of vision to avoid mid-air collisions.
Without that crucial human element, FAA officials were concerned that guidance technologies within unmanned platforms were not advanced enough to mimic such capabilities.
Under the pending Air Force-FAA agreement, however, unmanned platforms could conceivably avoid being subjected to such requirements. Such standards are based on the assumption that UAVs would operate within normal air traffic patterns. But during a natural disaster, such airspace would likely be closed to commercial traffic, reducing the threat of mid-air collisions with civilian planes or commercial airliners.
With the final UAV agreement nearing final approval, Mayes said the role of unmanned aircraft in rescue and relief efforts will only increase over time.
“Here we do imagery and analysis” on natural disaster scenarios, Mayes said. “So we will use unmanned systems for that . . . most likely from now on.”
Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion.
Apex of future US warfighting: Stratospheric Airship
It's not the satellite and "they" know it. Everything comes in realtime, all-the-time. No dropped com links, no data gaps. It's
counterinsurgency at 65,000 ft. and we strike before they do. It's that simple.
Real Time Orthorectification (delta aero science) coupled with optimized stratospheric telecom + persistence of Stratellite represents the only solution that could fit the unmanned airship requirements and time frame ("few short years....") of an operation like the one discussed below. aimho -pete
http://www.newstatesman.com/200606120018
America's Robot Army
Cover story
Stephen Graham
Monday 12th June 2006
Already there are killing machines operating by remote control. Soon the machines will be able to kill on their own initiative. A new warfare is on its way. By Stephen Graham
War is about to change, in terrifying ways. America's next wars, the ones the Pentagon is now planning, will be nothing like the conflicts that have gone before them.
In just a few years, US forces will be able to deal out death, not at the squeeze of a trigger or even the push of a button, but with no human intervention whatsoever. Many fighting soldiers - those GIs in tin hats who are dying two a day in Iraq - will be replaced by machines backed up by surveillance technology so penetrating and pervasive that it is referred to as "military omniscience". Any Americans involved will be less likely to carry rifles than PlayStation-style consoles and monitors that display simulated streetscapes of the kind familiar to players of Grand Theft Auto - and they may be miles from where the killing takes place.
War will progressively cease to be the foggy, confusing, equalising business it has been for centuries, in which the risks are always high, everyone faces danger and suffers loss, and the few can humble the mighty. Instead, it will become remote, semi-automatic and all-knowing, entailing less and less risk to American lives and taking place largely out of the sight of news cameras. And the danger is close to home: the coming wars will be the "war on terror" by other names, conflicts that know no frontiers. The remote-controlled war coming tomorrow to Khartoum or Mogadishu, in other words, can happen soon afterwards, albeit in moderated form, in London or Lyons.
This is no geeky fantasy. Much of the hardware and software already exists and the race to produce the rest is on such a scale that US officials are calling it the "new Manhattan Project". Hundreds of research projects are under way at American universities and defence companies, backed by billions of dollars, and Donald Rumsfeld's department of defence is determined to deliver as soon as possible. The momentum is coming not only from the relentless humiliation of US forces at the hands of some determined insurgents on the streets of Baghdad, but also from a realisation in Washington that this is the shape of things to come. Future wars, they believe, will be fought in the dirty, mazy streets of big cities in the "global south", and if the US is to prevail it needs radically new strategies and equipment.
Only fragments of this story have so far appeared in the mainstream media, but enough information is available on the internet, from the comments of those in charge and in the specialist press to leave no room for doubt about how sweeping it is, how dangerous and how imminent.
Military omniscience is the starting point. Three months ago Tony Tether, director of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon's research arm, described to a US Senate committee the frustration felt by officers in Iraq after a mortar-bomb attack. A camera in a drone, or unmanned aircraft, spotted the attackers fleeing and helped direct US helicopters to the scene to destroy their car - but not before some of those inside had got out. "We had to decide whether to follow those individuals or the car," he said, "because we simply didn't have enough coverage available." So some of the insurgents escaped. Tether drew this moral: "We need a network, or web, of sensors to better map a city and the activities in it, including inside buildings, to sort adversaries and their equipment from civilians and their equipment, including in crowds, and to spot snipers, suicide bombers or IEDs [improvised explosive devices] . . . This is not just a matter of more and better sensors, but, just as important, the systems needed to make actionable intelligence out of all the data."
Darpa has a host of projects working to meet those needs, often in surprising ways. One, called Combat Zones That See, aims to scatter across cities thousands of tiny CCTV cameras, each equipped with wireless communication software that will make it possible to link their data and track the movements of every vehicle on the streets. The cameras themselves will not be that different from those found in modern mobile phones.
Seeing through concrete
Already in existence are sensors the size of matchboxes which respond to heat, light, movement or sound; and a variety of programmes, including one called Smart Dust, are working on further miniaturising these and improving their ability to work as networks. A dozen US university teams are also developing micro-aircraft, weighing a few grams each, that imitate birds and insects and could carry sensor equipment into specific buildings or rooms.
Darpa's VisiBuilding programme, meanwhile, is making "X-ray eye" sensors that can see through concrete, locating people and weapons inside buildings. And Human ID at a Distance is working on software that can identify individual people from scans of their faces, their manner of walking or even their smell, and then track them anywhere they go.
Closely related to this drive are projects involving compu-ter simulations of urban landscapes and entire cities, which will provide backdrops essential for using the data gathered by cameras and sensors. The biggest is Urban Resolve, a simulated war against a full-scale insurgency in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, in the year 2015.
Digitised cities
Eight square miles of Jakarta have been digitised and simulated in three dimensions. That will not surprise computer gamers, but Urban Resolve goes much further: the detail extends to the interiors of 1.6 million buildings and even the cellars and sewers beneath, and it also includes no fewer than 109,000 moving vehicles and people. Even the daily rhythms of the city have been simulated. The roads, says one commentator, "are quiet at night, but during weekday rush hours they become clogged with traffic. People go to work, take lunch breaks and visit restaurants, banks and churches."
Digitise any target city and integrate this with the flow of data from many thousands of sensors and cameras, stationary and mobile, and you have something far more powerful than the regular snapshots today's satellites can deliver. You have continuous coverage, around corners and through walls. You would never, for example, lose those mortar bombers who got out of their car and ran away.
All this brings omniscience within reach. The US web-based magazine DefenseWatch, which monitors developments in strategy and hardware, recently imagined the near-future scenario of an operation in the developing world in which a cloud of minute, networked sensors is scattered like dust over a target city using powerful fans. Directed by the sensors, unmanned drones patrol the city, building up a visual and audio picture of every street and building. "Every hostile person has been identified and located," continues the scenario. "From this point on, nobody in the city moves without the full and complete knowledge of the mobile tactical centre."
Another Darpa project, Integrated Sensor is Structure, is working on the apex of such a system: huge, unmanned communications and surveillance airships that will loiter above target areas at an altitude of 70,000 feet - far above most airline traffic - providing continuous and detailed coverage over a whole city for a year or more.
From these platforms, all the information could be fed down in real time to soldiers and commanders carrying the hand-held computers being developed by the Northrop Grumman Corporation with Darpa funding. The real aim, however, is not to expose flesh-and-blood Americans on the ground, but where possible to use robots. That way there will be no "body bag problem"; and in any case machines are better equipped than human beings to process and make use of the vast quantities of data involved.
In one sense, robots are not new: already, armed drones such as Predator, "piloted" by CIA operators from screens in Florida, have been responsible for at least 80 assassination raids in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan (killing many civilians as well). Defence contractors have also developed ground-based vehicles capable of carrying cameras and weapons into the battlefield.
But this is only the start. What will make the next generation different is that they are being designed so that they can choose, all on their own, the targets they will attack. Operating in the air and on the ground, they are being equipped with Automated Target Recognition software capable not only of comparing signals received from new-generation sensors with databases of targets, but also of "deciding" to fire guns or launch missiles automatically once there is a good "fit". Automated killing of this kind hasn't been approved by anyone yet, but it is certainly being planned. John Tirpak, editor of Air Force Magazine in the US, expects initially that humans will retain the last word, but he predicts that once robots "establish a track record of reliability in finding the right targets and employing weapons properly", the "machines will be trusted to do even that".
Planners believe, moreover, that robot warriors have a doomsday power. Gordon Johnson, a team leader on Project Alpha, which is developing robots for the US army, predicts that, if the robot's gun can return fire automatically and instantly to within a metre of a location from which its sensors have detected a gunshot, it will always kill the person who has fired. "Anyone who would shoot at our forces would die," says Johnson. "Before he can drop that weapon and run, he's probably already dead. Well now, these cowards in Baghdad would have to pay with blood and guts every time they shoot at one of our folks. The costs of poker went up significantly. The enemy, are they going to give up blood and guts to kill machines? I'm guessing not."
Again, this may sound like the plot of a B-movie, but the US military press, not a body of people given to frivolity, has been writing about it for some time. DefenseWatch, for example, also featured robots in that future war scenario involving sensors dispersed by fans. Once a complete picture of the target city is built up, the scenario predicted, "unmanned air and ground vehicles can now be vectored directly to selected targets to take them out, one by one".
The silver bullet
It is shocking, but will it happen? The project has its critics, even in the Pentagon, where many doubt that technology can deliver such a "silver bullet". But the doubters are not in the ascendant, and it would be folly, against the background of the Iraq disaster and the hyper-militarised stance of the Bush administration, to write it off as a computer gamer's daydream.
One reason Washington finds it so attractive is that it fits closely with the ideologies of permanent war that underpin the "war on terror". What better in that war than an army of robot warriors, permanently cruising those parts of the globe deemed to be "supporting terrorism"? And what a boon if they destroy "targets" all on their own, with not a single US soldier at risk. Even more seductively, this could all take place out of sight of the capricious western media.
These technologies further blur the line between war and entertainment. Already, games featuring urban warfare in digitised Arab cities are everyday suburban entertainment - some are produced by the US forces themselves, while a firm called Kuma Reality offers games refreshed weekly to allow players to simulate participation in fighting in Iraq almost as it is happening in the real world.
Creepy as this is, it can be worse: those involved in real warfare may have difficulty remembering they are not playing games. "At the end of the work day," one Florida-based Predator operator reflected to USA Today in 2003, "you walk back into the rest of life in America." Will such people always remember that their "work day", lived among like-minded colleagues in front of screens, involves real death on the far side of the world? As if to strengthen the link with entertainment, one emerging military robot, the Dragon Runner, comes with a gamer's control panel. Greg Heines, who runs the project, confesses: "We modelled the controller after the Play Station 2 because that's what these 18-, 19-year-old marines have been playing with pretty much all of their lives."
The US aspiration to be able to kill without human involvement and with minimum risk raises some dreadful questions. Who will decide what data can be relied on to identify a "target"? Who will be accountable when there is an atrocity? And what does this say about western perceptions of the worth and rights of the people whose cities are no more than killing fields, and who themselves are mere "targets" to be detected, tracked and even killed by machines?
Finally, the whole process feeds alarmingly into the "homeland security" drive in the cities of the global north. The same companies and universities are supplying ideas to both, and the surveillance, tracking and targeting technologies involved are closely related. What we are seeing is a militarisation of urban life in both north and south that helps perpetuate the biggest and most dangerous myth of all, which is that technical and military solutions can somehow magic away resistance to George W Bush's geopolitical project.
Sorry about FCC reference, it's FSS. oops eom
FCC promo's new card at LV Conference 6/12-14
GoldenGate Real-Time 2006 User Conference Las Vegas Nevada
June 12-14 will feature FCC as Silver Sponsor (and who kindly included Globetel Communications on the Sponsor's page) and exhibitor with it's latest Card, merchant management, ATM & POS
services. Occupying Booth #4.
What is GoldenGate Real-Time Conference?
Quote:
"The technology may be about real-time transactional data management -- but the event is about the real-time, high-value exchange of information, solution ideas, experiences, hands-on training, and industry trends. Join us for this exciting three-day GoldenGate customer event that gathers worldwide IT leaders focused on staying ahead of the competition."
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http://www.goldengate.com/conference/sponsors.html
2006 Silver Sponsors:
FSS
FSS was founded in 1991 and pioneered the payment solutions in India. Partnering with industry leaders: ACI Worldwide, Integrated Research Ltd., and GlobeTel Communications Corp, FSS services 30 large banks in India and neighbor countries. FSS has setup a large infrastructure with several HP NonStop, Unix, Windows and Linux systems to provide offsite and onsite software development and support services to customers worldwide. Visit us on http://www.fss.co.in
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What is GTE's connection to FCC:
They put the remittance/voip phone card angle into an otherwise standard debit card.
From March GTE Letter to Shareholders:
"In India, for example, in an exclusive partnership with the largest financial processor in the country, FSS (partly owned by the Carlyle Private Equity Group, of which President George H. W. Bush is a Senior Advisor), our Magic Moneyä Division will shortly enable more than 25 million, existing debit card holders to become immediate members of our Magic Moneyä network, giving them access, at very low cost (i) to money remitted from relatives abroad, and (ii) to inexpensive telephony so that they are able to stay in touch in a way that was unimaginable even a year ago. A remarkable breakthrough. The money remittance market alone is projected to grow to $257 billion per year by 2009. And, GlobeTel’s Magic Moneyä Division expects to be one of the near term leaders in capturing a large part of this market through its unique digital technology in major remittance markets and, ultimately, globally, through its Super-Hub. Full Divisional profitability expected in the third quarter of this year."
AirForce near-fiction on near-space nears STRAT
So, when the military takes pen to hand for a little next decade sci-fi, what do you suppose is used as reference materials to base future systems, deptments, missions?
Good science -sure. But, actual mature/immature projects, reasonable & high-gain proposals and just plain common sense would play an active role in such 'entertainment'.
So, it's so much fun to read about the fictional weekly operations of the USAF near-space command center based at Edwards AFB and their fleet of 600 foot Rigid Airships(not Lockheeds blimp!!lol) as they cordinate missions for Homeland security, Iraq, and blue water Naval support!
Yes, those calm desert mornings make the perfect time to launch those 600' Stratellites (oops, i guess they never said that...but definitely implied i'd say!) don't they.......swami :)
p.s. Read the author's resume following the article. Think he knows what he speaks of? enjoy.
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj06/sum06/steves.html
Document created: 1 June 06
Air & Space Power Journal - Summer 2006
Near Space 2015
A Conceptual Vision of Near-Space Operations
Maj Mark Steves, USAF
Editorial Abstract: Major Steves presents a fictional account of an Air Force unit in 2015. In this scenario, from a perch too high for most aircraft to reach but too low for most space objects to orbit, airships provide reconnaissance and communication services for military operations ranging from combat missions to humanitarian assistance.
The following story is fiction. It depicts a “week in the life” of a hypothetical Air Force organization conducting near-space operations in the year 2015. The systems described are based on current concepts, both real and proposed. Projected timelines for developing such systems make the following scenario plausible. Although the story rests on these factors, the vehicles, payloads, organizational structure, and missions remain the fabrication of the author and have no direct relationship to any specific contractor proposals.
The near-space realm has no official or legal definition. Loosely, the concept refers to very high altitudes above which most aircraft cannot fly, but below altitudes at which satellites and other space objects reach orbit. Current proposals focus on technologies that would operate between 65,000 feet (20 kilometers) and 325,000 feet (100 kilometers). We have long known of the benefits of a platform able to function in the near-space realm. Both manned and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have flown at near-space altitudes for decades, albeit for short durations. In 2006 advances in technology allow us to envision long-duration operations in near space. The US military, other government agencies, and commercial providers have all recognized the immense potential of this realm. Aggressive programs now under way seek to create a family of near-space systems to provide true persistence to a variety of users.
Our story begins in the year 2015. Collaborative efforts of the Department of Defense (DOD) and industry have resulted in three distinct near-space systems. Small, hand-launched balloons incorporate a glider system to return payloads after transiting a region. Joining these semiexpendable systems are large, fully reusable airships and high-altitude lightweight UAVs (HALU). All of these systems are operational and controlled by Air Force Space Command’s 1st Near Space Group (NSG). We begin this week on a typical Monday morning as day-shift operations begin. . . .
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START
Monday
Maj Hilary Newman, USAF, arrives at the 1st NSG operations building early in the morning. A unique organization, the group is responsible for the near-space systems in use by the US government. Based at Edwards AFB, California, it has units based worldwide to provide near-space capabilities as needed—anyplace and anytime. Major Newman begins her week as commander of the day-shift operations crew. Manned round-the-clock, the operations center is the hub of all near-space operations for the DOD. The ops-crew commander serves as the conductor, overseeing a team of officer, enlisted, and contractor personnel who monitor and control the active near-space systems. As Major Newman receives her changeover briefing from the night-shift commander, the rest of her team members arrive and assume control over their individual stations.
Of primary concern to the ops crew this morning is the health and status of the on--station airships. Over 600 feet long, the stratospheric airships are the “Big Daddies” of the near-space fleet. Capable of lifting 2,000 pounds of payload, these remarkable craft have more in common with the great dirigibles of the 1930s than with the smaller blimps that most people recognize from sporting events. In addition to giving the aircraft its torpedo shape and rigid structure, the combination composite-and-metal skeleton acts as a frame upon which the propulsion, power, and payload systems rest. Hydrogen gas fills internal ballonets, providing the lift necessary to keep the massive craft airborne. Propelled by four ducted fan engines, the airship can reach a top speed of 45 knots. Flying with prevailing winds allows the airship to reach almost any point in the world from its base in 10 days. Once on station, the craft drives itself to an operational altitude where it sets up a station-keeping pattern based on wind speed and direction. Remaining there for the standard six-month time frame requires a renewable power source. Thus, thousands of square feet of ultraefficient photo-voltaic cells cover the top half of the airship, converting radiant sun energy into stored power. Because they fly above the clouds, the airships have uninterrupted sunlight throughout the day. At night, the batteries release their power to the airship’s systems and payload. This energy-efficient system allows round-the-clock operation for a full six months.
Major Newman and her team have as their first priority checking the status of the five airships currently in the air. Because the airships remain on station autonomously, no one has to “fly” them manually from the ground. After technicians enter coordinates from the global positioning system (GPS) into the redundant onboard computers, the craft will maintain itself within a predetermined footprint. Satellite-communication links to the ops center provide real-time telemetry of the airship’s position and health. Any deviation of position or anomaly in the platform or payload triggers an immediate alert at the corresponding monitor station. If necessary, a trained operator can assume control of the airship, but switching to redundant components usually solves such problems. A quick check by the incoming crew confirms that all five airships are in the proper location, performing their missions.
Three airships are currently assigned to the Department of Homeland Security and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The new fleet of lighter-than-air craft drew their names from the first US military balloons used during the Civil War: the Intrepid and the Washington fly a slow pattern up and down the east and west coasts of the US mainland, with the Excelsior monitoring the southern border. As new airships come online, they will add to the coastal monitoring duty, filling in gaps that exist with only the two current assets. The data from their onboard sensor suites goes directly to NORAD, which shares it with the Office of Homeland Security. This data provides a lookout capability of hundreds of miles, monitoring the air, ground, and maritime traffic approaching our borders. Before the airships assumed this mission, border coverage was spotty. Now, however, it has increased to nearly 100 percent all the time.
The two remaining airships flying today provide support to the US military. Tensions between the allied Iraqi nation and Iran have caused concerns for our troops stationed at bases there. US Central Command requested that the Constitution monitor the border for any signs of hostile activity. The Eagle provides support to the Navy, maintaining station over a carrier battle group on maneuvers in the Pacific. Because of the situation in that area, it has become standard practice to assign an airship to the Navy to provide unparalleled over-the-horizon monitoring in all directions around the fleet. With all five airships on station and in running order, Major Newman and her team settle down to what they hope will be an uneventful day.
On the other side of the world, the unit responsible for another near-space system also hopes for a quiet week. Located at a Royal Air Force base in the United Kingdom (UK) and responsible for HALUs based in the European theater, the HALU-Europe squadron is one of two planned regional HALU units. Next year the HALU-Pacific squadron will station its fleet of aircraft at an airfield in Japan. Until then, the UK-based team bears any HALU taskers that come down. The newest arrow in the near-space quiver, the HALUs have been operational for only a year. These vehicles—evolutionary upgrades from the UAVs used for the past decade—differ from the older systems in two crucial ways: autonomy and persistence. Designed to fly without human input, they typically require manual control only during takeoff and landing, when the aircraft’s 220-foot wingspan can create problems. Once at altitude, the onboard flight-control system flies the aircraft to the proper coordinates to begin its racetrack pattern. Additionally, whereas other UAVs can loiter for perhaps two days, HALUs can remain on station for up to two weeks; such persistence makes them true near-space assets.
Because of the time difference, Lt Col Toby “TR” Masino, the HALU-Europe squadron commander, began his day hours before Major Newman went on duty. Colonel Masino ensures that the five HALUs in his care remain at a constant state of readiness. Although the big airships provide the most lift and endurance, they still take more than a week to arrive at their destination. But conditions in today’s world sometimes demand a more rapid response. Unlike the airships, HALUs can reach nearly any location in their hemisphere in just one to two days. True, their payloads of 1,000 pounds amount to only half that of the airships, but that’s still enough to meet the needs of vital communications and/or reconnaissance missions. Not powered by solar energy, they usually stay on the ground until needed. A modular “plug-and-play” design unites the airframe and payloads, allowing the squadron to have a variety of payloads on hand for quick integration. Colonel Masino’s team has just finished two weeks of exercises over Africa, so he’s looking forward to a quiet week of rest and refurbishment.
Another 1st NSG team, however, is just beginning its mission. In a friendly Central American country, MSgt Ed Grant oversees the arrival of his balloon team—one of two teams in the 1st NSG responsible for deployed operations of the Tactical High Overhead Resource (THOR) balloon system. One of the first near-space systems to become operational back in 2006, THOR began as a demonstration program but exceeded everyone’s expectations and quickly entered into service. After proving its worth in combat operations, it became a standard feature for US military operations worldwide. Today, the team is deploying to support a special operations mission to extract American hostages held by narco-terrorists.
The THOR system employs a rather simple concept: suspending a glider with an internal payload from a balloon. After reaching a preset altitude, the balloon drifts with the wind over a region of interest. At the conclusion of the mission or before the balloon drifts into unfriendly territory, the glider detaches from the balloon. Using onboard GPS, it autonomously flies back to a secure landing zone, where crews can hook up the glider and payload to another balloon and relaunch them. Using multiple launches from an upwind location, the team can provide continuous coverage over a region indefinitely. For the upcoming extraction, enough balloons and gliders have shipped with Sergeant Grant’s team for five days of continuous coverage—although everyone hopes that only one day will suffice.
As Monday draws to a close, Major Newman and Colonel Masino have caught up on some paperwork. Sergeant Grant gets his team into quarters and then works on the ops plan for the upcoming mission. As the midshift begins its duty on the ops floor, the near-space airships keep watch high above their assigned areas.
Tuesday
Tuesday morning dawns bright and clear over the California desert. Major Newman performs her shift-changeover duties and attends to her checklist items. After establishing the state of the on-station airships, she contacts the various parts of the 1st NSG that are conducting their own operations.
First she calls Colonel Masino, who reports a ready status for his HALUs. The second call goes out to Sergeant Grant and his deployed THOR team, who have arrived at their operating base along the Central American coast. Veterans at this sort of task, the teams deploy about eight to 10 times per year to provide short-duration near-space support. Regular Army, Navy, and Marine Corps units have integrated balloon operations into their own forces. Each month the 1st NSG training squadron runs sessions for selected troops to learn the ins and outs of balloon operations. This training gives ground-force commanders an internal near-space balloon capability without having to call on the 1st NSG to deploy to every theater, leaving the THOR-deployable teams free to support smaller units such as the special ops on today’s hostage-rescue mission.
Equipment checkout for the team includes assembling the gliders, integrating the payloads (in this case, communication-relay repeaters), and inspecting the balloons. As with every deployment, the team has brought more supplies than it should need. Because of the critical, time-sensitive nature of the operations, the team can’t wait for replacements or additional equipment to arrive. Besides, even with advances in weather-prediction tools, forecast accuracy remains limited. Strong winds can push a balloon across the designated area in a matter of hours, requiring the launching of more balloons. Or a single balloon can effectively hover over the area for a day or more, with the mission ending only when the onboard batteries are depleted.
Sergeant Grant checks with his weather expert for the optimum launch location. Accurate weather forecasts are vital to the success of the mission since the team needs to know where and when to release, based upon wind speed and direction at altitude. Because the extraction operation has a small window, they will launch multiple balloons to provide redundancy in case equipment malfunctions or the operation runs longer than planned. All seems set for balloon releases at 0130 local time. Sergeant Grant informs Major Newman of his team’s status and schedule; he then signs off to give his troops some rest before they commence operations.
For her last call of the morning, Major Newman checks with the maintenance squadron, whose job this week entails final preparations for launching the airship Union—the oldest in the fleet—named after the first US military balloon. Since returning to base three weeks ago, the Union has undergone routine refurbishment, which includes inspection of the 50,000 square feet of solar arrays for damage and replacement as necessary. The fabric skin and internal structure of the airship undergo inspection as well. Previously deployed for border-monitoring duty over the United States, the airship received a new payload last week for its upcoming mission. All the airships have proven themselves tough, requiring little maintenance after a routine deployment, so the Union will launch tomorrow and begin its transit to replace the Constitution over Iraq—weather permitting, of course. The airships can remain at altitude for months, but they are difficult to maneuver close to the ground. Because of the wind limit of 15 knots for launch, the craft typically depart in the calm desert air of early morning. For the rest of this day, Major Newman will prepare her team for tomorrow’s launch.
Tuesday draws to a close just as it began—quietly. But tomorrow will be an entirely different story.
Wednesday
The Union rolls out of its immense hangar in the predawn hours. The crew encounters no problems during rollout, and the weather is picture perfect for launch. Major Newman’s team at the ops center performs its prelaunch checkout and ensures that the airspace has been cleared. At the hangar, the visitors assemble. Even today, an airship launch draws a crowd. The 600-foot-long craft dwarfs everything except its hangar. It doesn’t linger on the ground very long. Any wind gusts could make the airship hard to handle and dangerous to the ground crew, who checks the Union’s systems—especially the command and control system, which will guide this giant on its journey. Back in the ops center, Major Newman watches her team closely, and all systems check out green. With a final go/no-go check, the order comes down to release the airship from its mooring mast, and the vehicle takes to the misting morning sky. Slowly at first, the airship begins to rise. The large, ducted engines point the vessel into a nose-up attitude. The airship doesn’t need the engines to reach altitude; they provide direction to make the ascent as efficient as possible. Weather-squadron personnel, who have already mapped out the upper-air wind speeds and directions, are in contact with other weather forecasters around the world. Thirty minutes later, the airship has become a mere dot in the sky. After just over an hour, it has reached cruising altitude.
Utilizing jet-stream winds, the Union rides the currents in a west-to-east pattern on a preprogrammed flight route. Avoiding any country’s overflight restrictions, the airship follows a path to the Mideast that should have it arriving in eight days. Once in motion, the airship assumes control of its flight. The autonomous guidance system constantly updates its position via GPS satellites and monitors speed and direction. The ops-control team can manually input commands but only rarely needs to. For the next week, the team will monitor the airship’s progress as it makes its way across the world. Once it arrives over Iraq, control authority for both platform and payload will transfer to the local commander.
The relative quiet that Major Newman and her team have enjoyed this past week comes to an end early in the afternoon. They hear reports of a major earthquake on the Indian coast, first on the news and then through the 1st NSG’s Tasking Office—the conduit for any potential users of the group’s near-space assets. Normally they support DOD users but sometimes receive requests from other government agencies, allies, and even foreign countries. Today, as the scope of the earthquake becomes clearer, Major Newman and the team realize that a major humanitarian crisis may soon unfold. The Indian government quickly calls for assistance from any nation, and the United States responds. In addition to the typical disaster relief that our country always rapidly provides, these days the world looks to US near-space assets for critical help. Although the 1st NSG can’t deliver blankets or food, a single near-space asset over a disaster zone can establish communications to the entire region. The first use of these craft over the mud-slide disasters in Panama three years earlier clearly demonstrated this fact, and the Tasking Office knows that the Indian earthquake may lead to a formal tasking from the Department of State.
On the ops floor, Major Newman—expecting a call-up—begins to examine her options. There are two airships on station in that part of the world, but the Navy craft isn’t carrying the correct type of payload. The Constitution, on the Iraqi border, could carry out the task, but it’s unlikely to receive an order to abandon its current mission. The Union, launched this morning, could revector to assist in the short term, provided the Constitution can remain on station a little longer. But it will take the Union a week to arrive at the disaster site. Since she needs something more immediate, Major Newman decides to give the HALU--Europe squadron a heads-up.
In the United Kingdom, Colonel Masino isn’t surprised by Major Newman’s call since he’s been watching the news as well. After receiving an update from her, he decides to start recalling his team. Confident of an imminent tasking order to use his HALUs in the relief effort, Colonel Masino wants to be ready to roll when he gets the word. The five aircraft stay in a normal state of readiness, but he raises them to an even higher level of alert and has his team start prepping one of the aircraft with a standard communications payload. In addition to providing relay for ground-to-ground radios, the payload also serves as a satellite-communications booster, allowing ground personnel to use low-power radios to talk through satellites to any location in the world. In only three hours, a HALU stands loaded with the payload and positioned for fueling. Because of the hazards associated with fueling, Colonel Masino holds off on that last act until formal notification arrives. In the meantime, his controllers have already plotted the best possible route from the UK base to the disaster zone. The HALU can arrive within 24 hours after launch and should be able to loiter for 10–12 days. If necessary, his people can launch a second HALU or perhaps redirect an airship. During the process of examining all these possibilities, Colonel Masino gets the tasking order: launch the HALU!
Members of the fueling crew move around the aircraft in their protective clothing, loading the liquid hydrogen. The specialized hangars at the base allow inside fueling, out of the weather. In the event of strong winds or winds blowing from the wrong direction, the HALUs stay grounded. Luckily, today’s conditions are favorable, so the HALU shortly begins its taxi to the end of the runway. At this stage, a certified pilot from the squadron’s ops center manually controls the vehicle. A similar setup back at the 1st NSG at Edwards AFB could control the HALU as well, but today those personnel only shadow the takeoff. After final checks of the craft’s systems and an all-clear from the tower, the aircraft begins to roll slowly down the runway, and after using a good two-thirds of it, the HALU begins to rise. The great wings, drooped while the vehicle rested on the ground, now rise up, lifting it into the sky. The HALU performs no radical maneuvers or barrel rolls upon takeoff—just a gentle turn to line up on the predetermined heading. Like an airship, the HALU takes advantage of prevailing winds at lower altitudes to reach its destination as quickly as possible. As it approaches India, it will climb to 65,000 feet and begin to orbit the disaster area. But that won’t occur until tomorrow. For now, Colonel Masino turns over control of his HALU to the team back at Edwards and starts prepping another vehicle in case it is needed.
Thursday
By 0130 local time on the Central American coast, Sergeant Grant’s THOR team members stand ready for their first balloon release. They use hydrogen bottles, filled the day before, to release three balloons tonight. Based on the wind speed and direction, they can launch inside their deployed base. At the proper time, the inflated balloon attaches to the small, lightweight glider, which contains the relay payload that will provide communications connectivity to ground and airborne forces conducting today’s operation. An hour after release, the balloon reaches an optimum altitude of 70,000 feet. The THOR’s command and control system, operated via laptop by the launch team, monitors the ascent and commands venting and ballasting to hit the target altitude. Because of the good weather and relatively short distances involved, the gliders for tonight’s operations will fly back to their launch location after separation from the balloons. The THOR teams can deploy a separate recovery crew if necessary, but Sergeant Grant is glad that he doesn’t have to split his team today.
Three hours later, the team releases the second balloon, and the extraction mission is a go. As this balloon drifts over the target area, controllers switch on its payload systems and switch off the first balloon’s payload. At this point, they command the first glider to release from the balloon. After plummeting for several thousand feet, the glider begins an automatic pullout and orients itself back to the launch location, over 200 miles away. Forty-five minutes after release, the glider performs a soft landing in the predesignated clearing. Sergeant Grant remains unaware of the operation’s progress, but deep in the jungle the special forces troops consider his balloon a lifeline. As they strike out to the terrorist camp, their small tactical radios maintain contact with the recon unit monitoring the site and with the air-support helicopters in a holding pattern several miles away. Before the use of near space, such communication was impossible because terrain reduced a radio’s effective range to about five miles. Now troops can talk to forces over 350 miles away. After rendezvousing with the recon team, they call in air support and begin their attack. Catching the terrorists completely off guard, the special forces quickly infiltrate the compound and rescue the American hostages. Within 10 minutes, all of them exit the camp, and helicopters come blazing in to pick them up.
Back at the launch location, recovery-team members retrieve the first glider and load it into their vehicles after notification of mission success. They then command the second glider to release and return to base. Knowing that their systems saved lives today, they are justifiably proud.
By the time Major Newman arrives for the start of her day, the THOR team has recovered all its equipment and has packed up. She finds it pleasing to report up the chain not only the team’s success, but also the HALU’s good progress and likelihood of arriving over the disaster area later today. Having coordinated with the various military and civilian relief agencies descending on the area, the 1st NSG’s Integration Office needs to ensure the most effective use of the communications services provided by the HALU.
Like the day before, Thursday holds some surprises. On the ops floor, Major Newman notices an alarm at the station monitoring the airship Eagle, which supports the Navy carrier fleet. Apparently, the craft has blown off station. The upper-level winds have started gusting, blowing too hard for the airship’s engines to fight. The ops floor swings into action, first gathering accurate weather data for all altitudes around the airship’s position. Perhaps it’s possible to rise above or go below the gusting winds to regain station. The weather-squadron personnel on shift discover a layer 5,000 feet lower than the current cruising altitude that would allow the airship to recover over the fleet. Even better, they do not foresee the higher winds at operating altitude lasting very long—good news because operating at lower altitudes requires more engine performance (therefore more power). Although they have not yet reached a critical threshold, if the engines cannot handle the power requirements, the payload might need to shut down. In the worst case, the airship would have to drift, sometimes hundreds of miles, until the batteries recharge sufficiently to allow the airship to fly back to its station—something that happens periodically to almost all of the airships.
Fortunately, the gigantic footprint from near-space altitude often means that the data flow remains uninterrupted, and users on the ground have no idea that their airship is no longer directly overhead. In only rare circumstances are the airships unable to recover within a day or two. The loss of a near-space asset, even for a day, sounds the alarm bells. Already informed of the temporary loss of his big eye-in-the-sky, the fleet commander on the Navy ship launches conventional aircraft to take up the slack. Formerly the norm for providing fleet defense, these aircraft now launch only rarely. Major Newman considers this scenario a prime example of the vital importance of near-space assets in today’s world. It seems hard to believe how we conducted operations without them.
For the Eagle, a new flight plan will take it to a lower altitude. By the time the day shift ends, the airship is heading back to the fleet. The midshift team will take it the rest of the way.
Friday
Friday typically signals the end of a work week. But for the men and women of the 1st NSG, the work week never ends. The HALU begins to circle over the Indian disaster area, its payload providing communications coverage to a devastated region. Relief forces in the most remote and hardest-hit areas can now communicate with the aid center, arranging for medical airlift and supply delivery. Six airships are in the air; the Eagle has come back on station, shadowing its Navy user; the Union rides the jet stream east to Iraq; and the THOR team prepares to head home.
Back on base, Major Newman takes her lunch break to watch the dedication of their newest airship hangar. Although it contains upgrades such as a new fueling system and mobile scaffolding, this structure’s retractable roof sets it apart. Operating much like a sports stadium, the roof will allow airship launches in all but the most severe weather, thus improving the team’s ability to meet users’ needs for near-space platforms.
Major Newman is proud to be a member of an organization that has become so significant to military operations in such a short time. The vision of Air Force leadership in the past several years—aggressively pursuing near-space systems to operational status—has paid off. Near-space assets fly every day in all corners of the world, providing support to military, diplomatic, security, and humanitarian causes. People now take their presence for granted, and Major Newman can only imagine what future fleets will ply the near-space realm.
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Contributor
Maj Mark Steves (BS, University of Delaware; MS, Air Force Institute of Technology; MBA, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University) works on the Commander’s Action Group, Headquarters Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), Peterson AFB, Colorado. He formerly served as the Near Space Command lead at AFSPC, working within the Directorate of Plans and Requirements. He performed launch-operation tasks for 22 Delta II missions at Cape Canaveral AFS, Florida, as well as satellite command and control duties at Onizuka AFS in Sunnyvale, California. At the National Reconnaissance Office, he conducted satellite-operations tasks and served as a mission manager for launch integration of national space systems. Major Steves was competitively selected to attend the first Intermediate Developmental Education class at the Air Force Institute of Technology, Dayton, Ohio
Raytheon/Brazil deal + Strat=US/Mex $$
The success of Raytheon's Brazilian surveillance program (article below) produced further contracts for Airport security here in the US and a possible leg up on competiting bids for the $2 billion dollar US Mexico/Canada border programs.
With an operational Stratellite program accentuating an already proven security infrastructure such as Raytheon and "tentative" partner Sanswire would offer, competitors may well be hard pressed to counter. -pete
http://business.bostonherald.com/businessNews/view.bg?articleid=140020
Raytheon Bids For Border Contract
By Jay Fitzgerald
Boston Herald General Economics Reporter
Saturday, May 20, 2006 - Updated: 12:17 AM EST
A vast sensor system being used in Brazil’s Amazon forest could be the high-tech model for a similar “virtual fence” along America’s borders - if Waltham-based Raytheon has its way.
Raytheon is now preparing its official multibillion-dollar bid proposal in response to the U.S. government’s recent call for ideas on how to better monitor the Mexican and Canadian borders to prevent illegal aliens and potential terrorists from sneaking into the country.
Bids are expected on May 30 - and a final contract for the so-called “SBInet” system will be awarded this fall by the Department of Homeland Security.
Raytheon is hoping its past effort to build an electronic monitoring system in Brazil will give it a leg up on competition for the U.S. contract.
Four years ago, Raytheon finished up its $1.4 billion contract to construct Brazil’s “System for the Vigilance of the Amazon,” whose high-tech monitoring devices are intended to catch drug traffickers and people cutting down trees in the 2 million-square-mile region of the Amazon.
The idea is to tie together ground and satellite sensors, planes flying above, mobile radars, and other high-tech gadgets to track people and trucks within the Amazon.
“All of the (information) feeds into one central command system,” said Lynford Morton, a spokesman for Raytheon, a defense contractor that’s increasingly moving into non-military business areas.
In March, four airports in the New York City area gave Raytheon a $100 million contract to build anti-terrorist monitoring systems at the airports.
That contract came after New York officials visited the Amazon, Morton noted.
“It’s (similar) to what we’re doing in Brazil,” said Morton of the U.S.-border system federal officials envision.
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Now imagine a 7-8 Billion dollar Saudi securtiy deal (Raytheon to bid on) thrown into the mix. -pete
http://www.tacticalreport.com/Articles/TRWB-Insight/2006/12052006.htm
LA_LT: Centerline Communications LLC. link/address
http://www.centerlinecom.net/index.htm
Hope this helps.
Seth Jayson part of SEC Probe (article)
[Note: Nilremerlin, Thanks much for the face time you spent with our suit counterparts. Great defense on our part! -pete]
While the article is slanted (author is also part of SEC probe),
it's refreshing nonetheless to read Seth's name listed as a
"probee" [let's hope it also involves the use of a colonoscope!].
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06088/677765-28.stm
When Firms Bark and SEC bites, Result is More Cowed Analysts
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
By Jesse Eisinger, The Wall Street Journal
The Securities and Exchange Commission is still going after journalists' communications with sources -- but now it's through the back door.
A few weeks ago, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox slapped the hand of his staff for taking the "extraordinary" step of subpoenaing journalists in a market-manipulation probe without notifying commissioners. Now, as part of that probe, the agency is demanding that a small stock-research firm, Gradient Analytics, turn over all its communications with nine reporters, including me, as well as CNBC.
Securities lawyers say it's perfectly reasonable to ask market sources for their communications with journalists if they suspect people are using reporters to spread misinformation.
While subpoenaing journalists directly was a "big mistake," says Stanford law professor Joseph Grundfest, "it shouldn't be surprising and it shouldn't disappoint anybody" that the agency is going after market participants' communications with journalists. "It would be a very strange world if people could be held liable for every lie they told except for the biggest lies they told to reporters," he adds.
But that's a view from the airy realm of the abstract. Context is what matters here. What's really happening is that the SEC is displaying alarming credulity about allegations leveled by a chief executive who has been the target of critical Wall Street analysis and articles. In doing so, the agency has provided a clear roadmap for CEOs of that ilk: Whine loudly enough that there is a conspiracy afoot to harm your company and the agency can be made to do your bidding.
The nine reporters have one thing in common: They all have written critically about Overstock.com or been named by CEO Patrick Byrne, the Dan Brown of the business world, as card-carrying followers of a "Sith Lord" or "Master Mind" out to get him and his company. Mr. Byrne has repeatedly charged that certain financial reporters are "crooked." He has said some reporters are "condoms" to be used and discarded by nefarious hedge-fund market manipulators.
Mr. Byrne laid out the whole scheme on a flow chart -- a maze of crisscrossing lines and boxes that makes Mr. Brown's "Da Vinci Code" look like "Where's Waldo?" Distributed in conjunction with an Aug. 12, 2005, conference call the CEO held, the chart includes six of the nine journalists named in the subpoena. The other three wrote about his company subsequently.
Overstock, for those not following this story, is a money-losing Internet retailer that hasn't hit many of its publicly announced business goals. Overstock has sued Gradient and hedge fund Rocker Partners, accusing them of conspiring to drive down its stock so short-sellers can profit from the decline, in part by colluding with reporters in disseminating misleading information. Another company, Canadian drug maker Biovail Corp., has also sued Gradient, along with other hedge funds, making similar allegations. Gradient and the hedge funds deny the charges.
The SEC's roster is puzzling. A person familiar with the SEC's probe says the journalists' names were compiled from multiple sources, but it looks more like a download of Mr. Byrne's enemies list. For one, it includes Seth Jayson, a writer for Motley Fool, a Web site that has carried numerous positive articles about Overstock. Mr. Jayson has been an exception there, writing a handful of critical pieces that incited the wrath of Mr. Byrne.
Another reporter on the SEC list, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, hasn't even written an article for Barron's (like The Wall Street Journal, a Dow Jones & Co. publication) since late 2002. Her only apparent connection to this affair is that she was mentioned by Mr. Byrne in that infamous conference call last summer and included on his Sith Lord flow chart. The only rationale he alluded to in the call was that she had the audacity to marry a hedge-fund manager. True, she once wrote a piece on Biovail for Barron's. But that was back in 1996 and it was positive, concluding that the company's stock might be "a bitter pill for short-sellers to swallow." (The SEC list also includes two other Dow Jones journalists, MarketWatch's Herb Greenberg and Dow Jones Newswires' Carol Remond.)
Journalists aren't above securities laws. If the agency has serious evidence of wrongdoing by reporters, it can and should investigate them. And even if Overstock and Biovail are overvalued dogs deserving of SEC investigation themselves, it's entirely possible that Gradient and the hedge funds may have violated securities laws. Granted, it's not possible to understand the full contours and extent of an SEC investigation. The SEC may be looking more widely at Overstock and Biovail.
"It's appropriate for market manipulators to think twice before trying to use journalists to mislead investors," said John Nester, an SEC spokesman, speaking generally. "We don't believe the policy chills law abiders from communicating with the press."
That's naive. Even though the SEC is on solid legal ground now, it's stubbornly compounding its initial mistake by persisting in this line of inquiry. That should trouble any investor who expects the SEC to be spending taxpayer money wisely and not hindering the free flow of information.
The key issue, says University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein, is whether the SEC has enough solid information to think that the communications with journalists are relevant or is "acting on rumors and going on fishing expedition." The latter "deters future communication of the sort that is very important (for) market efficiency."
What the SEC is doing is less akin to a fishing expedition than a snipe hunt. As it stumbles through this investigation, what is the likely effect?
Let's hope it will be modest. Perhaps sources who want to communicate with journalists will just use their phones, rather than email.
But that's unlikely. The message is that the SEC will give credence to any company that is a target of skeptical research if it complains. What will honest analysts and investors think as they witness this? They'll be less inclined to talk to journalists and to each other -- just the sort of thing the SEC's Mr. Cox publicly fretted about after learning his agency had subpoenaed reporters directly. Analysts also will be less likely to take on tough targets. Why analyze a prickly company if the end result is an SEC subpoena, legal costs and bad publicity?
Stock research already is overwhelmingly positive. Does the SEC really want to encourage more traffic along that path of least resistance?
House cuts into High Altitude Airship funding
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Well, if the House gets it's way, this reads like the MDA's Lockheed high Altitude Airship program may get it's 'wings' clipped a tad.
Time will tell for the final version of FY 07 budget, but really should not suprise us -especially since Darpa canceled the Walrus program; another Lockheed-favored contract.
Watch an see the whole HAA project funding get yanked from LM, upon successful conclusion of Stratellite II flight testing this June. In My opinion, of course.
-Gov't gets free R&D from GTE, and Lockheed just bleeds.....pete
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http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=1734841&C=america
GOP Trim Bush Defense Budget
House Armed Services Committee members cut about $1 billion from “pie-in-the-sky” military programs and shifted the money to proven weaponry during markups of U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2007 Defense Authorization Act April 25.
In a show of defiance against the Bush administration, Republican subcommittee leaders declared the president’s spending priorities out of sync with a tight budget, fast-rising war costs and service needs.
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., boasted that his subcommittee cut $605 million from such future-oriented programs as the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS), the Air Force’s Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and the new presidential helicopter.
The subcommittee redirected the money to more mundane purposes, such as upgrading Army M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, and buying new equipment for the National Guard.
Weldon, who chairs the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, said the cuts are sure to upset defense contractors, including some in his eastern Pennsylvania district. But he declared that in making the cuts, Congress is “doing its job as a separate and equal branch of government.”
Weldon’s subcommittee reviewed $73 billion worth of procurement, research and development spending for 2007. In addition to tinkering with the president’s priorities, the subcommittee added $3.8 billion in new spending to the 2007 budget.
Members on the Strategic Forces Subcommittee also took from the future to pay for the present.
Members cut $183.5 million from Bush’s $10.4 billion planned spending on ballistic missile defense systems. Hardest hit were such trouble-plagued programs as the kinetic energy interceptor, the multiple kill vehicle and the high-altitude airship.
Rep. Terry Everett, R-Ala., the subcommittee chairman, said subcommittee members were concerned about the “technical risk” of those programs and decided to “shift funds to programs with more near-term capability for the war fighter.”
The Strategic Forces Subcommittee cut $80 million from the troubled Transformational Satellite, and $30 million from the Space Radar program, citing auditors’ concerns that the programs are not yet ready for the large increases the Defense Department sought for them.
The subcommittee also cut funds for modifying Trident ballistic missile submarines to fire conventional missiles. Before going ahead, the subcommittee wants assurances from the Navy that some safeguard has been developed so that conventional launches from the submarines are not misinterpreted as nuclear attacks.
Weldon and the senior Democrat on his subcommittee, Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, emphasized that the changes to Bush’s budget were bipartisan decisions aimed at an administration that seems out of touch with fiscal reality and real defense needs.
Abercrombie said the war in Iraq is now costing $10 billion a month and is “putting pressure on every other part of the defense budget.” He called the budget changes “a good-government approach to making tough decisions when funds are limited.”
The subcommittee version “is a significant improvement over the budget presented by the president,” he said.
The subcommittee added $408 million to the 2007 defense budget and ordered the Defense Department to buy the alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. Weldon said he is confident that competition between engine builders will hold engine prices down and recoup the $1.8 billion it would cost to finish developing the second engine.
The subcommittee also cut $241 million from long-lead funding to buy 11 JSFs in 2008 because the plane will not be adequately tested by then. The cut would leave enough money to buy five JSFs.
Army Moves
More than half the money the subcommittee redirects comes in a $325 million cut to the Future Combat Systems program. Bush sought $3.9 billion for FCS and another $2 billion for affiliated programs in 2007. “The problem is that the Army simply has too many bills to pay and not enough funding to cover them all,” Abercrombie said.
Some FCS money would be used instead to buy radios, rifles, ammunition, machine guns, night-vision gear and other ordinary battlefield gear.
The subcommittee approved a $276 million increase for M1 tank and Bradley fighting vehicle upgrades. Weldon said increasing the number of tanks and Bradleys the Army can upgrade will dramatically cut the per-vehicle cost. The cost of tank upgrades can be cut from $7.4 million apiece to $5 million, and Bradley upgrades can be cut from $8 million per vehicle to $3 million, he said.
The subcommittee approved a “modest cut” of $39 million to the presidential helicopter program and complained that senior White House officials are inappropriately pressuring the Pentagon to speed the program up.
“The problem is, they want to move ahead [toward production] without testing,” Abercrombie said. “There has been tremendous pressure from the White House to advance this.”
Senior presidential aides, including the recently departed White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, have pressed the Navy to get the new helicopter flying by 2007, an Armed Services Committee staffer said.
Abercrombie said the pressure is “clearly not appropriate and could be outright dangerous.” The helicopter must be thoroughly tested before it is put into service, he said. The White House has declined to explain why it wants to speed up development, Abercrombie said.
The subcommittee approved adding $1.4 billion to the F-22 program. The president’s bu
Re: crash
Typically, Take-off/landings represent the most critical period for an air vehicle. Thus, any craft which performs the fewest such actions during it's mission cycle, repesents the more stable system, operationally (all other consideration being equal).
The 40 hr. flight plan for a Predator B, vs. the proposed 18 month operating period for a Stratellite, makes a nice competitive advantage for the Sanswire/Raytheon partnership.
Border UAV crashes on duty
One of Sanswire/Raytheon's competitors in aerial platform/surveillance systems for homeland security crashed yesterday while on duty. Article is below, but from personal study have read first hand accounts by experienced pilots operating the predators that they are some of the most difficult airships to land. -pete
http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=4816527&nav=HMO6
Posted April 25, 2006 11:45 AM MST
News 4 has learned that an un-manned air vehicle belonging to the Border Patrol has gone down.
An agent says it happened between midnight and 6 Tuesday morning while it was patrolling the Arizona/Mexico border.
It crashed on Morning Star Ranch, a remote area about 10 miles east of Interstate 19.
The aircraft was the only UAV the Border Patrol owned. It had just been unveiled in September of last year.
Agents say the UAV was extensively damaged. The aircraft itself was worth 10 million dollars.
A News 4 crew is heading out to the crash site. We'll bring you the latest details as they become available.
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To review craft specifics go here:
http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/predator/
Article: Senate carves 1.9Billion for border
Looks like Gov't is very serious about our southern border. This complements nicely last article on homeland securtiy.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=a1VbkciW_Ueg&refer=us
U.S.Senate Adds $1.9 Bln in Spending on Border Security (Update1)
April 26 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate voted to cut $1.9 billion from Defense Department programs so it can spend the money on aircraft, patrol boats and other equipment used to boost U.S. border security.
The Senate approved the change in a 59 to 39 vote on an amendment to a $106 billion emergency spending measure for military operations and hurricane recovery.
Under the amendment, $1.9 billion will be used to replace surveillance aircraft, patrol boats, ``outdated'' vehicles, communications equipment and other improvements that lawmakers said were urgently needed to secure the nation's borders.
``The purpose of this amendment is to basically give the people who are defending us on our borders -- the border security agents, the Customs agents, the Coast Guard -- the tools they need to their job right,'' said Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican. ``We can bring the border under control and we're on a path to do that.''
Democrats denounced the spending plan, saying it forced lawmakers to choose between supporting American troops and protecting the country's Southwestern border.
`Urgent Need'
``Border security is an urgent need and it should and must be addressed by this Congress,'' said Senator Hillary Clinton, a Democrat from New York. ``But our security and our values are not served by choosing between protecting our troops and protecting our homeland.''
A Democratic alternative proposal, which would have made paid for the border security equipment without cutting defense programs, was rejected on a 54-44 vote.
Republicans said their proposal would cut non-emergency defense programs, not funds for troops, and was more fiscally responsible because it wouldn't increase the overall size of the spending measure.
The legislation includes money to replace the U.S. border protection agency's only unmanned surveillance aircraft, which crashed yesterday in Arizona.
The Bush administration, which requested $92 billion in emergency spending, has threatened to veto the $106 billion spending measure unless lawmakers cut more than $10 billion out of the plan. The House has approved legislation that closely tracks the president's request, capping the spending at about $92 billion.
Differences between the House and Senate measures will have to be resolved by a conference committee.
Immigration
The border security spending is part of an effort by Majority Leader Bill Frist to gain support for pending legislation, now stalled in the Senate, to overhaul the nation's immigration laws.
The immigration measure would beef-up border security, create a temporary worker program and allow millions of illegal immigrants to gain legal status has stalled in the Senate over disagreements on a number of proposed amendments to the plan. The House has approved legislation that would crack down on the hiring of undocumented workers while calling for the construction of a 700-mile fence along the border. The Bush administration has called for overhauling U.S. immigration laws, including the creation of a guest-worker program.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Brian Faler in Washington at bfaler@bloomberg.net
The Coming Revolution: Look to S. Africa?(article)
Below is an article that should perk our ears. A small nation looking for single-solution Stratospheric airships, providing services well beyond telecom.
It's all about one word....CONTROL. We are talking about the coming Age of Control through persistent monitoring. The All Seeing, Never Blinking, -Eye-In-The-Sky.
This S. African study (and as other research has shown) subtly suggests that to effectively manipulate large scale resources (populous, equipment, media, etc.) through acquired source knowledge, demands the continous realtime, multi-range, big picture/small picture, [yada-yada-yada] environmental monitoring made possible through stratospheric airships.
This kind of Control collates information threads gathered simultaneously from specific patterns of population, communication (hub-tapping?), commerce, finance (strat-card?), meteorological, environmental, etc., facilitating material decisions on direction or deflection of a given condition.
Very powerful, very valuable stuff for those who possess it....or provide it.
So what is S. Africa looking for in ONE delivery device?:
stratospheric flight
long endurance
multiple loads
radar array payload [heavy-heavy]
surveillance payload
communications payload
scientific sensors
This translates into a heavy load-bearing (1000's lbs.)
rigid airship (designs of >400ft favor rigid construction) operating at 64,000ft.
Now, please ask yourself these three questions:
1) Take a look around. How many airship companies fit this profile......nearterm? $$
2) How many countries, just like South Africa, want to know firsthand what the heck is happening around them? $$$$
3) The Trillion dollar question is "Who controls that Control?".....
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Sessa, Sanswire!
http://www.flightglobal.com/Articles/2006/03/14/Navigation/177/205445/South+Africa+studies+high-alti...
DATE:14/03/06
SOURCE:Flight International
South Africa studies high-altitude airships for maritime monitoring
A persistent surveillance stratospheric airship is being studied by the South African government’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) with the aim of improving the nation’s maritime monitoring. The country’s coastline could be covered by seven airships carrying radars with a 600km (325nm) range.
Subject of a R5 million ($807,000) study, the maritime surveillance airship could be a 160m (525ft)-long vehicle generating more than 2kW in electrical power for a 2t sensor, communications and propulsion payload capable of operating from a week to a month.
After examining European and US projects for high-altitude, long-endurance surveillance airships, CSIR has identified common emerging technologies ranging from fuel cells through electric propulsion to solar cells. The Phase 1 study began in September and its airship technology findings will be presented in July.
“[For Phase 2] the intention is to go ahead on a much bigger scale,” says CSIR airship researcher and radar and electronic warfare fellow Francois Anderson.
The government wants to use airships for tackling crime as well as for defence.
customer interest lifting stratos telecom balloons..
The demand for stratospheric telecom is present, even to the extend of funding fringe technology providers, such as these primitive/diminutive free-floating telecom weather balloon projects. Gov't loans, military testing, state interest along with private backing all point to market pressure on the producer for a broad commercial aerial telecom solution yet to be delivered.
How ironic that running parrallel to these efforts is GTE's June test of an advanced solution for the multitude of customers seeking to provide inexpensive metropolitan/rural local services or industrial/emerging national telecom augmented with a slice of hyper-band connection, IPTV, radio, financial, and surveillance on the side......pete
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/8zIYMfPFhk3hAK/Vendors-Look-to-Balloons-to-Support-Cell-Services....
Vendors Look to Balloons to Support Cell Services
By Paul Korzeniowski
TechNewsWorld
04/11/06 5:00 AM PT
Extend America and Space Data use standard weather balloons, which cost about $50 each, to carry special purpose cell towers, which are small and light at 10 cubic inches and weighing less than 12 pounds. The balloons travel 20 miles above the earth, well above commercial airliner pathways.
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With cell phones now becoming popular fixtures among the masses, securing coverage in even the most remote geographic areas has become an important goal for service providers. Cell towers are expensive, however, costing from US$100,000 to more than $1 million to set up, and present logistical problems, such as clearing local regulations and finding suitable placement.
Now, startup companies Extend America and Space Data are trying to alleviate such problems with cell towers supported by weather balloons stationed in the stratosphere. "Because cell coverage is still not ubiquitous and can be difficult to deploy in some areas, there has been a lot of talk about new approaches, such as using weather balloons and airplanes to reach uncovered areas," noted Allen Nogee, principal analyst at In-Stat/MDR.
Confronting Challenges
The two companies use standard weather balloons, which cost about US$50 each, to carry special purpose cell towers, which are small -- 10 cubic inches, and light -- less than 12 pounds. The balloons travel 20 miles above the earth, well above commercial airliner pathways. Because of their high flying position, the devices cover a larger area -- from 50 miles to 500 miles -- than traditional cell towers.
The companies have taken different tracks to promoting their technology. Space Data has concentrated on communications and monitoring challenges that the oil industry faces, launching balloons in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas and New Mexico that help companies track their vehicles and monitor the production of their oil wells and pipelines. In addition, the company is working with the U.S. military on possible strategic uses for the technology.
Reaching Into Parks and Camp Sites
Extend America has focused on the telecommunications market and helping cellular suppliers fill in coverage area gaps. "Now that carriers have deployed cell stations throughout metropolitan areas, they are searching for ways to reach more remote locations like Montana, as well as camp sites," stated Neil Strother, an industry analyst with market research firm the NPD Group.
Former North Dakota Gov. Ed Schafer heads Extend America, which has focused on delivering services first in that state and has a strategic agreement with Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S) . Not surprisingly, the North Dakota state government has expressed interest in the services.
While the new approach should be less expensive and eliminate many of the zoning hoops that carriers often have to jump through, they also raise new logistical issues. Currently, there are questions about how well the systems will perform in bad weather and how much difficulty carriers may have in making sure the balloons stay on track.
"The biggest problem is keeping the cell tower aloft," noted Ira Brodsky, president of market research firm Datacomm Research . Also, the balloons need to be constantly replaced. Once launched, they swell from six feet in diameter to 30 feet as they gain altitude. The earth's stratospheric winds should push the latex balloons eastward at a rate of about 30 mph. How well the signal will work as the balloon moves is questionable. Consequently, carriers are experimenting with different models -- some that rely solely on the balloons and others that include a mix of balloons and terrestrial cell stations.
Maintenance Costs
Eventually, the balloons rise so high that they are out of transmission range and, at some point, they disintegrate into the atmosphere. Carriers want to salvage the cell towers, so the balloons are equipped with a jettison mechanism that sends them slowly to earth via parachutes. The towers are outfitted with Global Positioning Systems, so their flights can be tracked. After the towers land, the carriers need to send runners to retrieve them so they can be used again. How many of the cell towers will be lost or damaged during their return trips is unknown.
In addition to the short-term nature of theit flights, the cell towers have to deal with issues such as battery power. The current systems are outfitted with batteries that last about eight to 10 hours. Consequently, carriers need to be constantly launching and recovering their cell towers.
The end result is that this approach represents an ongoing expense. Estimates are that a company would need to spend $100,000 to $300,000 annually to support this service.
Because of the expense, this approach is expected to take root first in areas that are far off main highways or away from cities. "The areas that still lack cell coverage are spread out and sparsely populated," In-Stat's Nogee told TechNewsWorld. North Dakota, for instance, has a population of about 650,000 and about 20 percent of the residents do not have access to cellular services.
Seizing the Opportunity
In addition to rural areas in the U.S., the firms are looking at foreign countries that have underdeveloped telecommunications infrastructures and rugged terrain as potential customers. GlobeTel Communications has been working with the government of Colombia, for example, to use unmanned communications blimps hovering 10 to 13 miles above the earth to support cellular services there.
At the moment, the balloon proponents remain entrepreneurial ventures. Space Data claims to have raised $33 million from private investors. Extended America raised $9.5 million from companies including Ignition Partners, Catalyst Investors, Cascade Investment and Greenspun Corporation, and has also secured a $11.2 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Utilities Service.
Whether or not that money will be sufficient to keep their businesses afloat will become clear as the year progresses and these firms begin marketing their services more aggressively
Article: WiMAX/Electronic Newsprint/GTE
Pokestake, on R.B. just posted a nice article describing the essential infrastructure (WiMAX) necessarary to allow the coming electronic newsprint technology to become marketable.
It's great to read the expanding services that Wimax through Stratellites with accomodate. $$$
thanks pokestake! Wished i'd "bagged" this one......
Note refereance to Internafta here. They mispelled Globetel, but that's ok. This is probably old news, but worth repeating.
http://www.newsandtech.com/issues/2006/04-06/nt/04-06_epaper.htm
Taking Stock: Electronic newsprint and the interactive newspaper
By Peter G. March
Special to Newspapers & Technology
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Electronic ink, electronic paper, and WiMAX broadband wireless access. Before the end of this decade, these technologies will converge through a series of fortuitous events to help transform, and totally revitalize, the newspaper publishing industry.
Think of the scene from “Minority Report” where a D.C. subway passenger is reading a copy of USA Today on a broadsheet-sized, uber-thin screen. But it’s really USA Right-This-Second, with constantly changing text, photos, video, audio and advertising. While the film is set in 2054, the idea of a lightweight, full-page, interactive newspaper is not all that far away. Commuters, and all subscribers for that matter, will soon be able to unroll their i-newspapers and get continually updated content wherever they may go.
One of the pioneers behind the technology is E-Ink Corp. The Cambridge, Mass., firm was founded in 1997 and built its business around research conducted at the nearby MIT Media Lab. Among its goals: to create a flexible newspaper that blends the versatility of digital control with the dynamics of wireless connectivity.
The binary bindery
The concept behind E-Ink’s electronic ink is fairly simple. Take millions of black and white microcapsules (imagine tiny beach balls or paint particles), each about the thickness of a human hair. The white particles are positively charged and the black particles are negatively charged. They are all floating in a clear fluid within a capsule. When a negative charge is applied, the white particles move to the top of the surface, and at the same time, an opposite charge pulls the black particles to the bottom of the surface. By manipulating the electrical charges, combinations of particles can appear dark or light to form words and sentences. Additionally, black-and-white particles can be positioned to increase the resolution and allow grayscale dithering to occur, just like the ink in an inkjet printer.
While prototypes to date have been monochrome, E-Ink is partnering with Japan’s Toppan Printing Co. to create 12-bit color electronic paper displays. A full-color display with black text and color images on a paper-like white background was shown at the December 2005 FPD (Flat Panel Display) trade show in Japan. Although the output format demonstrated was only about 6 inches in diameter, it is clear that another major technology hurdle has been crossed.
Other companies entering this space include Plastic Logic of Cambridge, U.K., a leading developer of printed flexible thin film transistor (TFT) displays. By combining E-Ink’s electronic inking and imaging film with Plastic Logic’s lightweight, large-format, bendable backplanes, it is possible to create a reading device that uses far less power than a laptop, provides higher quality under all lighting conditions and from all angles, and allows data to be continually refreshed and displayed on a surface that looks and feels like a daily newspaper (see Figure 1).
Fig. 1: Even at this early stage of development, it’s not hard to imagine which medium will be the preferred choice for morning commutes and relaxed Sunday mornings alike.
Whither WiMAX?
To achieve the “Minority Report”-like vision of constantly updated headlines and interactive content, the mobile i-newspaper reader certainly cannot be tethered to a DSL cable or broadband modem connection. That’s where WiMAX comes in. WiMAX is an acronym for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave, and it’s a wireless technology that provides high-speed Internet access over large distances. Instead of having WiFi hot spots at specific coffee shops, bakeries and airport locations, with WiMAX everyone in a community can access the Internet wirelessly wherever he or she may be.
The Cayman Islands recently completed a WiMAX project that now provides 100 percent wireless coverage to all businesses and aims to have 100 percent residential coverage this year. In Russia, GlobalTel Wireless is partnering with Moscow-based Internafta to deploy wireless networks throughout 30 Russian cities over the next two years. In addition, communities throughout the United States are beginning to roll out WiMAX hot spots covering distances from eight to 30 square miles.
Once WiMAX becomes more pervasive, the idea of a portable, updatable online news and information device seems like a logical next step. And this is where electronic newsprint can shine: Why would people want to lug around a heavy laptop or try to squint at box scores on their cell phones if instead they could get the news and information they need from their e-device?
Electronic newsprint will succeed because it mimics the paradigm - in terms of look, feel and format - of a newspaper. Better still, it can be reused thousands of times and requires less than 1/100th the power of a laptop computer. It’s also six times brighter than any LCD display. Plus, the ink doesn’t get on your fingers, no trees are lost in its production, no recycling is required, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
From a publisher’s perspective, the best news of all is that the production of an i-newspaper will closely match the workflows, talents, and business operations of today’s media companies. The demand for current, high-quality content will be as strong as ever. Readers will still want local news, combined with national, international and feature stories. Location-based classified and display advertising will thrive, and existing advertiser relationships will be strengthened as a result of new multimedia package offerings that can be provided.
Accustomed to deadlines
Of course, journalists and editors will need to get accustomed to deadlines that are more similar to those of a Web publishing environment. At the same time, space constraints will become less of an issue, which again will follow the model of the newspaper’s Web site. From a design perspective, the i-newspaper’s layout will be similar to that of the current printed edition. Section fronts can be planned like conventional tab or broadsheet pages, with links to allow i-newspaper readers to click and drill deeper into stories of interest, or (a little further in the future) to jump to sidebar video or audio clips.
It’s also possible to envision advertiser coupons and promotions that can be sent from the i-newspaper to someone’s cell phone, and vice versa. And just as editorial content can be continually updated, the same will apply to advertising content. Real estate agents will be able to provide up-to-the-minute open house information and latest selling prices. Car dealers will be able to send current inventory lists with images and descriptions. In fact, combine the i-newspaper and WiMAX concepts with some personalization, global-positioning and geo-location technologies, and you can see how a retail advertiser will be able to provide targeted sales offers or coupons to individual readers who happen to be nearby the retailer’s business.
The bottom line
Profit and loss obviously will also play an enormous role in the adoption of this technology. To come back to today’s reality for a moment, newspaper publishers were at the end of 2005 faced with newsprint prices of more than $600 per ton, up more than $50 per ton from 2004 figures.
A metro newspaper uses approximately 200,000 tons of newsprint each year. At current newsprint prices, a typical publisher spends about $150 per reader on the manufacture of a daily newspaper. It might therefore prove cost-effective for the newspaper to add value by offering a reading device as part of a print/electronic subscription package.
With rising costs, shrinking circulation, and dwindling ad volumes, the newspaper industry is sure to embrace the complementary benefits that electronic ink and wireless wide-range access will provide. Media companies like Hearst Corp., McClatchy Co. and Gannett Co. Inc. have already taken steps in this direction through strategic investments in E-Ink. Technology powerhouses such as Xerox (through its acquisition of Gyricon), Philips and Sony are also developing electronic paper alternatives in increasingly larger and more legible formats.
Peter G. Marsh is senior vice president and chief integration officer at Atex. He can be reached via e-mail at pmarsh@atex.com or by telephone at 781.276.1616.
unclassified Powerpoint w/Stratellites 2005 Symposium
Yes, you will need powerpoint to open, but it's worth it.
An unclassified briefing was given Nov. 2005 at the Florida
Space Symposium (put on by the same folks running the April 2006 Space Symposium Sanswire will be exhibiting at in Colorado Springs.)
No exhibits were listed, so am assuming GTE and others were for "conversation only".
----------------------------------------
Joint Warfighting Space (JWS) Briefing
(unclassified)
2005 Spaces Sypmosium
11/15-17/05
http://www.spacesymposium.org/floridaspace2005/docs/presentations/Thursday-11-17-05/1015/Volz-Toby.p...
---------------------------------------------
I think they like us....oh and check out the speakers.
http://www.spacesymposium.org/floridaspace2005/information/index.cfm
Gov't of Mayalsia's comments on Stratellites
In a January question/answer press release discussing the nitty-gritty of the GTE/Russian telecom deal, a small snippet of the conversation went like this:
-------------------------------------------------------
Q. Where else does GlobeTel plan to deploy HotZone-based networks?
A. GlobeTel is currently initiating pilot programs in Mexico,
Malaysia, Peru, Colombia, China, Argentina and Germany.
Upon the successful completion of these pilots, GlobeTel expects to beginwide-scale deployments of its proprietary wireless networks in each of these countries.
http://investor.globetel.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=67726&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=802047&highligh...
------------------------------------------------------
This was the first/only such mention by GTE of a WIMAX pilot program in Malaysia (believe also Argentina qualifies here).
Below are the first comments i've come across describing Malaysian gov't interest in our Stats. Which leads one to easily imagine a similar scenario as the Russian deal: lead-in with dense population terrestial WIMAX to validate, then w/further service expansion using non-terrestial Stratellites.
Like the key words used: proposals, maturity, and my favorite
particularly intriguing. Definitely reads like a motivated buyer! -pete
----------------------------------------------------------
Proceedings of the JUPEM
Department of Surveying and Mapping Malaysia (JUPEM)
Kuala Lumpur Malaysia
May 12, 2005
http://www.jupem.gov.my/rtk/GlobalRTKnetNetworkSolution.pdf.
"The expansion and availability of cellular service globally has been astounding, and in some aspects data service can extend beyond that of the companion voice service. Much work is being done to extend the service of RTK networks beyond the cellular coverage areas with repeater and extender type devices. Even as service coverage improves, there may still be hardware limitations. An example is vibration effects on cellular devices with respects to heavy equipment in machine control systems. Again, much work is being done with repeater type devices for use on construction sites.
Cellular may not be the only great innovation to add utility to and enable successful RTK networks. Though somewhat impractical for most uses, direct satellite has been used with limited success for communications with CORS, much of the limitations due to inherent latencies in transmission.Proposals for pseudo-orbit satellites, serving more effectively limited regions of the globe and the maturity of the decades old idea of "stratellites" are particularly intriguing.
Stratellites may not overshadow current cellular systems nor be able to supercede functions thereof, but with respects to particular communications conundrums encountered in developing and using some RTK networks, this could be a viable solution for wide area line-of-sight connectivity. A new twist on the same theme as the Echo balloon-satellites of the 1960's, modern stratellites [9] will likely incorporate lifting-body characteristics on solar-powered-fan driven dirigibles that maintain relatively stationary positions at altitudes in the order of 20,000 meters to serve as a platform for communications antennae and devices. At the fraction of the cost of a conventional satellite, a single stratellite could service an area in the order of half a million square miles."
The Search: or How/to Drink lots & feel useful
Good2be,
am sure most of this stuff has been shared before, but here goes:
1. Best search engine for me is Google. Use it very heavily.
2. one word searches are best used within a very defined field such as Google News. Bringing up the News page opens up a much more refined search vs. the more general (by highly populated) basic web scan. Entering in "Sanswire" into Google web = probably around 38,000 or so entries. "Sanswire" news search will bump that down to but a handful.
3. When using main web search engine for one word (say Sanswire) use the Advanced feature that allows "time frames" to narrow it down a bit. Recent info from the past month could help eliminate repeated entries from say 2003.
4. Best search is one involving multiple key words. Key words or abbreviations or variations on words render the most unique finds. Have a list of key words/acronyms ready to mix-up for your search. Examples: Sanswire, Globetel, DOD, DARPA, Exibitor,Symposium, Conference, HAA,HAP,WIMAX, etc.
5. Use plural of search word. "Stratellites", or "Exhibitors" may render results when singular does not.
6. Milk sites for other links/words/topics. Have unintentionally found related convention links at a search site, clicked on that link and found the search company attending the very same convention....
7. Keep plugging away. Read related articles for understanding while searching for pertinent info. Try to build both knowledge base and shareable Nuggets at the same time. Learn one thing and you learn ten.
Here's a sample search which relieves an as yet unshared presentation which discusses airships and mentions Sanswire.
------------------------------
Google search using two words:
Sanswire Symposium
We find:
Google search using two words:
Sanswire Symposium
We find:
----------------
http://www.dodccrp.org/events/2005/10th/CD/presentations/138.pdf
"Using Near Space Vehicles in The Pursuit of Persistent C3ISR"
By Major Andrew Knoedler
Center for Strategy and Technology
10th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium
4-6th Oct. 2005 Virginia Beach, VA
---------------
Downloading the pdf we find what looks like a pretty cool presentation. Lots of pictures, some featuring our Strat. Nice.
taking a snippet of the above link we can go to the site to gather more info:
-----------------------------
http://www.dodccrp.org/
--------------------------
The "events" link takes us here:
-----------------------------
http://www.dodccrp.org/html2/events_0506.html
-------------------------------------
2005-2006 events list the 10th ICCRTS (International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium) were the paper was presented, but also gives a listing for the next symposium: the 11th. this Sept. 26-28th 2006 in Cambridge, UK
Anyway, nothing stopping you good2be from perusing the 11th symposium for anything Sanswire.....
Good luck with your search, and hope this helps,
pete
nite
orlander_file & good2be
Orlander, in my response to a Pit post, it is immaterial if "pit is a pump for a hedge, a trader, a long, a short" as you write. Accurate, critical information (whether positive or negative for GTE) is the currency we operate with on this board, and by whose hand it is delivered is obviously irrelevant. Unfortunate events found by a board member here are as important as good news.
But,it is just as important that we understand how valuable this board is, and the purpose it serves. Thus, when i read Pitbull74's comments below, i sought to disconnect Pit's correlation between stock price/or lack of company info with the value of our GTE board. The fact is, this board becomes even more invaluable when such conditions exist. Pit would have us believe it is "Dead" or " a waste of time".
This is false.
I do hold that a person may post what he/or she wishes on this board, but we all must stand ready to explain our position.
---------------
Posted by: pitbull74
In reply to: None
this stock, these boards are dead until globetel puts out some real news! all of these theories and related technology articles/finds are a total waste of time imo -pit gone from i-hub for the week...
--------------
Orlander, what part of the above repost do you hold as true?
As for your beliefs, they are your own.
----------------------------------------------------------
Good2be,
You are the perfect example of what this board is all about. Sorry if i've included you here, but it relates so well to the above.
I am glad you like the info provided. Daily i use search engines 4-5 hours researching our company. I share this information with you folks here on investorshub and with invested family & friends because it should be.
In the next post to you, i will share what works for me.
For now let me just respond to what you have written here:
-----------------
"our endless conjecture can be wearisome (w/o Co validation) and, in our current state of limbo, could prove pointless (w/o significant, verified forward progress from GTE)."
---------------
good2be,
Neither of us, nor any message board, can control what GTE does, not what the markets do with S.P., or the amount of time required for a succesful investment. And yes, sometimes a company may be reluctant to share publically what it does/or does not possess [-competition being what it may is one such reason but there are certainly others].
But, we can on our own search for company information that may be "floating around" out there. Unseen info to the masses of investors. I've known posters who have dumpster-dived into company rubbish to find "truth".
Some write emails to IR or company employees, others vist the headquarters like an individual on another board recently did.
Some simply search the web....
And then we share our "find" on message boards such as these.
For what purpose?
To help each individual define themselves (as best we can in the present) as investors (or not) and to possess the BUY/SELL conviction that time, stock price, & other posters would seek to take away.
And yes, when further validation comes by way of a company press release, the stock may well rise/fall, but you were privy to such matters before the market understood
it's signifacance. What does one do with such infomation?
Case in point: Those very same 3 satellite conferences you mentioned Sanswire is/was involved in speaking/exhibiting/or both. This info has yet to be revealed officially by GTE.
Do you view this as significant or ancillary to a micro company promoing (perhaps for the first time) stratospheric airships to a powerful/insular industry such as the satellite biz?
For me, it's hugely significant, and one reason why i don't view posting this information on investorshub as a "waste of time", as some would have us believe.
-I'm off my soak box now, and poppin my beer. So give me a sec and will start on "search post".
pete
Montanar & Mide, thanks for your comments
Montanar, point taken. Agree. Like your state:)
Mide, i lack private posting abilities but thank you here for everything.
pete
Pitbull74
The purpose of a stock message board is for gaining understanding of a particular company relative to it's position in the marketplace (price). It may also expand/reveal the inner-investor through shared methodology, tools, etc.
That's why it's troubling to read the comments you've made, where your personal posts are sadly lumped together with those offering primary/secondary research or investment insights that are of obvious use to investors in GTE. And taking this whole, you label it "a total waste of time."
Now if you were only describing your reiterations of thoughts/desires parroting countless posts typically found on ragingbull/yahoo as worthless, i would agree.
Here's a recent sample -
-------------------------------------
"if huff does have a secret bag of unexpected goodies this week (as with dec 30th) i think his ability to surprise may literally scare shareholders into being afraid to sell their shares in the future. timwould then get the nickname "magicman" -pit
"..time frame on an "expert" to review a business plan? i would think we should hear something this week imo if huff wants to not slip to a gwb poles level with shareholders. if the banks/russians continue to @#$% around with huff on this i would even show my respects for huff if he was to tell them to shove it entirely.."
"tim huff executing business and bringing in a ton of money is the only way to silence all of these scum!!! -pit
-----------------------------
But when we find information that elevates our understanding or questions the current low valuation of GTE, such as our previously undisclosed recent/future attendance of Satellite industry conferences, then this and other posts that help define our place in multiple industries is highly important.
This information may not immediately move the markets, because without instantaeous dispersion of perfect information it's inefficient. But, it is through this inefficiency, we as investors gain an advantage over our adversary. In doing primary research in small companies, we discover what Wallstreet does not comprehend. And based on that knowledge we either continue to take a position at "fire sale prices", or we sell as best we can.
The Market will eventually catch up.
Pitbull, if you need more than a week, not a problem. Take your time coming back with something useful. If you still feel the same when you eventually return, respond as such and to make amends for the comments above i will leave the board.
pete
Sanswire opening 24th International Satellite Conference
Folks, is this a full-court-press on GTE's part or what!?!
This is the third Satellite conference we've stumbled on in three weeks of searching. Incredible.
This one starts on the 11th of June and runs for 5 Big days. During the opening all day Colloquium, 7 topics/speakers make 45 minute presentations followed by group question/answer. Sanswire will be one of those topics covered. Who's speaking? Haven't nailed that down yet.
Personally believe GTE has the goods (walking-talking Strat system) down pat or else why walk into the "lions den" of established Satellite industry with talk of "what ifs" or "can you imagine?".
Not going to happen. Smells like.......victory.
http://www.aiaa.org/content.cfm?pageid=230&lumeetingid=1269&viewcon=other524&id=524
11 - 15 Jun 2006
Hilton San Diego Resort
San Diego, California
ICSSC-2006 will be held jointly with the 5th Annual International Satellite & Communications exchange (ISCe) Conference and Expo. ISCe is the premier West Coast satellite & communications conference and expo, which attracts industry executives, commercial service providers, government decision-makers and senior military leaders. The co-location of ICSSC-2006 and ISCe will provide a unique venue for the global satellite industry, which will attract both the business executives, government leaders and the technical community.
ICSSC-2006 Colloquium
BIG PROGRAMS - BIG SYSTEMS - BIG OPPORTUNITIES
On Sunday, 11 June 2006, we will kick-off the 24th AIAA International Communications Satellite Systems Conference (ICSSC) and 4th Annual International Satellite & Communications (ISCe) Conference and Expo with an all-day Colloquium. The Colloquium will give attendees the opportunity to hear top executives and industry experts discuss the big programs, systems and opportunities in satellite communications today.
At the Colloquium, seven senior executives will present details on today’s new designs and developments in 45-minute sessions. At the conclusion of the individual sessions, the seven senior executives will come together for an hour-long question and answer panel. So come prepared to ask the tough questions!
Big Programs - Systems - Opportunities
1)Mobile Satellite Ventures (MSV) purchased three next-generation L-band satellites from Boeing, with MSV’s new Ancillary Terrestrial Component (ATC) design.
2)DirecTV, with its Ka-band HDTV service, competing with cable systems.
3)Inmarsat’s Broadband Global Area Network service with its own ATC design.
4)XTAR, from Space Systems Loral, providing X-band services to US and foreign military, and to civil customers.
5)NTT will discuss its big disaster communications network in Japan, with a VSAT installed on every Post Office.
6)Arrowhead Global Solutions (a preferred acquisition manager of bandwidth and satellite services for the Department of Defense) just won the contract to connect every US commissary in the world into an integrated VSAT network.
7)Sanswire’s high-altitude platforms – what role will they have in wireless?
Sanswire Networks attending Satellite Symposium 4/3-6/06
22nd National Space Symposium April 3-6 Colorado Springs, Colorado
http://www.nationalspacesymposium.org/index2.cfm
The National Space Symposium is the premier U.S. policy and program forum for all sectors of the space community - commercial, civil and national security - and is an ideal opportunity for information and interaction.
Booth 908 Sanswire Networks (across from Cisco Systems)
http://www.nationalspacesymposium.org/exhibits/index.cfm
-----------------------------------------------------------------
If anyone is counting, this represents back-to-back (apprx. one
month apart) conferences that Sanswire has/or will be attending thus far this short year. Info on the first can be found here:
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp
message_id=10127624
Considering the quality of topics, speakers, and exhibitors, it certainly appears that we are forcefully inserting ourselves into a very powerful crowd. A body, no doubt unaccustomed to a usurper. That is exactly what Sanswire represents. A satellite substitute beyond compare.
Make no mistake, Tim H. knows that to enter the fray, he must possess the "goods" to claim and hold ground.
I can not help but be persuaded by this and similar corporate actions, that the "curtain" is being drawn back and GTE revealed
to the world.
hope this helps,
pete
nite
GTE speaks European Military Space conf.3/8-9/06
Bob Jones and GTE's strategic partner, the good Dr. Bernd Kroeplin, spoke at a military space conference held in Brussels Belgium 3/8-9/06. It should be obvious to the reader, based on the individual speakers presenting and the particulars of topics covered, that the Stratellite and it's various "versions" have arrived.
This is not an event for frivality or dreams, but reality. Serious topics by serious people, and we are among them. Notice any other high altitude airship reps present, like Lockheed or JAXA/CAPININA (Europe's own answer to HAA), or Aeros whatever....?
Nope, just us.
[click OVERVIEW LINK to see speakers]
http://www.smi-online.co.uk/events/programme.asp?is=1&ref=2317&day=2
MilSpace: Challenges and Changes
8th to 9th March 2006, Royal Windsor Hotel, Brussels, Belgium.
Overview:
Following the huge success of Global MilSatCom – the largest independent military satellite communications conference in Europe, we are proud to present the latest in our military space series…MilSpace 2006 Challenges and Changes
SMi’s inaugural MilSpace 2006 conference will explore recent developments in space systems and the growing importance of space applications for the military in the 21st Century. Bringing together a dynamic mix of high level government and military officials and leading suppliers and industry experts, the conference will examine SatCom capabilities, space surveillance, navigation, defence, intelligence and the importance of space agencies. MilSpace 2006 will provide a platform for discussion, giving a clear picture of the current issues surrounding military space.
MilSpace 2006 will also address challenges and solutions for the future of military space, technological developments within space-based systems and lessons learned through operational experiences to aid future battlespace operations
Day 2
3:10PM
STRATELLITE FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND MILITARY USE
Sanswire family of Airships - Uses for the Airship
Homeland security support capabilities
mobile communications relay for surface and air troops
battlefield tactical communications relay
Real-time immediate orthorectification image processing
command and control uplinks and downlinks for time critical ISR data
GPS and SATCOM data/communications relay
data relay to or from AWACS or JSTARS assets to other air or ground assets
extensive electronic warfare (EW) system platform to aid "blue force" operations
Bob Jones, President, Sanswire Networks, LLC.
Professor Dr Bernd Kroeplin, Project Co-ordinator, University Of Stuttgart Institute Of Sanitary Engineering.
Holter/Holein1: Luv the clip/quote/ & products
Holter
That was cool! Wish every response was a movie clip like that.
Would sure as heck post more often...thanks again. very uplifting.
Holein1, believe that quote, or portions of it, have been circulated by T. Huff & company for well over a year. Yeah, connecting the telecom dots with Strats in a geopolitically challenging arena such as the Philippines appear to be our forte. It's no accident that both Peru and Columbia, the 1st/2nd countries to purchase Strats, are both facing strong anti-gov't challenges (read rebels), much like this island nation.
Surveillance coupled with telecom loosely/strongly controlled by the gov't makes for a great combination.
4 Hotzone Products/ see sites before they're yanked
Taken from the Globetel-Europe.net site; it's so nice to see all the brand extensions being offered. Obviously, this is well thought out and attempts to fully flesh-out the market early on.
Brillant. Adds to our lead.
Capturing all market niches (within the sector) before the competition can match speaks volumes on the maturity of our offering and Huff's market savvy.
Yes, it would have been nice to read specs, but am sure site will be filled in as news in announced. Nice to have the
heads-up though on a full product plate such as this. Imagine the typical one-size-fits-all first launch by most companies in a new market; GTE rocks!
pete
Homezone 2000
http://www.globetel-europe.net/cms/front_content.php?idcat=163
Hotzone 4000
http://www.globetel-europe.net/cms/front_content.php?idcat=164
Hotzone 4010
http://www.globetel-europe.net/cms/front_content.php?idcat=165
Hotzone 5000 WiMAX
http://www.globetel-europe.net/cms/front_content.php?idcat=166
some perspective on Lockheed's prototype
A lot of questions/beliefs/ & competitive concerns have been expressed here regarding the Lockheed airship currently being tested at Plant 42 in Palmdale.
Not attempting to reshape anyones opinions here, but would like to share some information possessed.
1). The Walrus Project, a gov't project to field cargo/personnel with super-blimps (Lockheed and WorldWide Aeros were the only two competitors up for mega-contract to be awarded in the Fall 06)has been essentially CANCELLED (per Darpa). See link.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1644771&page=1
Excerpt from above link:
"Worldwide Aeros Corp. was in competition with Lockheed Martin Corp. to produce a new transport for the military called Walrus. But according to Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the main research wing for the Department of Defense, funding for the project was pulled and will end this summer. (pg.2)
2). Parallel program for a Transport Airship designed for civilian use (e.g. luxury cruisers of the sky) exists for Worldwide Aeros (again read link above).
3.)Heavy-lift transport Airships, whether designed for military or civilian use, currently incorporate these elements:
a.aerodynamic lifting-body shape (versus cigar shape blimp);
Note: Many airship companies are implementing this element (including both Lockheed and Worldwide Aeros) into their respective designs. This is not a Sanswire propreitary element.
b. non-rigid and semi-rigid design (versus rigid e.g. GTE Strat)
c. vectoring (or angled) lift from thrust-producing propellers housed beneath the airship are needed to vertically stablize craft
Note: Stratospheric airships would never incorporte thrust vectoring device. This is a tool for an airship which needs a lifting assist for a load too heavy to transport solely with the lifting gases contained within the airship.
d). manned with low operating ceiling and in no way designed for stratospheric flight
----------------------------------------------------------------
With the above info in mind, revisit Petprodoc's reposted article link to review Lockheed photo. Here's my take:
The non-rigid lifting-body shape in combination with manned flight and 1 to 2 seperated ducted thrust vectoring devices (1 of which might be the gondola or more likely a combination gondola/fan) visible beneath airship, is a clear tipoff to a Heavy-Lift Airship.
While the Lockheed article mentions that this prototype in not related to the Walrus project, if such airship was designed for civilian use or with the cancellation of said project in mind, the writer would still be relating accurate info even if heavy lifting (non-stratospheric) was the desired purpose of Lockheed's prototype.
-------------------------------------------------
Hope this helps.
pete
The Door opens.........
This probably falls into the category of say, "Huff's in Switzerland", but will post for consistency's sake (having done so in the past a few times and truthfully does seem kinda timely with Strat-test-on-Tuesday quoted by those in-the-know with IR and yes, even jivving with the 5 day weather forecast....):
The Main door (West facing) of our Plant 42 facility was nearly wide open this afternoon -nearly being around 2/3rds the way parted in the center.
First time i've seen it this wide open since i've been going past the facility twice daily for work. Yes, have witnessed the East door drawn way back during Summer and Fall (especially before/after Sky Dragon presentation last November, but there is a partition unevenly dividing the building in two and does not leave much room in the East side of the facility -say for a Strat.
Yes, the parking lot held 20 cars or so (but in fairness the hangar next to us was also open, so not sure who-was-who). From the parking lot one could see well into the hangar all the way to the back partition across 50% of it or so. Believing the Strat to have a 90ft width, one should have been able to see a portion of the side (assuming it was parked against the unviewable South wall), given the fact that the building is under 200ft wide and the angle of observation tapering from a 2/3 aperture to 1/2 of back wall a couple of hundred feet inside.
Nothing viewable was in the hangar.
Draw your own conclusions, or even better just ignore this post because in the end T. Huff will do what he wishes and it does not matter a bit whether we say he's in Switzerland or the Strat's at Edwards.....
Hope this is useful to some.
pete
How fortuitous for LLC Internafta....
By a simple act of God or man, our Russian partner may now view the flying beast (strat test for Feb.) which is to form the cornerstone of it's future telecommie...
What luck, yes? Or did it not seem strange from the start that 'Boris' inked a 600 million dollar deal without the slightest care about the actual capabilities of the Stratellite?
I do not pretend to know the ways of international business or law in this age of terrorists and oligarchs -just some of the ways of men.
Gosh, i wonder too if our Russian friends could have made any money off a prudent postponement, considering that they may have been operating under a deadline to assign this contract to some enitity late last year.
Chance favors the prepared mind and Boris looks prepared, but then, so am i. Come hell or high water, am aiming to see the STRAT through it's paces, no matter how fortune shines.
pete
Lockheed/Worldwide Aeros compete gov't Airship contract
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-blimp17jan17,0,1946470.story?coll=la-story-footer&track=mo...
While obviously not competitively revelant to Globetel's operations, this article exposes similarities of Worldwide Aeros' venture into airship transport and our Stratellite program (btw Aeros has previously stated their intentions to field a stratospheric airship, so who knows how much of the technology utilitized in this transport design works it's way into other projects.).
Incorporating a rigid airframe, lifting body, (Cool picture of internal framework of Aeros rigid airship available at web site.)
and challenging competitor(s) of much larger size make Aeros sound like Globetel's "kissin cousin". -pete
ARTICLE
---------------------------------------------------------------
Small Company Aims to Soar Above Lockheed to Win Blimp Contract
The firm is confident the Pentagon will pick its design for a craft to move troops and cargo.
By Peter Pae, Times Staff Writer
It's the blimp industry's version of David and Goliath.
An obscure Tarzana firm run by Russian emigres is locked in competition with Lockheed Martin Corp., the world's largest defense contractor, to win a Pentagon contract to build 900-foot- long, blimp-like aircraft to move cargo and troops into combat zones.
Worldwide Aeros, which makes blimps used for flying billboards, generated plenty of buzz in aerospace circles last summer when it and Lockheed each landed $3-million contracts from the Pentagon to do preliminary design work.
The Pentagon's advanced research arm expects to pick the winning design in September and award a $100-million contract for a prototype airship. The winner then has a chance to bid on a blimp production contract potentially worth $11 billion over 30 years.
"In reality we don't feel Lockheed is our technical competitor," said Igor Pasternak, 41, Worldwide Aeros' founder. "There is only one solution, and we have that one solution," the Russian-trained scientist insisted.
Pasternak's company "wrote a proposal that seemed outstanding," said Norman J. Mayer, a veteran airship designer for Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and the Navy, who helped the Pentagon evaluate the blimp proposals. "They were very serious about what they were trying to do. Time will tell how well they do it."
Winning will not be easy.
Lockheed farmed out the blimp job to its Skunkworks unit, the legendary aircraft design house in Palmdale that has developed many of the nation's most advanced aircraft, including the SR-71 and U-2 spy planes.
By contrast, Worldwide Aeros, with 40 employees, expects $10 million in revenue this year from selling blimps for advertising, including promoting MasterCard and Spalding sporting goods.
Pasternak has built about 30 blimps in the U.S. His blimps cost about $3 million each; components are made in Tarzana, then assembled in hangars in San Bernardino or Palmdale.
But Pasternak said he had faced bigger challenges than outwitting Lockheed, including persuading six of his employees and their families to flee Russia with him in 1993.
Pasternak grew up in Lviv, a Ukrainian city of 700,000 near the Polish border.
After getting a degree in civil engineering, he formed his own company in 1988 and began working on a Soviet project to develop mammoth airships to transport cargo to the remote Siberian oil fields. It was one of the first private aeronautics ventures permitted under Mikhail S. Gorbachev's perestroika reforms, Pasternak said.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Pasternak's investment capital dried up. With growing anti-Semitism in his country, Pasternak said, he and his colleagues fled Russia and emigrated to the U.S.
Eventually, he was able to persuade several investors to fund his aerospace company based on his experience making blimps in Russia.
The Pentagon hopes that these new airships can help move U.S. troops more quickly. Currently, personnel and equipment travel separately; heavy weapons, such as tanks, are transported by ship, which can take more than a month.
Ultimately, the Pentagon envisions buying 14 to 16 heavy-lift airships, each capable of carrying 500 tons of cargo and passengers.
The airships would travel up to 138 mph, with a range of more than 10,000 miles.
In addition to increased cargo capacity, the airships would give the U.S. military additional flexibility in moving troops closer to the battlefield because in theory the craft could bypass ports and runways. The airships would have only one requirement: an open landing field about two to three times their size.
"It can totally change how you conduct warfare," Pasternak said of the concept.
He envisions the aircraft as not a blimp or an airplane but as a hybrid of the two. The vehicle would rise into the air thanks to nonflammable helium, much as a blimp does, but the bottom of its hull would act like a wing to give it additional lift and control, he said. The craft would be powered by propellers.
Pasternak contends that this new design would be easier to handle and that it could land under a pilot's control, without ground handlers having to pull on tethers as with conventional blimps. But the concept still faces several hurdles, analysts said.
Although engineers have decades of knowledge in developing airships, none has been built to carry the tonnage the Pentagon envisions for its project.
Moreover, the airships would be vulnerable to antiaircraft fire, not only because of their size but also because they would be flying at relatively low altitude of about 10,000 feet, bringing them within range of shoulder-fired missiles.
The challenges for the prevailing bidder will be immense. But win or lose, Pasternak sees the project as a means to a different end: to build commercial versions for carrying business cargo or even paying passengers.
His "cruise ship in the sky" would have hotel-like rooms, vast lobbies with viewing areas, a restaurant and space for about 180 passengers. It would fly from Los Angeles to New York in about 18 hours.
"You can have dinner, go to sleep and wake up in the morning in New York," Pasternak said.
He said the craft would cost about $46 million to build — about the same as the 150-seat Boeing Co. 737 passenger jet but half as expensive to operate.
Businessmen have talked up grand plans for passenger blimps for decades, and none has taken hold. Ever since the hydrogen-filled passenger dirigible Hindenburg burst into flames in 1937, lighter-than-air ships have been little more than a footnote in history.
Pasternak, who doesn't shrink from taking on a behemoth like Lockheed, brushes aside any qualms.
"It'll be a completely different approach to moving things," he said.
Sanswire & Emergency Communications Systems Confer.12/13
Bob Jones spoke at the National Conference on Emergency Communications Systems this past Dec. 12-13.
Am taking this obviously as a very favorable outcome of November's Sky Dragon presentation to the gov't. Wished Bob had also spoken on panel 7, but GTE is just getting it's feet proverbially "wet" here so as the upstart it may take time to work our way up to the likes of Northrop et al. Will say no more; just felt like sharing again.
nite.
pete
http://www.emergencycomconference.org/NCEC_REGISTRATION_5.doc.
Panel 6 Panel 6: Development of New IT and Communications Systems (11:
00am-12:30pm speaker: Bob Jones
http://www.emergencycomconference.org/about_us2.html
National Conference on Emergency Communications Systems
December 12-13, 2005
George Washington University—Media and Public Affairs
Building-Auditorium, 805 21st St. NW, Washington, D.C.
Conference Objectives:
A series of disastrous events in the U.S. and abroad has
alerted us to the fact that our emergency response
capabilities are woefully lacking. The objectives for the
National Conference on Emergency Communications
(NCEC) are to identify ways to upgrade U.S. emergency
communications systems as well as methods to make them
more interoperable. There is a further specific objective to
develop a White Paper that comes up with top
recommendations as to how to improve emergency
communications and IT systems. This White Paper will build
on not only the results of the December 12-13 Conference
but also will incorporate ideas and proposals from testimony
before the U.S. Congress, policy papers such as those
developed by Mobile Satellite Ventures, the Satellite Industry
Association, press articles and interviews with key officials
and executives from the private and public sectors.
It is hoped that the recommendations that emerge from the
NCEC and the ensuing White Paper will be innovative,
cost-effective and realistic. Although many recommendations
will require public funding at the national, state, local or even
international level, it is believed, that in some cases,
proposed actions might be implemented by commercial
organizations on the basis of various incentive or tax credits
or via standards-making organizations. It is hoped that
results, conclusions and recommendations from the NCEC
and the following White Paper will be highlighted in the
national and trade press to be maximum extend possible.
Further it is intended that the White Paper will go directly to
key people in Congress, in the Executive Branch and other
state and local agencies.