Teledesic was a company founded in the 1990s to build a commercial

broadband In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals at a wide range of frequencies and Internet traffic types, that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. ...

satellite internet constellation A satellite internet constellation is a constellation of artificial satellites providing satellite internet service. In particular, the term has come to refer to a new generation of very large constellations (sometimes referred to as a megaco ...

. Using low-Earth-orbiting satellites small antennas could be used to provide uplinks of as much as 100 Mbit/s and downlinks of up to 720 Mbit/s. The original 1994 proposal was extremely ambitious, costing over 9 billion

USD The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

and originally planning 840 active satellites with in-orbit spares at an altitude of 700 km. In 1997, the plan was scaled back to 288 active satellites at 1400 km. Teledesic Corporation changed its name to Teledesic, LLC by pro forma assignment of its license, granted on 26 January 1998. The commercial failure of the similar

Iridium Iridium is a chemical element with the symbol Ir and atomic number 77. A very hard, brittle, silvery-white transition metal of the platinum group, it is considered the second-densest naturally occurring metal (after osmium) with a density of ...

and

Globalstar Globalstar, Inc. is an American satellite communications company that operates a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation for satellite phone and low-speed data communications. The Globalstar second-generation constellation consists of 24 l ...

ventures (composed of 66 and 48 operational satellites respectively) and other systems, along with bankruptcy protection filings, were primary factors in halting the project, and Teledesic officially suspended its satellite construction work on 1 October 2002.

Description

The Teledesic system would have provided "fiber-optic like" links to customers around the world. The system was to act as a network operator and support communications ranging from high-quality voice channels to broadband channels supporting video-conferencing, interactive multimedia, and real-time two-way data flow. Teledesic was notable for gaining early funding from

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Chairman

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

Craig McCaw Craig McCaw (born August 11, 1949) is an American businessman and entrepreneur, a pioneer in the cellular phone industry. He is the founder of McCaw Cellular (now part of AT&T Mobility) and Clearwire Corporation (now part of T-Mobile via the Sprin ...

, founder of McCaw Cellular Communications, and

Saudi prince The House of Saud ( ar, آل سُعُود, ʾĀl Suʿūd ) is the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia. It is composed of the descendants of Muhammad bin Saud, founder of the Emirate of Diriyah, known as the First Saudi state (1727–1818), an ...

Alwaleed bin Talal. The system would have used

Ka band The Ka band (pronounced as either "kay-ay band" or "ka band") is a portion of the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum defined as frequencies in the range 26.5–40 gigahertz (GHz), i.e. wavelengths from slightly over one centim ...

to send and receive signals from users. Each satellite would have acted as a node in a large-scale packet-switching network. The service was planned to begin in 2002 with a total cost of the project estimated at US$9 billion. The satellites were

three-axis stabilized Spacecraft attitude control is the process of controlling the orientation of a spacecraft (vehicle/satellite) with respect to an inertial frame of reference or another entity such as the celestial sphere, certain fields, and nearby objects, et ...

with a faceted antenna on the bottom and a large articulated solar panel on top. The spacecraft was designed to be compatible with over 20 different launch vehicles to permit launch option flexibility. The satellites were to be launched into a 700 km circular, near-polar (98.2°)

Sun-synchronous orbit A Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), also called a heliosynchronous orbit, is a nearly polar orbit around a planet, in which the satellite passes over any given point of the planet's surface at the same local mean solar time. More technically, it is ...

. The initial rollout was to include 12 orbit planes with 24 spacecraft in each plane. The antenna footprint for each satellite was to be about 700 km². Teledesic planned 288 satellites in 12 LEO orbits, each at an altitude of 1315 km.

BATSAT (Teledesic T1)

A demonstration satellite for the Teledesic constellation, originally labeled Broadband Advanced Technologies Satellite (BATSAT), and later renamed Teledesic T1 or just T1 (

COSPAR ID The International Designator, also known as COSPAR ID, is an international identifier assigned to artificial objects in space. It consists of the launch year, a three-digit incrementing launch number of that year and up to a three-letter code repr ...

1998-012B), was launched from

Vandenberg Air Force Base Vandenberg may refer to: * Vandenberg (surname), including a list of people with the name * USS General Harry Taylor (AP-145), USNS ''General Hoyt S. Vandenberg'' (T-AGM-10), transport ship in the United States Navy, sank as an artificial reef in K ...

on a

Pegasus-XL Pegasus is an air-launched launch vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) and now built and launched by Northrop Grumman. Capable of carrying small payloads of up to into low Earth orbit, Pegasus first flew in 1990 and remai ...

launch vehicle on 26 February 1998 at 07:07:00 UTC. The satellite differed in size and design from the anticipated satellite for the final constellation, but was designed to support two-way communications at speeds up to E1 rates in the 28.6-to-29.1-GHz band. The 120 kg satellite was placed in a 535 km × 580 km orbit at 97.7° inclination and a period of 95.8 minutes. It was the first Ka-band satellite in orbit owned by a commercial enterprise. The satellite decayed from orbit on 9 October 2000.

References

External links

Lloyd's satellite constellations - Teledesic

Teledesic home page
*

What Goes Around: Teledesic 2.0
��a column by Robert X. Cringely, October 29, 2009 {{Satellite constellations Communications satellites in low Earth orbit Internet technology companies of the United States Defunct spaceflight companies Satellite Internet access