2009: A Space Odyssey

When I was a kid there was a program on ABC radio called "Jason and the Argonauts".

It came on each weekday afternoon, after school had finished around 3pm. It was somewhat "intellectual" and was meant to be educative. There were prizes for the best Poem submitted to the program - that is for those whose poems were read out and heard Australia wide.  Other than that there was a kind of "Mentioned in Despatches" prize if ones name was announced as having submitted something "worthwhile". 

Jason and the Argonauts was something like a secret society in that ones actual name was not read out  - only ones code name.  You see, you joined Jason and his Argonauts by writing to the ABC and they allocated a code name.  I was given Argus 49.

Argus 49 was mentioned once for having written a poem about a cat.  I did not have a cat - but poetic licence allowed me to have one and write a poem sufficiently well to get a mention!  I think I was 8 or 9 years of age at the time.

For some reason I have long held the belief that Jason was tied up with Ulysses of Homer's Odyssey; but I will have to move on from that as I only recently discovered that the only connection between Jason and Ulysses was that they both had to pass by the temptations of the Sirens.

Oh well, I guess you get that, when you don't have a good classical education.

Anyway, the real point of this yarn is that I have applied to purchase my own piece of the Space Odyssey.  And it is for this reason:

The last time I was by myself crossing the badlands west of Boulia in Queensland, toward Alice Springs via the Plenty Highway, I found that I could not make contact with anyone on my High Frequency Barrett 550 radio which is installed in the Land Rover.  The radio is modified so that I can operate it on the Ham Bands as well as the VKS737 system; but all was quiet.

I thought to myself, what happens if I have a heart attack way out here?

That's the kind of thing that crosses the mind of a 61 year old lone traveller 500 kilometres from anywhere!

Recently I received some advertising for the Thuraya Sat Phone pictured above.  It is pocket sized and about the same size as my mobile phone.  The price seemed right. Thuraya in Arabic means the Seven Sisters, or Pleiades.  The phones come from a UAE outfit, and are regarded as the "terrorists Sat phone of choice".  They were used in the Mumbai attack. 

 

However, they can't be all that bad as my phone will use a Boeing Satellite which sits in a geostationary position 35,786 km above Singapore - and it gets there via a Russian Zenit three stage rocket, fired from a SeaLaunch pad.  SeaLaunch uses a setup like an unmanned Oil Rig platform to launch the rockets which carry the satellites, while the Command Ship stands off at a safe distance of 5 miles or so. There have been explosions; but most launches have been successful. The launches take place in international waters in the Pacific Ocean with Kiribati being the nearest country. 

 

I found all this information fascinating and while Googling around found a reference to an article written by Arthur C Clarke in 1945 in which he predicted that a "geostationary satellite" positioned above the equator would be a good bet for wide coverage relay stations - although his calculated altitude does seem to be out by about 6,000 km.

 

His 1945 article is at the link below. Be warned, it is about 3.3 megabytes in size but, for the technically minded, it is well worth reading, and better than the movie!!

 

Arthur C Clarke "Wireless World" Article1945

Comments

[vince]

..!. alò alò ! int affo sotten bò !

[Tjilpi]

Hi Vince. Thanks for the comment. What does it mean? I have looked in my Dizionario but can't find any of those words!

[kim]

i used to be way annoyed about the classical education deprivation. now i'm pretty much accepting. pretty much.
i've recently been fantasizing about a turn of events that would encourage me to join the sat fone world. i settled on settling for iridium. they even have spare satellites hangin' 'round up there, just in case. but thuraya oughta work well for you. as long as you don't plan on exploring the americas.
anyway, no heart attack. i'm told they're most sucky.
do you still have the prize winning poem? i love cats. i love poetry.

[Tjilpi]

I'm learning as I go. I learned that Ulysses is Roman for Odyssey. However, I don't think that 2001: A Space Ulysses sounds quite right!

Iridium phones here cost twice as much as my Thuraya. I had a phone call yesterday to tell me it is on its way. They are going to send it to my brothers place in Cairns as I am flying over there for 6 days. We plan on going camping out bush for my birthday so I might even get to use the phone!! I'll phone my sister so she can wish me happy birthday.

I've been following the Iridium story since its beginning. My understanding is that Iridium has 66 electrons; and that 66 low earth orbit satellites -LEOS at about 780km - are needed for the Iridium system to work - hence its name. I read that recently one of the active satellites was knocked out by a piece of Russian space junk. Apparently there are over 300,000 bits of loose metal orbiting around up there, with 180,000 of them being monitored by NASA. Talk about littering!!

Yep - the Thuraya covers the whole of Australia with a single satellite - and from the maps they display the Americas aren't covered. At one stage Boeing was fined $10 million for doing something naughty by cooperating with the Russians, Ukranians and Norwegians in the development of the satellites.

Sorry, no longer have the cat poem. If I did I wouldn't be able to mention it as Jude would disapprove!

[kim]

i think that greek for ulysses is odysseus. oddyssey being what he did. which, i guess, would make ten wasted years of my life, wandering here to there, a kimmy. hm, it'd need spell correction.
yes, jude might disapprove, but would she put that disapproval into words?
iridium still worked mostly without the damaged sat. i think they've moved one of those spares into place now.

[Jude]

If Kim likes cat poems, he can take his pick from this page: www.sniksnak.com/poems.html

I rather like this one:

Ode To A Cat

I think that I shall never see
A cat that sheds as much as thee
Thy fur that sticks is all around
On chairs, on mats in little mounds
I sweep the floor, you shed some more
I wash the rug and you just shrug
You should give thanks I tolerate that
Or you would be a crew cut cat.

~ Marea Needle ~

However, you can scrub the last two lines. I wouldn't be tolerating the cat. - Jude