Call In the Military To Blast Rogue Satellite? 243
coondoggie submitted a follow-up to the tale of the wandering satellite that might collide with other stuff in orbit. He asks "Will the military need to be called in to blow up the rogue Intelsat satellite meandering through Earth's orbit? Or maybe a NASA Space Shuttle could swing by and grab it? You may recall that in 2008, rather than risk that a large piece of a failing spy satellite would fall on populated areas, the government blasted it out of the sky. The physics of such a shot were complicated and the Navy had a less than 10-second window to hit the satellite as it passed over its ships in the Pacific Ocean. But it worked. Now word comes that a five-year-old Intelsat TV satellite is meandering in orbit and attempts to control it have proven futile. At issue now is that the satellite could smash into other satellites or ramble into other satellite orbits and abscond with their signals."
U.S. Air Force to the rescue! (Score:5, Funny)
Abscond with their signals? (Score:2, Funny)
Satellite Hunting License . . . (Score:5, Funny)
With "privatize the space industry" all in vogue these days, the government should issue Satellite Hunting Licenses to private companies, with $$$ prizes for taking it out.
Let the private sector nail that varmint!
Re:No, and no (Score:2, Funny)
and (3)---No Taco Bell sponsorship...yet.
Re:should be impossible to hit (Score:3, Funny)
Lasers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:U.S. Air Force to the rescue! (Score:5, Funny)
The satellite is Luxembourg-owned, which has an army of 600 soldiers, 2 cannons and no plane, so I don't see that happening.
Comment removed (Score:2, Funny)
Re:When China does it... (Score:3, Funny)
Good god, man, cable TV signals are at steak here!
Let's not limit ourselves just to worrying about Food Network. Don't be a chicken, there's a whole world of television programming.
Re:#3: would cause huge amount of debris (Score:5, Funny)
If this stops satellite TV stations from polluting the skies with gameshows and comedies, I'm all in favour of blowing the satellite up in the way that causes the worst debris field possible.
Re:They can't (Score:5, Funny)
Galaxy 15 is at 22,230 miles
So that just means you need 64 of them, right?
The First Sat Hunting License (Score:3, Funny)
"Be vewwy vewwy qwiet! I'm hunting for satewwites!"
The first license will be issued to a Maj Gen Fudd, I am sure.
Just to be sure... (Score:3, Funny)
Better nuke it from..... er never mind.
Re:U.S. Air Force to the rescue! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:U.S. Air Force to the rescue! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:#3: would cause huge amount of debris (Score:3, Funny)
Well, TV is a joke, I'll agree there, but stating the problem isn't. TV doesn't need to be crap, it is because it panders to the audience that makes itself visible (the alcoholic couch potatoes who believe The Price Is Right is the height of intellectualism). You want to know why Star Trek got revived? It's because the marketplace for fan merchandise started having a turnover comparable to that of Paramount itself. That gets noticed. The bean-counters realized other people were cashing in on THEIR gold-mine and that they themselves could not. The reason they're back to making just movies is that the gold-mine is heavily worked-out.
The reason Doctor Who got revived? Pretty much the same reason. The fans had nothing to do with it, in any direct sense. The BBC discovered they were missing out on a fortune but others were raking it in big-time. They wanted in, and the best way to do that was to produce more. The scale of the gold seam that represents Doctor Who can be seen in the number and diversity of spin-offs (hitting at not only the mainstream, but also the children's market and the slasher market).
But other series are as good (or better) than either of these, and have the potential to be just as profitable for the bean-counters. The reason they are neglected and/or abused by the stations is that they're not visibly profitable. The conventions are low-key, the fan productions aren't serious competition ("Stranger and Miss Brown", originally a Who-alike, was serious competition and sold well enough at the retail level for stores to have it on the shelves), and the merchandise isn't visibly big-numbers stuff. The total turnover may actually be huge, but it's discrete and in consequence what the companies see is nothing that interests them.
Let's look at the other side of the equation. Reality shows are cheap, so you can turn a profit from just about any income at all. Sci-fi is generally expensive, and quality script-writers for any series are both expensive and rare. Which is why you don't usually find either, and why SyFy considers wrestling a far better prospect for return-on-investment. But that's because most TV companies don't comprehend the market and Sci-Fi fans and geeks are way, way too under-the-radar.
I'd be willing to bet that if the real value of sci-fi was known, and (even more importantly), if the real value of quality writing was known, TV would be utterly different. There'd be next-to-no crap, there'd be far more intellectual programming, and there'd be far more effort to work with fans to understand what they want and why they want it.
Geeks are stereotyped as basement-dwellers for a reason. We aren't visible. We're probably amongst the largest consumers (programmers tend to earn a decent amount) and we're probably a significant factor in the economy (you couldn't run a consumer-based business in Silicon Valley if geeks didn't know how to spend), but the TV execs treat us as an insignificant minority with a few dollars pocket-money. That's one hell of a perception error, but Star Trek and Doctor Who demonstrate that the perception error was originally created by us. When we choose to make our presence felt, when we choose to tell the market what it needs to do, we have a voice that no couch potato could ever have.
The thing is, we choose not to speak.
THAT is why TV is crap.
Re:#3: would cause huge amount of debris (Score:3, Funny)
Ideally, yes, you'd get a signal jam rather than a collision. Hell, if it could have a similar impact to that satellite that went rogue, taking out cell phones and pagers through a decent swathe of the market, it would be great!