SATELLITES POSE PROBLEM AS THEY OCCUPY MORE SPACE.

Byline: Robert S. Boyd Knight Ridder Newspapers

Out of sight and mostly out of mind, an unprecedented traffic jam is building up in the sky, with a vast potential for good or ill.

New constellations of communications satellites are being boosted into orbit at an astonishing pace, ready to link billions of people who have never made a telephone call to the modern world.

But this global information superstructure is also creating new opportunities for disaster as society comes to rely more and more on intricate, fragile electronic systems.

As of last month, 2,556 satellites of all kinds - military, scientific and commercial - were soaring hundreds of miles above Earth, according to NASA and the Air Force. On average, three new payloads go into orbit each week. More than half of all the objects put into space since 1957 are still up there.

Five years ago, communications satellites primarily provided stationary voice and TV broadcast services. Now they are starting to serve portable phones, personal messagers, trucking companies, pipelines, farmers and boaters. They help the Virginia Department of Transportation keep track of its snow-removal vehicles and keep mountain climbers from getting lost.

Soon they will be carrying high-speed computer data - adding extra lanes to the traffic-choked information superhighway.

These advances come at a price. The May 19 failure of a U.S. communications satellite showed how many things we take for granted come from space. Automated teller machines, credit card systems, pagers, and TV and radio networks were knocked out around the globe. The problem was fixed within a day by switching traffic to another satellite, but it led President Clinton to warn about ``the enormous impact of a single failed electronic link'' - whether by accident or by hostile attack.

``Satellites need to be more reliable. You can't send a repairman up there,'' said John Baras, director of the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communications Networks at the University of Maryland.

Over the past 40 years, 40 countries and international organizations have launched one or more satellites. But 1997 set an all-time record, with 150 new payloads placed in orbit. The United States launched 68, Russia 50, Europe 19, China eight, Japan three, and India and Brazil one each.

The record is likely to be broken again in 1998, as even more nations join the game. Egypt's first entry, known as Nilesat, was launched at the end of April.

The demand for launchers is so great that U.S. satellite companies depend on Russian, French and even Chinese rockets as well as American boosters.

Junk in space

Space debris, from abandoned nose cones to tiny bolts, is also a growing problem. NASA counts 6,224 chunks floating around - enough orbiting junk to be a serious threat to astronauts on the U.S. shuttle, the Russian Mir and the future International Space Station. Debris knocked out a solar panel on a Japanese satellite last year, rendering the device useless.

Communications satellites have been orbiting Earth since the early 1960s. But this generation is different in kind as well as in number.

``There have been dramatic new developments in satellite design, manufacture, integration and testing,'' said Joseph Pelton, dean of the International Space University in Boulder, Colo. ``The United States has led the way, but others are now set to follow.''

Instead of a small number of big, stand-alone satellites, the new networks are composed of dozens or hundreds of smaller satellites working together, using computerized management techniques originally developed for the Strategic Defense Initiative missile system, known as Star Wars.

New phone technology

By the end of this year, you will be able to use a pocket-size phone to place a call from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else at about $3 a minute. Your call will go to one of 66 Iridium satellites put in orbit over the last two years by Motorola Corp. The call will then be bounced from satellite to satellite until it reaches the other party.

``New services will be available to the entire globe,'' said Alfred MacRae, retired director of satellite communications at AT&T's Bell Laboratories.

Another difference: Communications satellites used to be parked in stationary orbit - 22,300 miles over the equator - like extremely tall transmission towers. At that altitude, just three satellites could cover the world. Unfortunately, telephone service suffered from annoying delays because electronic signals had to make a round trip of almost 45,000 miles. Even at the speed of light, that takes a quarter-second each way.

Direct from satellite

Still another new trend is to provide direct service to consumers from satellites - not routed through a telephone or cable company.

Prime examples are pizza-size home satellite TV dishes, which arrived just two years ago and already reach almost 9 million American households. Direct TV got off to the fastest start of any consumer electronics device in history - faster even than broadcast TV or video cameras.

Last year, Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., put an eight-satellite network in low orbit, mostly for pagers and monitoring devices on trucks, buses, railroad cars, pipelines and the like.

Magellan Systems, an offshoot of Orbital Sciences, sells a $99 portable global positioning receiver - about the size of a TV remote control - that tells a user not only where he is, but how fast and what direction he's going, and how far it is to his destination. The unit runs for up to 17 hours on four double-A batteries.

Assembly-line technology also has come to the satellite industry. Motorola, the Chicago electronics firm, built an Iridium satellite every five days, compared with the two years it took to assemble older geostationary systems.

Push from private sector

The new satellite invasion is being driven mostly by the private sector - commerce, communications, entertainment, media and the consumer electronics industry - not by NASA, the military or other quasi-government agencies like COMSAT. The traditional aerospace defense companies, like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, are also involved, but mainly as subcontractors.

Financial experts say more than $20 billion was invested in satellite communications in the last five years. They predict another $65 billion will come in over the next five years. That dwarfs the cable industry's investments of $30 billion over the past 20 years.

Besides Iridium, other key satellite companies are the Globalstar system, based in San Jose, sponsored by Loral Space and Communications, and ICO Communications, which will start service in the next two years.

Their primary customers will be business travelers and people living in underdeveloped or remote sites that lack the expensive copper or fiber-optic cable infrastructure available in the industrial world.

Countries like Brazil and China can use satellites to leapfrog the construction of terrestrial communications networks. ``Leapfrogging is already happening,'' Baras said.

A much-anticipated application of low-orbit satellites is high-speed computer data transmission. The major player in this game is Teledesic, an Internet in the sky composed of 288 globe-girdling satellites. It's a project of Bill Gates of Microsoft and Craig McCaw, the cell-phone pioneer, that is due to begin operation early in the next century.

Teledesic will be able to download data at 28 million bits per second, 1,000 times faster than a typical phone connection can handle today.

``There is going to be tremendous exponential growth for high-speed data services,'' Baras said. ``Today, 80 percent of the satellite network is used for voice. By 2002, 80 percent will be data.''

All this is more than a technological or commercial revolution. It also involves people.

About half the world's population - 3 billion human beings - have never made a phone call and have no access to telephone service. These new systems could include a $1,000 phone booth, solar powered, in each little village, linked directly to a satellite soaring overhead. They could do for central China, India and Africa what the coming of the railroad did to the American West.