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“Good corporate drama . . . an enlightening narrative of how new communications infrastructures often come about.” —The Economist, “A Book of the Year 2016” In the early 1990s, Motorola developed a revolutionary satellite system called Iridium that promised to be its crowning achievement. Its constellation of 66 satellites in polar orbit was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment, surely the future of communication. The only problem was that Iridium the company was a commercial disaster. Only months after launching service, it was $11 billion in debt, burning through $100 million a month and crippled by baroque rate plans and agreements that forced calls through Moscow, Beijing, Fucino, Italy, and elsewhere. Bankruptcy was inevitable—the largest to that point in American history. And when no real buyers seemed to materialize, it looked like Iridium would go down as just a “science experiment.” That is, until Dan Colussy got a wild idea. Colussy, a former head of Pan-Am now retired and working on his golf game in Palm Beach, heard about Motorola’s plans to “de-orbit” the system and decided he would buy Iridium and somehow turn around one of the biggest blunders in the history of business. Impeccably researched and wonderfully told, Eccentric Orbits is a rollicking, unforgettable tale of technological achievement, business failure, the military-industrial complex, and one of the greatest deals of all time. “Deep reporting put forward with epic intentions . . . a story that soars and jumps and dives and digresses . . . [A] big, gutsy, exciting book.” —The Wall Street Journal, “A Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2016” “Spellbinding . . . A tireless researcher, Bloom delivers a superlative history . . . A tour de force.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

An astronaut alone in the void of deep space. An alien starship capable of destroying all creation. A DNA Detective in search of the genetic code of The Beatles. A terrorist explosion trapped inside a bubble of space/time. A new life-form found in the quantum echoes of the void. Eccentric Orbits contains seventeen SF stories originally published between 1999 and 2011 and now collected together for the first time. Stories range from the very short up to novella length. Full Contents Terahertz * wolF emiT * The Armageddon Machine * rho-m10 * 22nd Century Genie * A Loop * Good Vibrations * Ten Million Years * Holy Mountains * Not Better Than One * Remembrance Day * Second War of the Worlds * The Thirteenth Labour * An Explosive Relationship * The Long Walk * Time Dilation * Live From The Continuing Explosion

Paperback. This publication contains the proceedings of the meetings of the COSPAR Technical Panel on Satellite Dynamics which took place during the 31st Cospar Scientific Assembly held in Birmingham (UK) in July 1996. The 20 papers cover a variety of topics relating mainly to satellite orbit determination and analysis. A group of papers discusses orbit determination of low earth orbiters, in particular earth observation and research missions having high accuracy and using various various types of tracking support (data relay satellites, PRARE, laser, GPS). Two papers on geostationary orbits describe a project for their use in time-transfer and their evolution with time. Modelling problems associated with surface forces are analysed by a number of authors (an overview paper on Lageos perturbation models; the impact of surface forces on gravity models covering penumbra affects, numerical integration and attitude motion). One paper describes a visualisation