Zapped from Space
by Gar Smith

In May, the last of 72 satellites comprising the new $5 billion Iridium/Motorola communications system was blasted into orbit from Kazakstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome. The low-orbiting Iridium system is designed to reach any cell phone on the planet. In March, Globestar began launching a competing system of 56 satellites from Cape Canaveral.

Globestar hopes to have 8.7 million customers by 2007 and gross $30 billion a year. "The profits are obscene," Globestar's president Doug Dwyer told the San Francisco Chronicle. (Globestar is jointly owned by Loral Space & Communications, AirTouch Communications, France Telecom, Qualcomm and Hyundai.)

While Globestar plans to start broadcasting in 1999, the Iridium system is set to power up this September and that has some people worried.

"This means a global microwave rain from 435 miles up and it's the digital type which [is causing illness all over this planet," states Arthur Firstenberg, editor of the No Place to Hide newsletter and author of "Microwaving the Planet" (Summer '97 EIJ). Firstenberg believes that plans for space-based "world phone" networks could trigger a "global and ecological catastrophe the likes of which this planet has never seen."

Iridium's 72-satellite system (66 satellites will be active; six others are "spares") will bathe the Earth in a 1.6 GHz broadcast beam using more complex modulations than anything used in land-based systems. The power reaching the surface of the planet is expected to be 0.1 picowatts per-square-centimeter.

"Any signal that is strong enough to make a small hand-held phone work, is also strong enough to sicken and kill electro-sensitive people," Firstenberg claims. "This is the first pollutant in history that is being intentionally broadcast throughout the entire atmosphere with the express purpose of leaving no part of the Earth's surface untouched. Most of the planet, including the oceans, has never before been exposed to pulse-modulated digital signals of any kind."

Iridium believes it can prosper by selling satellite-linked cellphones to 3 million of the 60 percent of the world's population that lacks access to a phone of any kind. But poor residents in Third World villages are not likely to be paying $50 a month to make $3.62-per-minute calls on Iridum's $3,000 "world phones." The more likely market, the New York Times notes, is "foreign oilmen [in] remote oil-bearing regions" and "investors [making deals]... around the energy-rich Caspian Sea."

And the corporate take-over of near-space is only accelerating. A Motorola factory in Chandler, Arizona is churning out a new communications satellite every five days and the Medill News Service reports that commercial rockets "are going up almost every week" - largely from launch stations in China and Kazakstan [see "US Space Junk Falls on Siberia," Spring '98 EIJ]. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is backing a $9 billion 288-satellite Internet-in-the-Sky. The Teal Group Corp. predicts that more than 1,200 commercial satellites will be in orbit by 2007.

Compounding the problem is the planned debut of digital TV which is slated to begin land-based broadcasts in November.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the expansion of cellphone technology continues to spread. Radio astronomers complain of increased difficulty in "hearing" the sounds of stars and distant galaxies because of the rising din of interference from cellphones, radio and TV broadcasts and Internet transmissions. "What it really boils down to is science versus heavy-duty commerce," one astronomer told the San Francisco Examiner.

The ascent of tower technology may mean the decline of nature's songbirds. Between 1957 and 1994 one TV broadcast tower on a Wisconsin hilltop caused the deaths of 121,560 birds who were decapitated by the tower's near-invisible metal guy wires.

With some 75,000 transmission towers already bristling on US ridges and peaks, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has buckled to industry pressure and proposed exempting towers from state and local environmental review to permit the installation of 1,000 new towers within a year.

The Audubon Society fears that these towers soon could lead to the deaths of five million songbirds a year. On October 30, Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and James Jeffords (R-VT) introduced S.1350, which would overturn the preemption clause of the Telecommunications Act and revive the rights of state and local governments to regulate wireless technology on the basis of health effects. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has introduced a similar bill (HR. 3016) in the House.

All of these concerns could become moot on November 17, when a large meteor storm is expected to send as many as 100,000 meteorites crashing into the Earth's atmosphere. As the Associated Press reports, the "most severe meteor shower in 33 years... could damage or destroy some of the nearly 500 satellites that provide worldwide communications."

Although the Leonid meteor shower peaks every 33 years, the people behind the corporate satellite launches apparently did not take meteor strikes into consideration.

According to the AP, communications satellites can be protected by turning them away from the path of the meteor shower. Turning the satellites off will assure that bursts of electromagnetic energy do not destroy - or reprogram - satellite circuits. (Military satellites, unlike commercial systems, cannot be turned off. They are designed to operated 24-hours a day. This raises the slim but chilling possibility that a satellites that targets nuclear missiles could be disabled - or reprogrammed - by a stray Leonid meteor strike.)

Meteorites or not, the Earth and its creatures are soon fated to endure yet another environmental burden - an electronic storm from on high.

What You Can Do: For more information, contact the Cellular Phone Task Force [PO Box 100404, Brooklyn, NY 11210].