After months of bureacratic holdups and technical difficulties, Globalstar's plan to gird the earth with low-earth orbiting satellites is finally getting off the ground.
At 10:54 p.m. EST Monday, Globalstar launched four satellites aboard a Soyuz-Ikar rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It was the company's first successful boost since it lost 12 satellites in a single rocket explosion in September 1998 at the same launchpad.
Globalstar has also been stymied by snags in a trade agreement between the United States and Russia.
This Technical Safeguards Agreement protects sophisticated American technology from being transported through foreign countries. The United States and Russia disagreed on the terms of the document, and US satellite companies were prevented from launching from Baikonur while the countries negotiated a compromise.
Now that those obstacles are removed, Globalstar will keep to a launch schedule for the remainder of the year, and will roll out satellite phone service in the third quarter of 1999, said Tony Navarra, executive vice president.
The company's satellite control center in San Jose, California, will spend the next several weeks raising the satellites to their operational altitude of 883 miles.
Globalstar hopes for one launch a month through the end of the year, to have 32 birds in orbit by the third quarter and 52 by the close of the century.
