New Broadband

A new satellite was launched today from Cape Canaveral. It is a private business investment of $1.5 Billion providing broadband to remote areas of the world. The first satellite will cover most of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The second, soon to come, will cover North America. Soon we will have people blogging from the remotest parts of the earth. You can read about it here.

I remember standing on the roof of our house in 1960 and watching the Echo satellite as it went across the skys. Do you remember Echo? You can read about it here. It was Americas response to the successful launch of Russia's Sputnik satellite in 1957. They were years ahead of us in space stuff. Echo did nothing except give a surface to bounce microwaves off of. But it was reassuring to our American sensibilities to know that we also had a satellite and we could "see" it.