This seldom seems to happen. 16.15 Satellites for Emergency-Service Provision On 10 July 1962 Telstar was launched into an elliptical orbit going round the earth every two hours and 37 minutes at a height of between 1000 and 6000 kilometres. The satellite had been built at Bell Telephone Laboratories, was roughly spherical, about 34 inches (880 mm) in length and weighed 170 pounds (77 kilograms). Working on 14 watts of power from a solar cell array the satellite received signals at 6 GHz and transmitted at 4 GHz and successfully relayed television pictures, telephone calls and faxes. The launch was privately sponsored, which in itself was an innovation. The consortium included AT and T, the British Post Office and the French National PTT. The US ground station was in Andover in Maine, the UK ground station was on Goonhilly Downs and the French Ground Station was at Pleumeur-Bodou in North Western France. The BBC managed the conversion between the 525 line (US) and 405 line (UK and European) television standards. The ground-station antennas were huge, weighing 380 tons, with an aperture of 3600 square feet (330 square metres). The antennas were housed in radomes the size of a 14-storey building and had to track the satellite with a pointing error of less than 0.06 degrees. Sixty years later satellites continue to play a fundamental role in telecommunications, but probably most impressively are powerful enough to transmit signals to hand-held devices. It is this part of the story that we particularly want to tell. Just over thirteen years ago two companies, Iridium and Globalstar started providing a service to mobile users with hand-held phones from two low-earth orbit constellations. The Iridium5 project, championed, engineered and financed by Motorola, involved launch- ing sixty six satellites into low-earth orbit to provide cellular-type services at a time when cellular networks were becoming increasingly ubiquitous and cellular service increasingly competitively priced. The system was and still is a spectacular