I remember when cable happened and everyone said broadcast was dead, and then satellite happened and everyone said cable was dead, and then DVDs happened and everyone said everything was over. Nothing was over. I’m very optimistic about the future.
Streaming TV shows, movies, and other types of video over the Internet to all manner of devices, once a fringe habit, is now a squarely mainstream practice. Even people still paying for cable or satellite service often also have Netflix or Hulu accounts.
Satellite communications connect television screens in Japan with television cameras in England, and the distance of half a world loses its meaning.
I sold Blockbuster because I saw what was coming: the satellite dish, technology that would make the business obsolete in a few years. Why would people go to a store for a video and then have to return it when they had a dish?
As a nation we have, over the past seven years, been rebuilding our intelligence with powerful capabilities that many thought we would no longer need after the Cold War. We have been rebuilding our clandestine service, our satellite and other technical collection, our analytical depth and expertise.
I think the relationship between cable and satellite and telco pay TV service providers and the content industry is a very, very solid one.
Most of the planet’s terrestrial surfaces are visually accessible through video cameras and satellite imagery, if not physically within reach. Even the approaches to Mount Everest are now littered with human debris. One can drive to Timbuktu, which for centuries was synonymous with inaccessibility.
Mission Control in Houston receives our e-mails through a satellite and then sends them out to our family and friends. Likewise, any e-mails written to us go through the Mission Control, and then they send them up to us via a satellite.
Comics are a dying art. If you ask a little kid to choose between a video game with insane graphics or comic books… you have to compete with cable, satellite TV with its thousands of channels, and with video games that are like movies, with CGI explosions where you can blow up worlds.
A satellite has no conscience.
And the first flight of the tether satellite happened in ’92, and I was the backup on that flight.
The bottom line is that finding orphan planets – small, faint, and located who-knows-where – is not for the faint of heart. The task is comparable to observing a match flame at the distance of Pluto. The WISE satellite, a hi-tech, space-based infrared telescope especially suited for such work, has found only a few.
Hubble isn’t just a satellite; it’s about humanity’s quest for knowledge.
I’d read about NBA players in magazines when I was growing up in Congo, but I had never actually seen what NBA basketball looked like because we didn’t have access to a satellite for TV.
We grow up with this idea that we’re all individual agents. We work, make our money, have our place to live and our satellite TV. But whether you like it or not, you need family or community.
I was lucky because growing up in tiny little Bailey, North Carolina, we had a satellite dish, so we got WGN. Which meant we got almost every Bulls game.
So, I’m on the satellite every Sunday, no matter where we are, with the Rams. Turn on the satellite; got to watch the Rams.
The space industry is developing and delivering benefits that tie into our immediate needs and priorities here on Earth-for example, medical and materials research, and satellite communications.
Some people are using landline connections and dial-up modems to call ISPs in other countries and get onto the Internet. Still others are using satellite connections.
The Planck satellite may detect the imprint of the gravitational waves predicted by inflation. This would be quantum gravity written across the sky.
The quality of TV, I think, is at an all-time high. The problem with it is the way that we end up consuming it – generally a cable box. A satellite receiver is, to me, nothing more than a glorified VCR.
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