Please plan on coming to the April 2 gathering! As we need to make arrangements with the hotel, attendance is cheaper for those responding by March 18.
Ellen Hoff
President, for the COMARA Board
Denis Curtin, Irv Dostis, Ron Garlow, Jack Hannon, Ellen Hoff, Bob Kinzie, Tom Kirkendall, Walt McKee, Peter Weiss
Please save Sunday April 2 for our annual get-together. In response to the many suggestions received, this will be held from 4-6:30, for those of you who dislike night driving. We look forward to seeing you amid the crowd of COMSAT friends on April 2. This social is open to all former COMSAT employees and spouses.
Details for the social can be found at www.comara.org/social/2006-social.htm
The Board recently simplified the dues structure. Annual dues (including the first year dues) are now set at $10. If you haven't paid the 2006 dues, please send a check to COMARA, PO Box 34594, Bethesda, MD 20827. You can include the dues in your check for the social on April 2. Send an email to treasurer@comara.org if you have any questions.
Rick Gould says Look! Up in the sky. It's a bird? No, it's a plane. No, perhaps it's a HAPS? Yes, definitely a HAPS, a High Altitude Platform Station. Rick Gould reports that he is working for......Rick Gould? Is he still around? I've always wondered whatever happened to him after..... Well, anyway, he's working on behalf of his second HAPS client. You see, there was an unfortunate crash of the airplane of his first client and....No, No, Rick had nothing to do with that. Nobody did. Helios, the solar-powered plane with a 247-foot long wing, covered with solar cells, was un-manned -- un-personed. It had actually set the world's altitude record for a propeller-driven aircraft -- 96.863 feet! It was originally designed to stay up for six months, but the problem with solar-powered airplanes is that they don't fly as well when the sun goes down. To give it round-the-clock, round-the-year, capability it was fitted -- on that last fatal flight -- with a hydrogen fuel cell. Such cells use the excess energy from the sun during the day to split water from the fluid obtained from the DC water mains into pure water and the lead that had been leached from the 100-year old lead pipes leading to people's homes....But that's another story.
Actually, the water is split into hydrogen and oxygen and lead. After the sun goes down, the hydrogen and the oxygen are allowed to re-combine, giving up the energy it took to separate them. That energy is used to power the plane at night and the lead is saved for later sale to the manufacturers of weights to fishermen. Seriously, he said, after it was much too late to be taken seriously, the crash illustrated what can happen if designers of complex devices try "quick fixes" to solve a problem that has arisen with the original design. In this case, the added weight of the fuel cell required additional payload. So the camber of the wing was jiggered to get a little more payload capacity. Unfortunately, the new wing design then required more air speed to generate the extra lift. It turned out that so much additional air speed was required that the plane tore itself apart. The moral: The only way to make sure that one has not ignored second-order effects, is to start the analysis from scratch. To be continued in the next thrilling episode in which Rick tries to get the international allocators of spectrum to turn over to HAPS the frequencies made excess by the conversion to HDTV of broadcasting stations around the world.
Larry Haughey has recently joined XTAR as Vice President, Government Markets. He had joined CICI, Inc. in early 1987 at L'Enfant Plaza. He was responsible for U.S. Government, Department of Defense, sales. He worked for Dave Gourley. CICI, Inc. was subsequently sold to CONTEL ASC (as a result of the failed merger between COMSAT and CONTEL) and the majority of the team moved to Rockville, MD to become CONTEL ASC International. After a short time, much of the CICI, Inc. organization stayed together as we went through another merger and became IDB. I made it through the Worldcom merger and then left to go to, of all places, MCI. Shortly thereafter, we were Worldcom again. The rest is history and Bernie is still not in jail!
Joan Mancuso, principal of Broadband International LLC, joins the Advisory Board of Airtrust International Systems, www.airtrust.net, with office in Beijing. Joan offers business development services to telecom and technology companies. In addition to her international business experience, Joan has the language (Mandarin) and cultural skills that you can trust. For more information, call 202-966-9470 or j-mancuso@att.net
Ed Martin reports reports that Montgomery County has, with Federal assistance, opened three magnet middle schools in the County. One of these, The Parkland Magnet Middle School for Aerospace Sciences, is temporarily located in North Bethesda pending completion of a new facility in Silver Spring due to open in 2007. Ed Martin has been assisting the school in enriching its program by engaging Comsat veterans and others to participate in special programs, the most notable of which was their first ever Satellite Night held on January 25th for students and parents. They have scheduled two more "Family Technology Nights" but have not identified the themes as yet although one will probably be robotics. Ed has connected them with DARPA who have run the robot auto competitions and have arranged for an Intelsat tour. If you wish to learn more about this program, contact Ed at edmartin752@aol.com.
Paul Koskos On Friday, January 27, 2006, of Potomac, MD. Beloved husband of 52 years of Doris Koskos; loving father of Melissa V. Koskos. A memorial service was held at the Geneva Presbyterian Church, 11931 Seven Locks Rd., Potomac, MD 20854 on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in his name to the American Heart Association, P.O. Box 5216, Glen Allen, VA 23058 or to the Geneva Presbyterian Church at the above address.
The web hosting company for COMARA.org moved the pages to a new server last month. Some of the code supporting the pages had to be made as a result of this move. Hopefully, all of this change is behind us at this point. If you notice broken links, or features that don't work, let webmaster@comara.org know. Your suggestions for improvements or additions are always welcome.
COMARA email addresses. If you aren't receiving email from us, the problem can be that we don't have a current email address from you, or, that your mail provider is blocking email from COMARA. Email is now sent from news@comara.org. Please add news@comara.org to your address book. The newsletters have a reply to address of members@comara.org. One reason for this change is to try to separate the email that bounced because of spam control attempts or a bad address from your replies.
IF YOUR EMAIL HAS CHANGED, PLEASE LET US KNOW YOUR NEW ADDRESS!
Send it to webmaster@comara.org