Covering eastern Europe-a satellite systems overview

The inherent difficulty in establishing terrestrial communications systems from scratch has opened the door to a number of existing and planned commercial satellite systems. The paper presents an overview of the satellite systems offering coverage of the eastern European nations. Although the paper is primarily concerned with satellite systems that provide telecommunications services-the leading commercial space application-it is useful to note that other satellite services are under continual development. One of these, position determination, is provided by satellites primarily configured for communications. Another, remote sensing, is provided by a variety of dedicated Earth observation satellites, including SPOT, Landsat and, for operational meteorology Meteosat. Earth observation is often referred to as the second commercial application of space and, although the revenue it generates is nowhere near that of telecommunications, it has great potential for the future.<>