Instant Infrastructure

The last program I worked on at Lockheed was a $650 million geosynchronous regional satellite capable of providing telephony services - voice & data to Southeast Asia - Indonesia, China, Japan and India - 50% of the world's population. At the time of the launch in 2000 the wait time for a phone in some areas was well over 5 years. Think of trying to install phone lines or even cell towers across every island in Indonesia. After launch a single small handheld satellite phone was all one needed to call anywhere. The satellite was big and powerful - it had to be to send and recieve content 23,000 miles to a tiny antenna.

Without the opportunity to go in space and see it in person, this is as close as I'm going to get -- I was able to find it on a NASA satellite tracking site where the above image was captured.