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Chapter 3: The Geostationary Orbit: A Critical Legal Geography of Space’s Most Valuable Real Estate
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3 @ The Geostationary Orbit A Critical Legal Geography of Space’s Most Valuable Real Estate christy collis This chapter begins 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth’s equator, where a satellite drifts eastward at 6,897 miles (11,100 km) per hour. The satellite receives information from Earth and bounces it back. The satellite is an average one: about 12.5 feet (3.8 m) high, and, with its solar panel “wings” extended, about 85 feet (26 m) wide. It weighs 3,807 pounds (1,727 kg), including its fuel, which it will use to maintain its precise orbital position over the course of its operational lifespan of about 15 years.1 Two aspects of this satellite make it particularly important, neither of which has to do with the satellite itself. Its importance rests instead on its location—its geography . At this precise height over the equator, the satellite moves at exactly the same speed as the point on the planet beneath it: it forever stays in the sky above a single fixed point on Earth. Second, because it is above the equator, the satellite can “see” 42 percent of Earth’s surface at once, from 81°N to 81°S: what is called its “terrestrial footprint” is larger than that which could be achieved by a satellite in any other orbit around Earth.2 As such, it is a particularly powerful communications tool: the receiving stations on Earth below it do not need to be adjusted or calibrated, because the satellite never moves from its position above them, and its data can be broadcast to 40 percent of the Earth’s surface at once. What makes this satellite so powerful, and so valuable, is that it is located in the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO):3 the single orbital belt, 22,236 miles above the equator and a relatively miniscule 18.6 miles (30 km) wide, in which satellites orbit at the same speed as the ground below them. Because of its special properties, the GEO is Space’s most valuable position:4 with a satellite in GEO, a communications provider does not have to pay the massive costs associated with maintaining several satellites to provide full-time coverage, or construct multiple Earth stations or moving receivers. With only three satellites in GEO, a communications provider can cover almost the entire planet. For satellites, which currently carry much of the world’s communication data as well as its navigation and meteorological information, the GEO is the place to be. But, as the above citations of the GEO’s size indicate, the GEO is not infinite: satellites have to be positioned apart from each other so that they do not interfere with each other’s transmissions; they are, to borrow Siegfried Weissner’s phrasing, strung along the GEO’s thin belt “like pearls on a string.”5 Only so many pearls can fit on a string, particularly when they have to be spaced at prescribed intervals. This chapter addresses two key questions about the valuable GEO: who, if anyone, owns it; and what kind of a cultural space is it? The chapter is grounded in two theoretical approaches: cultural geography and critical legal geography. The chapter is framed by the cultural geographical concept of “spatiality,” a term that signals the multiple and dynamic nature of geographical space. As spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre assert, a space is never simply physical; rather, any space is always a jostling composite of material, imagined, and practiced geographies.6 The ways in which cultures perceive, represent, and legislate that space are as constitutive of its identity—its spatiality—as the physical topography of the ground itself. Critical legal geography, the second theoretical field in which this chapter is situated, derives from cultural geography’s focus on the cultural construction of spatiality. In Law, Space and the Geographies of Power, Nicholas Blomley asserts that analyses of territorial law largely neglect the spatial dimension of their investigations; rather than seeing the law as a force that produces specific kinds of spaces, they tend to position space as a neutral, universally legible entity neatly governed by the equally neutral “external variable” of territorial law.7 “In the hegemonic conception of the law,” W. Wesley Pue similarly argues, “the entire world is transmuted into one vast isotropic surface” on which law simply acts.8 But as the emerging field of critical legal geography demonstrates, law is not a neutral organizer of space, but is instead a...