Company Is Looking Up to Find What’s Lost
The morning of Sept. 14, 1984, is etched in Richard Halavais’ mind. That is the day his prize 1927 Mercedes-Benz disappeared from the driveway of his Scottsdale, Ariz., home.
“I called the police, and they said, ‘Forget it. It’s parts by now,’ ” Halavais recalled recently, with lingering indignation. “I thought that was ridiculous. There ought to be a way to find something.”
Halavais, an aerospace engineer who now lives in San Juan Capistrano, never retrieved his Mercedes. But the incident inspired his search for a way to prevent the same thing from happening to others.
Halavais, who worked in the mid-1970s as a consultant on the Viking unmanned missions to Mars, had one piece of the puzzle already in hand. “The way you’re going to find things from Earth,” he said, “is from space.”
Thus was born Starfind Inc., a Laguna Niguel satellite tracking company that has designed a system to inexpensively locate stolen cars, lost ships, missing persons and other objects.
Starfind is one of a handful of companies, including Omninet in Los Angeles, that are attempting to get in on the ground floor of an emerging new satellite technology.
For the first time, technological advances have made it possible to track objects at a reasonably low cost. Starfind, for example, claims that it will provide its service for the cost of a $250 transmitter--about the size of a pocket pager--and a $35 monthly service fee.
Industry observers, citing many potential applications for the technology, believe that the market is primed for rapid growth in the 1990s. “The market is just starting to take off,” said Mark Brandstein, a telecommunications analyst with the Yankee Group, a Boston consulting company. “I think the prospects are enormous.”
But Starfind, like many of its would-be competitors, faces a number of hurdles before it can capitalize on its ideas. For one thing, the Laguna Niguel company can’t get its business off the ground until it gets a satellite in the sky.
Starfind has contracted with Houston-based Space Services America, a private rocket launching company, to launch five satellites from a NASA facility in Wallops Island, Va., beginning in early 1989. The first satellite would provide location services in the entire Western Hemisphere and adjacent oceans.
The Starfind satellites, which will cost $30 million each to build and launch, will be smaller and more economical than previous satellite positioning systems, Halavais said.
Starfind has not yet secured financing for the five launches, which will cost at least $150 million. Halavais said the company is negotiating with a U.S. banking syndicate headed by Baltimore-based Maryland National Bank to raise the necessary funds, but no final agreement has been reached.
Moreover, Starfind cannot proceed with the launch until it receives regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department agency that oversees government communications.
The competition for satellite tracking systems promises to be fierce. Washington-based Geostar Corp. has already inaugurated a tracking service, and Omninet plans to do so in June. Perhaps a half-dozen other companies are in a stage of early development similar to Starfind.
“It’s going to be a tough battle,” Halavais acknowledged.
There are also questions about whether Starfind’s technology will work as well as the company promises. The company said it has demonstrated in experiments using existing orbiting commercial satellites that its technology can locate people or objects to within 12 feet.
But Starfind won’t know for certain how accurate its system is until it launches its own satellite.
Starfind’s plans received a big boost last month when the company signed a 17-year contract to supply its satellite services in Mexico, Central America and South America.
Last year, Starfind received a U.S. government contract for its satellite systems, according to Halavais.
The base for Starfind’s operations will be a $35-million computer center to be built on a 65-acre site in Colorado Springs, Colo. Construction on the facility, which will employ 300 people, is scheduled to begin in June. The company employs 11 people at its Laguna Niguel office and about 30 outside consultants.
Starfind plans to finance the computer center by seeking approval from the state of Colorado to issue $35 million in industrial revenue bonds. The state has not yet approved the bond sale.
Starfind’s “position location and identification service” would work like this: A vehicle or other object equipped with a transmitter would beam an encoded signal to a 350-pound, orbiting satellite. The satellite would convert the code into data describing the position of the transmitter relative to the satellite’s location.
The signal then would be sent back down to Starfind’s ground station in Colorado, which could determine the identity and location of the transmitter. That information would be relayed, probably along telephone lines, to a customer using the service.
Starfind and other companies foresee a wide array of potential uses for the technology. In the transportation industry, for example, trucking, rail and shipping companies could utilize satellites to help them locate and communicate with their fleets.
Last May, Geostar became the first company to begin offering its service for the long-haul trucking industry.
The technology has already proven useful to one Geostar customer, Pomona-based Countrywide Truck Service, a nationwide trucking company. Last February, one of Countrywide’s $50,000 diesel trucks was stolen from a repair facility in Fontana. The thieves were unaware, however, that the truck had recently been outfitted with a $3,300 transmitter from Geostar. While the truck was driven around Southern California for two days, Countrywide officials tracked its movements on a personal computer.
When it was finally parked in southeast Los Angeles, the truck was recovered by Countrywide employees and the thieves arrested by the police. Countrywide plans to equip its entire fleet of 725 trucks with the transmitters, said Tony Perez, operations manager.
Halavais envisions a low-cost transmitter--a kind of “electronic safety pin”--that could be used to locate lost or missing people. He said one cattle rancher has asked about using Starfind’s systems to track wayward members of his herd.
Geostar said it expects to market a “personal electronic tracking system” in the 1990s. The system would include a small transmitter that could be carried by a person and a personal computer that could be used to keep track of one’s location.
“My mother is always nervous when my father goes hunting in the Catskills,” said Joanne DeVincent, manager of sales administration for Geostar in Washington. With a tracking system, “whenever she wants to, she can see where he is.”
