Lost Kingdom
18. New enterprise as princess heads to stars
Pilolevu’s most audacious enterprise was her effort, in a fashion, to steal the very heavens. She was quite unsuited and downright incompetent when it came to running a cutting edge international business. And she got greedy, and millions of dollars that should have been in Tonga’s treasury, vanished. Pilolevu’s brothers, both who became kings, were implicated in the corruption and incompetence marked by the Friendly Islands Satellite Communications Company, or Tongasat. The saga has produced lengthy academic papers and while Tongasat has vanished like a shooting star, very few understand what really happened. What has become a vast, legally complex operation, derived from the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Russia and the economic boom of places like China and Indonesia. Making millions for Pilolevu and others depended on control of geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) slots. The slots are prime real estate. From the 1960s the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has controlled access to what were decided to be 180 slots available, positioned so they did not interfere with each other. A GEO is an orbit 35,786 km above Earth's equator, 42,164 km in radius from Earth's centre, and following the direction of Earth's rotation. From the ground a GEO satellite would appear to be in a fixed position in the sky. Because they linked the big economies, demand for GEO satellites was great, offering big profits. And Pilolevu would take it all, and lose it?
