Big geostationary satellites, orbiting 26, 000 miles above the sky, are a lousy two-way synchronous Internet medium.
At the Minneapolis airport check-in kiosk, I entered my Sky Miles number to bring up my reservation.
FORBES: Evidently Delta Never Got the Memo On America's Express Border Crossing Program
First, GPS units have to pick up extremely faint radio signals from satellites orbiting 12, 000 miles in the sky, and that requires receivers that pull in as broad a swath of spectrum as possible.
FORBES: Cellphone Manufacturers Solved GPS Interference Problem
It was designed to climb about 40km (25 miles) into the sky during the powered phase of its two-minute flight.
It happened outside a casino, right near the front doors, with a clear view to six or seven different buildings, and miles of open desert sky.
The blaze could be seen in the night sky for miles around, with flames shooting "400, 500 feet in the air, " said Tennessee Emergency Management spokesman Donnie Smith.
According to official Iranian news reports, the primate was strapped snugly into a Pishgam (or Pioneer) rocket and launched 120 kilometers (75 miles) into the sky on Monday.
So on a Tuesday in July my wife, Elizabeth, and I join Henningsen, fishing guide Aaron Wert, cook Chad Winstead, wrangler Stacie Potts and four other guests at the Specimen Creek Trailhead, 10 miles south of Big Sky.
Yet as we pedalled toward Albany, some 56 miles from Rhinebeck, the sky looked increasingly grim, finally bursting near the city of Troy.
They were joined by George and Brenda Holloway, who drove their 2007 Sky almost 100 miles from their farm in Centre, Alabama, to join in the parade.
Rolling fireballs leaped into the sky, and residents 50 miles away felt the force of the blast.
We know that modern airliners scream across the sky at speeds up to 560 miles per hour, but numbers like that can be pretty abstract.
FORBES: Video: Visualizing airspeed via an iPad with Apple Maps
One expects to cross the Rockies on summer mornings under azure blue sky, with forward visibility of up to 100 miles.
Rusts especially exercised him: how they lived, under the green live tissue of stems, how they spread, travelling for miles on the jet stream, and how they fell from the sky to infect even the healthiest crop, if the moisture and temperature were right.
But if you hit one of those beautiful winter days when the sea is calm and the sky is blue, continue along the coast path for about two miles until it curves into the hidden bay and tiny old harbour of Lamorna Cove.
In the final landing phase, the spacecraft will hover on its jets about 65 feet above the surface and unreel the rover on three Kevlar cables in what NASA engineers call a "sky crane, " lowering it to the ground at less than two miles per hour.
He works with his brother, who goes by the stage name Scott Miles and played the brother of Jake Gyllenhaal's character in the 1999 movie October Sky.
And the Moon is close by and always in the sky, unlike the asteroids that flyby the Earth at incredible velocities or inhabit orbits tens of millions of miles away that take years to reach.
FORBES: The Moon is a Natural Platform for Asteroid Mining, Detection and Deflection
应用推荐