Satellite

Weather postponed Tuesday's launch of the ORS-1 satellite attached to the Minotaur 1 rocket, according to NASA officials, leaving spectators in the Mid-Atlantic to wait for another day. The ORS-1 launch was scheduled between 8:28 p.m. and 11:28 p.m., from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Virginia's Wallops Island which will be visible between South Carolina up to New York and as far west as West Virginia. Officials said that if the launch was scrubbed, subsequent attempts will follow nightly through July 10, except for a three-day window around the planned launch of the space shuttle Atlantis from Cape Canaveral, Fla., set for July 8. The Air Force will launch the battlefield imaging satellite into orbit the first operational version of the Air Force's Operationally Responsive Space satellite series.

In the frenetic telecommunications industry, where companies spring up like April grass, only a few firms have managed to develop and retain a truly distinct corporate character. AT&T Corp. is the distinguished, slightly dotty patriarch, looking to regain the vibrancy of youth. MCI WorldCom Inc. is the pushy parvenu gunning for the top spot.Then there is Comsat Corp. If Maryland's most prominent telecommunications company were a person, it would be an aging playboy with a glamorous past and a squandered inheritance.

Two days ago, most Americans were barely aware of the space technology that kept them in instant touch with their families, their banks, businesses and far-flung news correspondents.Today, millions of people from doctors to drug dealers are coping with the disruptions of a failed communications satellite that they'd never heard of, and never knew they needed.Blame Galaxy IV, a 9-foot- tall, $250 million telecommunications satellite 22,000 miles above the Galapagos Islands. Until 6 p.m. Tuesday it was a vital daily link for millions of pagers, bank cards, credit checks, corporate communications, television and radio broadcasters, and home satellite dishes.

NASA's recent lunar-punch mission apparently was not the high-profile flop it first appeared to be. Officials at Ames Research Center in Northern California, which managed the mission, released images Friday that clearly show a plume of debris emanating from the Cabeus crater shortly after the space agency's rocket plowed into it. The plume was estimated to reach a height of about a mile above the lunar surface. Creating a plume was key to the mission's success because the goal was to measure dust kicked up by the Centaur rocket to find out if ice might lie hidden in polar craters that haven't seen sunlight in billions of years.

Lockheed Martin Corp.'s $2.5 billion purchase of Comsat Corp. won final congressional approval Thursday night as the House of Representatives approved by voice vote a bill that would bring important changes to the satellite-communications industry. The legislation passed in the Senate on March 2 and now goes before President Clinton, who has until March 22 to sign it. The Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice also must review the proposed union of the two Bethesda companies.

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- The space shuttle Endeavour glided to Earth yesterday afternoon, ending a nine-day inaugural voyage that featured a daring rescue of a wayward communications satellite."

WASHINGTON -- Two years ago, President Clinton gave American companies the go-ahead to do something they had been forbidden to do for years: sell spy-quality satellite pictures to anyone who wants to buy them.But now, as aerospace giants scurry to put up new satellites and secure a piece of this new market, the government is getting edgy about the sales and reviewing procedures it might use to block certain transactions.The firms' space images, which are 10 times more detailed than what's been commercially available, have gone exclusively to U.S. intelligence agencies and military planners.

September auto sales up 6%Sales of domestically built new cars and trucks rose 6 percent in September, but the gain might have been stronger without a car-production shortfall at General Motors Corp.For the last 10 days of the month, sales were up 4.5 percent compared with a similar period last year and sold at an annual pace of 11.3 million, automakers said yesterday.House backs tighter securities rulesThe U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday to step up regulation of the $4.5 trillion government-securities markets and to open up the bidding process.

Bank assets rise 9%, survey saysAssets at the nation's 300 largest banks grew by 9 percent last year, to $2.6 trillion from $2.4 trillion in 1992, as acquisitions continued at a feverish pace, a survey released yesterday showed.The survey, by the American Banker, shows that deposits also grew by 4.9 percent in 1993, up from a meager 0.2 percent the year before, when low interest rates flushed deposits into mutual funds at a record pace.The survey also found that the total number of employees at all FDIC-insured commercial banks increased 1.1 percent, the firstincrease in industry employment in four years.

BETHESDA -- Bruce L. Crockett loves to collect things -- toy trucks, Wizard of Oz memorabilia, models of Chinese junks, elephant statues.Anything but satellites.Mr. Crockett, president and chief executive of Comsat Corp., says that when he joined the company in 1980 the standard office decor for company executives was models of rockets and satellites.L "I said I'm going to do things a little different," he said.He has. Mr. Crockett's passion for collecting has changed a lot more than the look of his office.