Other targets might include missions to geostationary orbit to fix broken, high-value telecommunications satellites that sit 36,000km (22,370 miles) above the Earth.
That hasn't done much for the value of telecommunications and telecommunications equipment stocks.
The value of telecommunications assets has plummeted since Concert was created in 1998.
National Grid, Britain's electricity carrier, reported a net loss yesterday after writing down the value of telecommunications businesses by the equivalent of $1.1 billion.
BT is being examined as a potential bid target by a number of global private equity firms in a move that could value the telecommunications group at a minimum of 20 billion pounds ($35.1 billion), The Times of London reported.
After a spectacular $1.31 billion gain in the fourth quarter of last year, earnings from Chase Capital tailed off to a $25 million loss in the third quarter, mostly because of the plunge in the market value of telecommunications stocks that Chase Capital owns.
Despite a relentless drop in the stock market value of telecommunications companies over the last year and a half, many executives have refrained until recently from acknowledging that the big bets they made on a new generation of wireless devices might have been premature.
Despite the recent collapse of market value in telecommunications, bandwidth nonetheless continues to expand exponentially, which will continue to improve the resolution and sense of realism in the virtual world.
Correction: December 20 , 2002 Friday An article in the special Outlook issue of Business Day on Monday about the future of Internet-based phone calls misstated the decline in global market value for telecommunications and technology companies from March 2000 to September 2002.
Executives at Qwest and WorldCom are expected to defend their transactions with AOL Time Warner as legitimate business deals, although the true market value of telecommunications capacity and online advertising is hard to determine, especially in 2000 and 2001 when the prices of both were in flux.
