Out-Of-This-World Performance.

You've heard stories about Thermo King units cooling penguins from the Moscow State Circus. And you've read about Thermo King's keeping Christmas trees at optimum temperature. Well, this is possibly our most far-out story yet. With an accent on the far-out.

Motorola and Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space have joined forces in the Iridium Project. Sounds top secret, doesn't it? It's not. But it is fascinating. The project brings the companies together to build and place in orbit 64 satellites in a grid over the earth to facilitate telephone and data transmissions. Once in place, there will be no dead or out-of-area cellular phone locations anywhere in the world. Now that's service.

As you can imagine, the batteries used to run these satellites are incredible. Three hundred thousand dollars each, incredible. So you can bet great attention is paid to storing these batteries.

That's where Richmond, California's Storage Plus steps in. The company uses forty-foot containers built by Carisle Container Manufacturing Corporation and Thermo King CF-II refrigeration units to keep the batteries at a perfect 34 degrees F. "Both companies were selected for their attention to detail and high quality product," explains O.L. Creech, director of engineering at Storage Plus. "The CF-II unit was chosen for its electronics, self diagnostics and monitoring capabilities."

Each hermetically sealed battery arrives fully charged in a 2'x2'x3' box from Motorola. The batteries are then married with modular-designed solar panels and frames creating what is called a battery rack assemble (BRA). Each BRA is tested to ensure it works properly and is returned to the container to be held until it is shipped to a launch site. Approximately 5'x3'x6' each, 12 BRAs can be stored in a container at one time.

"There are no special procedures," Creech continues, "other than the constant monitoring of the temperature and the plastic rear door curtain that minimizes temperature change while loading or unloading batteries and/or BRAs."

Although the temperature in space is -60 degrees F on the sunny side of the satellite, Storage Plus does not house the BRAs at such extreme temperatures on earth in an effort to eliminate condensation on the electronics. The battery is stored in two watertight boxes that are insulated and equipped with humidity control and monitoring systems that operate independently of the refrigeration systems.

Not only can extreme cold be harmful to the batteries, but extreme heat can also cause damage. If the temperature reaches above 40 degrees F, the battery begins to degrade. And when a battery goes, the satellite is history. To put it all in perspective, replacement of a new satellite runs around $40,000,000.

The battery itself is expected to last about 5 years. Plenty of time. At the rate the microprocessing technology is moving, the $40,000,000 units are expected to be obsolete by the time the battery goes.

"The alarm console is manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Creech explains. "Seven Lockheed Martin maintenance personnel have been trained in the operation and basic repair of the refrigerated container. That's backed up with the Thermo King of Northern California 24-hour hotline. Furthermore, we have home telephone numbers and pagers of three layers of management at Thermo King. Downtime is an unacceptable option at Lockheed Martin. That's precisely why Storage Plus selected Thermo King for this project."