MILLEDGEVILLE — Strangely enough communications satellites are hogging the news these days.

Almost  nobody thinks twice about where their TV programming comes from, and the development of these ungainly behemoths of the entertainment industry is a decidedly unglamorous job.

Mind you, it pays well, because satellite TV is big business, and a lot of money is always involved. But unlike a shuttle mission or the adventures of a Mars rover, the day-to-day workings of a comm sat are just nothing to write home about. And that’s really quite unfair given the huge impact those things have on our daily lives.

But few people get excited about new garbage disposal engineering or a technological breakthrough in lawnmower development either — as long as they work they get no press.

Such was the life of the humble Galaxy 15 communications satellite.

And then it got zapped by intense radiation from a solar flare, back in April. Now, you or I would have just disintegrated in the blast, but Galaxy experienced a brain fry instead. Its electronics and programming got scrambled and it no longer responds to commands from the ground. It’s still up there in geosynchronous orbit, along with many other satellites, but it no longer plays nice in the crowded space some 23,000 miles up.

Kinda like a zombie.

It wobbles unsteadily along, still blaring its signals all over the place except where it’s supposed to and refusing to stay in its allotted spot. Careening this way and that it’s chalked up an impressive number of near-misses, and satellite operators all over the planet are scrambling to get their own satellites far enough away from the unresponsive craft to avoid a catastrophic collision.

Zombiesat, as its been nicknamed, could hit any number of other satellites, and one crash would endanger countless others, with debris zipping all over the place, smashing into others and in turn damaging their flight controls, causing further collisions — you get the picture: a cosmic domino effect of out of control satellites, and rolling blackouts of TVs all over the place.

As the average American spends about 4 hours a day watching TV this is a disaster in the making! And we can’t even fall back on the ole’ rabbit ears any more, either, since the switch to digital TV.

Alas, blowing this zombie’s brains out altogether won’t solve the problem. Zombiesat must be dealt with in another way.

Enter the zombie hunters. They most likely wear a white lab coat, a security badge with an unflattering picture and a pocket protector. The good folks who worked so hard to make Galaxy 15 such a good machine in the first place are working overtime now, trying to regain control of the wayward undead delinquent.

Luckily, sometime in August Zombiesat will lose its lock onto the sun due to oversaturated reaction wheels — the mechanism that keeps the satellite pointed at the sun — and so it won’t be able to generate any more power. This should result in a complete reset of the system and the beginning of a testing program through which the programmers hope to re-establish control over the craft.

So unlike human zombies Galaxy 15 isn’t out for a snack on other satellite’s motherboards — it’s just an out of control transmitter run amok. It has no desire to harm others or attack — it just has no idea what it’s doing right now.

And all this time it’s still broadcasting, messing up other satellites and causing interference.

So the bottom line is: Zombies are bad news. Whether it’s undead people or wayward satellites, you’d better get out of the way. Meanwhile, grab your favorite zombie movie and relish the fact that most of those do have a good ending. Let’s hope the best for Galaxy 15.

Popcorn’s ready! Anybody wanna join me for “Dawn of the Dead”?

To keep up with the latest news about Zombiesat check out the Intelsat newspage at http://www.intelsat.com/resources/galaxy-15/operational-status.asp

Beate Czogalla is the associate professor of theater design in the Department of Music and Theater at Georgia College & State University. She has had a lifelong interest in space exploration and has been a solar system ambassador for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/ NASA for many years. She can be reached at our_space2@yahoo.com