Daniel Leussler:

Yesterday the world (or technically, a ring of space about 22,000 miles above the world) lost something which I expected to become a dear friend to me – TDRS 1, one of two communications satellites which are old and eccentric enough to provide coverage to the poles. There’s a decent rundown of its travels in orbit at Spaceflight Now, but the takeaway for me is that South Pole is apparently down to a 5 hour window of connectivity until NASA can move a newer satellite (TDRS 3) to cover it, and even then it won’t be quite the same.