Prescient
" but in April this year "
Either you are prescient or just a little behind the times.
Intelsat bird Galaxy 15 is responding to commands again, having exhausted its batteries over eight months of uncontrolled broadcasting, thus forcing an automatic reboot. The satellite rebooted on 23 December, and started transmitting its telemetry. Engineers from Intelsat picked that up and were able to get the rogue satellite …
Actually, the batteries weren't exhausted by "eight months of uncontrolled broadcasting," they were exhausted due to the solar cells no longer being pointed at the sun, due to saturation of the satellites "momentum wheels" which serve to keep the satellite from wobbling or tumbling.
I think Al meant that if the sat was working properly the signal telling it not to reboot would be sent
if its messed up and not responding then it would not receive the signal telling it not to reboot and would then reboot itself without having to wait for the batteries to die
Automatic re-boots... right in the middle of watching a TV program...
I imagine the boot up sequence of a satellite is a little more complex than rebooting your pc, and would probably take more time than a add break in the middle of corrie....
If it was me setting up the system, I think I would set up some sort of failsafe system, not attached to the rest of the systems that can remotely force a re-boot (switch it off then on again) via some sort of loop antenna for receiving the signal so no matter what its orientation it can receive said signal
Just for giggles call it the DBS (David Bowman Switch)
black chopper because can you really trust all those satellites up there watching us?