The article mentions a 600 ton satellite in synchronous orbit. What's the heaviest thing that's been put in a synchronous orbit to date?
Centrifugal force doesn't exist, it's only an apparent force. What you have in orbit, geosynchronous or not, is an acceleration due the gravitational force, which only serves to change the direction, but not the magnitude of the velocity vector of the orbiting body. When you twirl an object on a string around, the force of the string pulling on the object provides the same sort of acceleration, perpendicular to the velocity, which accelerates the object toward the direction of the string. But because the acceleration is normal to the velocity, it only changes the direction and not the size or magnitude of the velocity vector. Thus the object continuously changes direction, but not speed. The same happens with a body in a circular orbit. Elliptical orbits are more complicated, in that the force doesn't always act perpendicular to the velocity vector, so the object speeds up and slows down, although the sum of it's potential (due to it's altitude) and kinetic (due to it's speed) energy remains constant.
No, Helotes, your knowledge of physics is about 500 years out of date. Inertia is the tendency of a body to maintain its state of uniform motion unless acted on by an external force. You even misquote the grade school maxim, which, in fact states, "An object at rest stays at rest, an object in motion stays in motion." In fact, Newton's first law was a direct refutation to the commonly held belief of his day that all objects inherently tended towards motionlessness.
Centrifugal force is a fictional force, from Aristotelian physics, which has been shown not to exist. (Some have actually used the term centrifugal force to describe the force the smaller, circling body places upon the larger, encircled body. That is to say, the force which keeps the earth from ever-so-slightly falling towards the sattelite!)
(Actually, to get real technical, gravity isn't truly a force either, according to Einsteinian physics, but a illusion caused by multi-dimensional curvatures of the time-space continuum being mapped across our 3-dimensional experience of a multi-dimensional world. However, since Newtonian physics are still useful to describing and constructing mechanics, Gravity is still referred to as a force.
The thinking goes like this: The application of a force is the transfer of kinetic energy from one object to another. There is no medium between two objects in empty space, so there is no force.
The problem with such thinking is that there does exist a weak force, which seems to act to subtle direct extremely large masses (i.e., superclusters of galaxies) to draw them away from each other.