50 years in SPAAAAACE: Telstar celebrates half-century since launch On 10 July 1962, the privately-owned Telstar 1 was blasted into orbit on the back of NASA's Thor-Delta rocket, and despite only working for a year it proved that commercial satellite communications was possible. Telstar 1 was owned by the US telephony monopoly Ma Bell, and was built in the Bell Telephone Laboratories, though …
Released on August 17th 1962 just five weeks after the launch of the AT & T communications satellite that gave the record its title,
Written and produced by Joe Meek.
Telstar won an Ivor Novello Award and is estimated to have sold at least five million copies worldwide
Great!!
I remember watching the first TV pictures from Telstar. France received the pictures successfully on the first night; Britain saw only a noise signal. The second night was successful for both countries.
Apparently the Telstar signal was circular polarised. Despite the existence of thick manuals, both the US and France got it wrong. So it worked for them but not for us. Next day we bowed to the majority. Or so I was told by an ex-GPO engineer who had worked at the Goonhilly ground station.
'Telstar wasn't the first satellite to bounce radio signals, that was "Courier 1B" from whose name one can identify as a military project'
Courier 1B is pre-dated by Echo 1 which was a passive communication satellite - nothing more than big reflective mylar balloon which reflected signals. Echo 2 followed in 1964 by which time it had been superceded by active satellites.
SCORE was the first satellite to broadcast from space, it could play pre-recorded messages and receive new ones for later broadcast.
Courier was the first active satellite which received, amplified and rebroadcast radio signals in real time.
>but an equally good tribute is to spend the day watching satellite TV and remembering that Telstar made it possible.
Couldn't agree more, and I'm thankful every day to have access to Ch4 Ch.5, BBC 1-4 et-al, iTV- 1-4, Ch etc... etc... and, some of those also in HD. Given that I live in Germany I'd be outta luck with out the Astra 2A/B/D/N, and Eutelsat 28A (a.k.a Eurobird 1), Networks up there!
I can also strongly recommend Neal Stephenson's _Mother Earth, Mother Board_, a thoroughly engrossing (yes, really!) essay on cable laying (yes, really!): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
I believe a lot of the research for the essay found its way into _Cryptonomicon_, but the essay is an excellent read all on its own.
If you're on holiday in Brittany (near Perros-Guirec) it's worth taking an afternoon to visit the old France Telecom site where the Telstar work was done. It's no longer operational as a working radio site, but parts are being converted into a museum: http://www.cite-telecoms.com/en/accueil-cite-des-Telecoms (somewhat Franglais, it's better if you can read the French pages). They have the original huge horn antenna inside the radome, where they do a sound & light show several times a day. Lots of other interesting exhibits as well.
In Bethel, Maine.
I went on a field trip to the Telstar ground station in Andover, Maine as a kid. Last year, on a hike in the hills nearby, I saw clearly why the site had been chosen. The station itself (yes, it's still there) is in the center of a natural bowl, a valley, surrounded by woodland and a ring of hills.
We were a couple months behind launching, but ours lasted until we decided to switch it off 10 years later ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Space_Agency#History.2C_mission_and_mandate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alouette_1
Cheers to everyone in every country for all the amazing work done in those heady days!
Neither of Clarke's original papers refers to the radio relay stations being manned. It's possible you're misled by the term "Space Station", which we now use to refer to a manned satellite. At the time, the reference was to a radio station in space: space station.
While he didn't originally develop the idea of a space based communication satellite (he considered it such an obvious idea that someone else must have thought of it first, though this was true it wasn't as obvious as he considered it), his work on elaborating the idea did a lot to bring the idea to people to whom the idea of a space based radio relay wasn't obvious.
George O. Smith is documented as coming up with the idea for a radio relay in space before Clarke (being placed in a Trojan point with Venus to provide regular communications between Earth and Venus explorers in a science fiction story--Smith was also a radio engineer as well as an author). Hermann Oberth missed using radio, but suggested the idea of using an orbital mirror for signalling in 1923.
Clarke's work is how the idea of a communications satellite got out into the wild, so he deserves plenty of credit for both the basic communication satellite as well as the geostationary ones. The earlier people didn't get their voices heard.
I liked George O Smith's "Venus Equilateral" series, and reread it earlier this year. It is a great example of a SF writer extrapolating from the best knowledge of the time. It is also an example of how unforseen and perhaps unforseeable discoveries and advances invalidate the basic assumptions that the story is built on.
I must see if there are any interviews with Smith, who died in 1981, comparing VE with how space communication actually played out.
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