Globol Television Arrives - Kennedy Space Center - Signs of History on Waymarking.com you are not logged in. [log in] Globol Television Arrives - Kennedy Space Center - Signs of History on Waymarking.com Welcome to Waymarking.com! We hope you've been able to find what you are looking for. We would also like to encourage you to take some time to browse some of the other aspects of our site. We recommend viewing our featured waymarks , or perhaps the newest waymarks . You can also create a free membership to track your progress online and share your locations with others. Click here to view the complete waymark directory N 28° 31.407 W 080° 40.988 17R E 531003 N 3155230 Quick Description: This plaque is located in the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center.

Location: Florida, United States Date Posted: 4/10/2010 9:22:17 PM Waymark Code: WM8JNV Long Description: Global Television Arrives In 1960, the first live television signal to cross an ocean created an instant sensation - and spawned a communication revolution. This signal was bounced off a huge Mylar balloon we called Echo, launched into orbit by a Delta Rocket in August 1960. Just two years later, another Delta rocket launched Telstar, the first telecommunications satelitte, into orbit. Telstar could receive, amplify and transmit intercontinental television signals in real time. Suddenly, world events were unfolding in our living rooms to put a human face on history. From: Wikipedia Telstar Telstar is the name of various communications satellites, including the first ever such satellite able to relay television signals. The first two Telstar satellites were "Telstar 1", launched July 10, 1962 and operational until February 21, 1963, and "Telstar 2", launched May 7, 1963 and operational until May 16, 1965.

They were experimental, and nearly identical. Telstar 1 relayed the first television pictures, telephone calls and fax images through space and provided the first live transatlantic television feed. Description Belonging to AT&T, the original Telstar was part of a multi-national agreement between AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, NASA, the British General Post Office, and the French National PTT (Post, Telegraph & Telecom Office) to develop experimental satellite communications over the Atlantic Ocean. Bell Labs held a contract with NASA, reimbursing the agency three million dollars for each of the two launches, independent of success. The US ground station was Andover Earth Station in Andover, Maine, built by Bell Labs. William H Gill Jr. was a technician working for AT&T at that time and assisted in the technical details of the communications.[citation needed] The main British ground station was at Goonhilly Downs in southwestern England, and it was used by the BBC. It was the international coordinator and the standards 525/405 conversion equipment (filling a large room) was researched and developed by the BBC and located in the BBC Television Centre, London.

The French ground station was at Pleumeur-Bodou (48°47'10?N 3°31'26?W? / ?48.78611°N 3.52389°W? / 48.78611; -3.52389) in north-western France. The satellite was built by a team at Bell Telephone Laboratories, including John Robinson Pierce who created the project, Rudy Kompfner who invented the traveling wave tube transponder used in the satellite, and James M. Early who designed the transistors and solar panels for it. The satellite is roughly spherical, measures 34.5 inches (876.30 mm) in length, and weighs about 170 pounds (77 kg). Its dimensions were limited by what would fit in one of NASA's Delta rockets. Telstar was spin-stabilized, and its outer surface was covered with solar cells to generate electrical power. The power produced was a tiny 14 watts. The original Telstar had one innovative transponder to relay data, which was a television channel or multiplexed telephone circuits.

An omnidirectional array of small antenna elements around the satellite's "equator" received 6 GHz microwave signals to be relayed. The transponder converted the frequency to 4 GHz, amplified the signals in a traveling-wave tube, and retransmitted them omnidirectionally via the adjacent array of larger box-shaped cavities. The prominent helical antenna was for telecommands from a ground station. Launched by NASA aboard a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, Telstar 1 was the first privately sponsored space launch. A medium-altitude satellite, Telstar was placed in an elliptical orbit completed once every 2 hours and 37 minutes, inclined at an angle of approximately 45 degrees to the equator, with perigee about 1000 km from Earth and apogee about 6000 km from Earth (This is in contrast to most of today's communications satellites, which are placed in circular geostationary orbits.) Due to its non-geosynchronous orbit, Telstar's availability for transatlantic signals was limited to 20 minutes in each orbit that passed over the Atlantic Ocean.

Ground antennas had to track the satellite as it came around the world approximately every two and a half hours. Since the transmitting and receiving radio systems on board Telstar were not nearly as powerful or capable as those of today's satellites, the ground antennas had to be huge. Morimi Iwama and Jan Norton of Bell Laboratories were in charge of designing and building the electrical portions of the system that steered the antennas. The aperture of the antennas was 3,600 square feet (330 m2). The antennas were 177 feet (54 m) long and weighed 380 tons. The antennas were housed in radomes the size of a 14-story office building. The challenge was to steer the huge antennas to track the satellite that moved up to 1.5 degrees per second with a pointing error of less than 0.06 degrees. Group that erected the marker: Kennedy Space Center URL of a web site with more information about the history mentioned on the sign: [Web Link] Address of where the marker is located. Approximate if necessary: SR 405 chapter 6 Chapter 6 NASA Experimental Communications Satellites, 1958-1995 by Daniel R.

Glover [ 51] As the civilian agency exercising control over U.S. space activities, NASA has had a program of technology development for satellite communications since the agency was established in 1958. Part of this program has involved flying experimental communications satellites. NASA's first communications satellite project was Echo. Launched on 12 August 1960, Echo 1 was a passive satellite that reflected radio waves back to the ground. Echo started out in 1956 as a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) experiment to probe the upper reaches of the atmosphere and the effects on large lightweight structures in orbit. John Robinson Pierce and Rudolf Kompfner of AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories had been working on ideas for communications satellites, including passive systems, for some time. They realized that the Echo sphere would provide an excellent test mirror and proposed a communications experiment. The National Academy of Sciences sponsored a meeting, held on 28 August 1958, to define the project.1 In 1958, when NASA was created and NACA dissolved, Echo became a NASA project.

The Echo satellite was a 100-foot-diameter (thirty-one-meter-diameter) aluminized-polyester balloon that inflated after insertion into orbit. The G.T. Schjeldahl Company built the Echo 1 balloon, and Grumman built the dispenser, for NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Two-way voice links of "good" quality were set up between Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory facility at Goldstone, California. Some transmissions from the United States were received in England at Jodrell Bank. Echo demonstrated satellite tracking and ground station technology that later applied to active satellite systems. Leonard Jaffe, director of the NASA satellite communications program at headquarters, wrote: "Echo [I] not only proved that microwave transmission to and from satellites in space was understood and there would be no surprises but it dramatically demonstrated the promise of communication[s] satellites. The success of Echo [I] had more to do with the motivations of following communications satellite research than any other single event."2 Echo 2, managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland, left the launch pad on 25 January 1964.

It had a better inflation system, which improved the balloon's smoothness and sphericity. Echo 2 investigations were concerned less with communications and more with the dynamics of large spacecraft. After Echo 2, NASA abandoned passive communications systems in favor of active satellites. The superior performance of the U.S. Department of Defense's SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment) satellite, launched almost two years before Echo I, already had demonstrated the viability of the active approach. [ 52] Telstar In the fall of 1960, as Echo 1 was achieving its first successes, AT&T began developing an active communications satellite system called Telstar. Although some observers felt that AT&T's early interest in communications satellites was part of a defensive maneuver to protect its commitment to cable technology, the company was investing large quantities of its own capital to create and launch its own communications satellite program.3 Initially, the operational system was to consist of fifty to 120 active satellites in orbits approximately 7,000 miles (about 9,310 kilometers) high.

Using the large launch vehicles then in development, Pierce envisioned that "a dozen or more of these satellites could be placed in orbit in a single launching." With the satellites in random orbits, Bell Telephone Laboratories figured that a "system of 40 satellites in polar orbits and 15 in equatorial orbits would provide service 99.9 per cent [sic] of the time between any two points on earth." As Pierce explained, "AT&T has proposed that the system contain about 25 ground stations so placed as to provide global coverage."4 The cost of such a system would be high. In 1961, Pierce estimated the expense at $500 million, but that high price tag was not a detriment from AT&T's standpoint. As a telecommunications monopoly, AT&T's rates were regulated, and those rates included an amount that allowed AT&T to recover its costs as well as to make a profit. Thus, the cost of the proposed Telstar satellite system would be passed on to consumers, just as the high costs of undersea cables were, so AT&T found the system attractive. Bell Telephone Laboratories designed and built the Telstar spacecraft with corporate funds.

The first Telstars were prototypes intended to prove various concepts behind the large constellation of orbiting satellites. Moreover, of the six Telstar spacecraft built, only two were launched. NASA's contribution to the project was limited to launch services, as well as some tracking and telemetry duties. AT&T reimbursed NASA $6 million for those services. NASA was able to negotiate such an excellent deal with AT&T, even though Telstar was not really a NASA project, because NASA held the monopoly for launch services. Moreover, NASA claimed Telstar as a NASA-supported project and even published the results of the communications experiments, originally issued as articles in the Bell Telephone technical journal, as a NASA publication (NASA Special Publication [SP]-32). In addition, NASA obtained the rights to any patentable inventions arising from the experiments. On 10 July 1962, a Delta launcher placed the first Telstar spacecraft into orbit. The faceted 171-pound (about seventy-seven-kilogram) sphere had a diameter of a little more than thirty-four inches (about one meter).

Telstar was the first satellite to use a traveling-wave-tube amplifier; transistor technology at the time was not capable of the three watts of power output at the required microwave frequencies.5 Bell Telephone Laboratories also developed much of the technology required for satellite communication, including transistors, solar cells, and traveling-wave-tube amplifiers. To handle Telstar communications, AT&T built ground stations at Andover, Maine; Pleumeur-Bodou, France; and Goonhilly Downs, Britain. These were similar to, but larger than, the ground station used for project Echo. The French station used a duplicate of the AT&T Holmdel horn antenna, while the British antenna was a parabolic dish. [ 53] Telstar was a tremendous technical success, and the international reaction was spectacular. A U.S. Information Agency (USIA) poll showed that Telstar was better known in Great Britain than Sputnik had been in 1957. Rather than launching a useless bauble, the Americans had put into orbit a satellite that promised to tie together the ears and eyes of the world. Interestingly, the world saw Telstar as an undertaking of the U.S. government (the USIA publicity may have helped).

President Kennedy hailed Telstar as "our American communications satellite" and "this outstanding symbol of America's space achievements."6 Regarding Telstar, Jaffe, head of communications satellite programs at NASA, wrote in 1966: "Although not the first communications satellite, Telstar is the best known of all and is probably considered by most observers to have ushered in the era of satellite communications."7 This impression resulted from the tremendous public impact of the first transmission of live television across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to France by Telstar I on 10 July 1962, the very same day it was launched. In addition to television broadcasts, Telstar relayed telephone calls, data transmissions, and picture facsimiles. Telstar was AT&T's major move into satellite communications. That move failed to extend AT&T's monopoly of terrestrial communications into space, however; changing telecommunications policy from one presidential administration to the next, and a government desire to avert a monopoly of satellite communications, kept AT&T's monopolistic aspirations in check. At the same time, NASA contracted its communications satellite work to firms other than AT&T.

When AT&T began working on Telstar, the Eisenhower administration seemed willing to allow it to extend its monopoly into space. A statement by President Eisenhower in December 1960, in which he presented his administration's policy on space communications, stressed the traditional U.S. policy of placing telecommunications in the hands of private enterprise subject to governmental licensing and regulation and the achievement of "communications facilities second to none among the nations of the world." The role of NASA was "to take the lead within the executive branch both to advance the needed research and development and to encourage private industry to apply its resources toward the earliest practicable utilization of space technology for commercial civil communication requirements."8 The election of President Kennedy ushered in a new policy on satellite communications that was openly antagonistic to monopolies, particularly to the extension of AT&T's monopoly in terrestrial communications to space communications. President Kennedy released a policy statement on 24 July 1961 that favored private ownership of satellite systems, but with regulatory and other features aimed at avoiding a monopoly.9 AT&T's preeminent position as the largest U.S.

common carrier and sole international telephone carrier, together with its willingness and ability to commit large sums of money to the development of communications satellites, convincingly suggested that commercial satellite utilization would very likely become AT&T utilization. Concern over the possibility of an AT&T monopoly in space was one factor that prompted a later reorientation of the direction that commercialization seemed to be following.10 [ 54] On 31 August 1962, President Kennedy signed the Communications Satellite Act. The government assigned the monopoly of international satellite communications to a new corporation called Comsat. AT&T went ahead with Telstar 2, completing its experimental program. Of the six flightworthy spacecraft built by AT&T with corporate funds, only two were launched, but Telstar's publicity served AT&T very well. Nonetheless, between the success of Telstar 1 and the launch of Telstar 2 on 7 May 1963, AT&T lost its chance to control commercial satellite communications. NASA's role in communications satellites was changing, too. A 1958 agreement between NASA and the Department of Defense gave responsibility for the development of active communications satellites to the military, leaving NASA with the development of passive satellites.

In August 1960, however, NASA decided to pursue active satellite research, but not synchronous satellites. The military already had an active synchronous satellite, Project Advent, in place. NASA began developing medium-altitude satellite systems and issued a request for proposals on 4 January 1961 for an experimental communications satellite to be known as Relay. Both AT&T and Hughes approached NASA with their design concepts, but in May 1961, NASA selected RCA to build the two Relay spacecraft, instead of AT&T or Hughes. The Goddard Space Flight Center oversaw the project. Project Relay Although AT&T did not win the contract to build them, the Relay satellites used the same primary ground stations as those used by Bell Telephone Laboratories' Telstar 1 satellite. These were located in the United States (in Maine, New Jersey, and California) and overseas (in West Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Japan). Relay was an experimental satellite program; however, the satellites transmitted television signals between the United States and Europe and Japan. The Tokyo 1964 Olympics, however, were passed from Tokyo to the United States, and then on to Europe via Relay.

NASA launched Relay 1 on 13 December 1962 into an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 4,012 nautical miles (about seven kilometers). The orbit took Relay through the Earth's inner radiation belt, so that the spacecraft could measure the levels of radiation and study its effects on satellite electronics. Relay taught many lessons in communications spacecraft design. The idea of flying experimental communications spacecraft is to try new things and to determine whether they work. Failures are expected and provide the learning experience necessary for technology advancement. Relay was no exception. While in orbit, the power supply for Relay 1's primary transponder failed, and the spacecraft had to switch to its backup transponder, which performed well. Another problem was spurious commands. The satellite recorded 401 anomalies (errors) during its first year. Ground stations observed anomalies when the satellite was in view, which was during only 15 percent of its orbit. The main culprit was interference from the wideband subsystem. Consequently, as a corrective measure, Relay 2 carried a filter on the command receiver's transmission line and had improved circuitry to better differentiate between noise and command signals.

As a result, Relay 2 recorded only sixty-two command anomalies. Among the other problems faced by the first Relay experimental satellite was the failure of the charge controller for one of three battery packs after about three months. Yet another was the long time required for the traveling-wave tube to warm up. Normally, the tube took three minutes to warm up, but the malfunctioning tube could take as long as sixteen minutes. This delay reduced the time the satellite was usable, as Relay 1's orbit placed it in any particular ground station's view for only about thirty minutes. Relay 2, launched 21 January 1964, had increased radiation resistance plus measures that [ 55] improved reliability. Finally, Relay 1 had a design life of one year, but when its turnoff switch failed, it continued to operate for a second year. Syncom The objective of the Syncom satellite project was to demonstrate synchronous-orbit communications satellite technology. In the early 1960s, achieving a synchronous orbit was a challenge.

According to Lawrence Lessing, an observer at the time (1962): Nearly everyone agrees that for a short-range, experimental first venture, the medium altitude active repeater satellite, such as Telstar or Relay, is the best bet . . . . Lockheed . . . is confident that before the complex problems of operating 50 or more satellites at lower altitudes are solved . . . the U.S. will be able to put up a full-powered, simpler, high-altitude system. Other experts, however, say that the synchronous high-altitude satellite is still some order of magnitude beyond present technology.11 A synchronous orbit is one in which a satellite makes one orbit per day, the same period as the Earth's rotation around its axis. As a result, the satellite hovers over the same area of the Earth's surface continuously. The altitude of a synchronous orbit is 22,235 miles (19,322 nautical miles or 35,784 kilometers). At lower altitudes, satellites orbit the Earth more than once per day.

For example, the Space Shuttle, at a nominal altitude of 180 miles (290 kilometers), orbits the Earth in an hour and a half. The Moon, on the other hand, at a distance of around 240,000 miles (nearly 390,000 kilometers), takes a month to orbit the Earth. A key advantage of a synchronous satellite is that ground stations have a much easier job of tracking the satellite and pointing the transmitting and receiving antennas at it, because the satellite is always in view. With spacecraft in lower orbits, tracking stations must acquire the satellite as it comes into view above one horizon, then track it across the sky as the antenna slews completely to the opposite horizon, where the satellite disappears until its next pass. For continuous coverage, a ground station might need two antennas to acquire the first satellite, then connect with the next satellite passing overhead. In addition, continuous coverage requires the placement of ground stations distributed around the globe, so that any given satellite is rising over the viewing horizon of one ground station, while it is setting in relation to another station. The chief communications advantage of the geosynchronous satellite, however, is its wide coverage of the Earth's surface.

About 42 percent of the Earth's surface is visible from a synchronous orbit. Three properly placed satellites can provide coverage for the entire globe. Although Arthur C. Clarke published the first idea of a synchronous communications satellite in 1945, the first such synchronous-orbit spacecraft, Syncom 1, was not launched until 14 February 1963. However, when the motor for circularizing the orbit fired, the spacecraft fell silent. To demonstrate attitude control for antenna pointing and station keeping, Syncom had two separate attitude control-jet propellants: nitrogen and hydrogen peroxide. The most likely cause was a failure of the high-pressure nitrogen tank.12 [ 56] Syncom 2 addressed these critical problems from the first attempt at making a geosynchronous communications satellite. Launched on 26 July 1963, after improvements in the nitrogen tank design, Syncom 2 successfully achieved synchronous orbit and transmitted data, telephone, facsimile, and video signals. Its successor, Syncom 3, launched 19 August 1964, had the addition of a wideband channel for television and provided coverage of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Syncom 3 was different from its predecessor in other ways, notably in its orbital pattern. A particular type of synchronous orbit is the geostationary orbit--namely, a synchronous orbit around the equator. Geostationary satellites seem to be stationary over a point on the surface, as distinguished from an area of the surface. Syncom 3 had a geostationary orbit, while the orbit of Syncom 2 was inclined thirty-three degrees to the equator, so that over a twenty-four-hour period, it appeared to move thirty-three degrees north and thirty-three degrees south in a "figure 8" pattern as observed from the ground. Figure 12. Television image transmitted from Japan to the United States of the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo via the Relay experimental communications satellite launched in 1962. (Courtesy of NASA). In addition to communications experiments, the Syncom satellites contributed to a determination of the Earth's gravitational field. They were capable of measuring range at synchronous altitude to an accuracy of less than fifty meters. The high altitude of their orbits minimized perturbations arising from local topology changes on the Earth's surface. Applications Technology Satellites: The Next Generation?

The first of the second generation of the ATS program, known as ATS-6, also was the last ATS mission. Congress canceled the program in 1973 as a budget-cutting measure and to allow the commercial communications satellite industry to underwrite its own research and development. In 1974, NASA unsuccessfully attempted to reinstate the ATS program. Thus, the impressive ATS-6 spacecraft, launched 30 May 1974, marked the end of an era and the beginning of a dry spell for NASA experimental communications satellites. Built by Fairchild Space and Electronics Company for Goddard, the ATS-6 spacecraft was much larger than its predecessors, weighing 1,336 kilograms (compared with 431 kilograms for ATS-5) and standing just over eight and a half meters tall and sixteen meters across its booms (ATS-5 was 1.8 meters tall and 1.4 meters in diameter). In addition to being the largest geosynchronous communications satellite launched to date, it was the first three-axis stabilized communications satellite.

ATS-6 incorporated many significant design firsts, such as a 9.14-meter parabolic reflector, a digital computer for attitude control, solid-state high-power radio frequency transmitters, a primary structure made of graphite composite material, heat pipes for primary thermal control, monopulse tracking for attitude control, and a radio frequency interferometer for attitude determination and control.15 Equally significant was the demonstration of technology for tracking and data relay satellites that led to the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) program. In the TDRSS, a tracking and data relay satellite uses the geosynchronous orbital vantage point to look down on low-altitude satellites. Data are relayed from the low-altitude [ 60] satellite to a ground station through the geosynchronous satellite. Without this space relay capability, NASA needed ground stations all over the globe to collect data from satellites as they passed overhead. Because a low-altitude satellite orbits the Earth in a matter of a few hours, it is only in view of a single ground station for typically 20 minutes at a time.

ATS-6 tracked the Nimbus 5 and 6 and the GEOS 3 (Geodynamics Experimental Ocean Satellite) satellites with a roll-and-pitch accuracy of better than 0.2 degree. The nine-meter antenna enabled small ground receivers to pick up a good quality signal. A demonstration in India, in 1975, relayed television signals from a six-gigahertz uplink through the ATS-6 spacecraft and back to Earth at 860 megahertz, directly to three-meter antennas installed in approximately 2,000 villages. The large deployable antenna required tight pointing by the spacecraft, which is why it used three-axis stabilization. ATS-6 carried out radio-wave propagation studies at frequencies up to thirty gigahertz; it also established L-band (1,550 to 1,650 megahertz) relay links to aircraft and demonstrated multiple aircraft tracking. ATS-6 experienced a failure of three of its four orbit control jets in May 1979. That failure led to the decision to power down the spacecraft on 3 August 1979.

Subsequently, its telemetry system was activated between November 1979 and February 1980 to collect particle data for correlation with similar data being collected by other satellites.16 NASA Quits Although the launch of the ATS-6 spacecraft in 1974 marked the end of NASA's program of experimental communications satellites, the space agency also participated at the same time in a Canadian satellite venture known initially as "Cooperative Applications Satellite C" and renamed Hermes. This joint effort involved NASA and the Canadian Department of Communications. NASA's Lewis Research Center provided the satellite's high-power communications payload. Canada designed and built the spacecraft; NASA tested, launched, and operated it. Also, the European Space Agency provided one of the low-power traveling-wave tubes and other equipment.17 Hermes was launched 17 January 1976 and operated until October 1979. Canada also created a telecommunications policy that the United States would emulate, and this would lead to the end of NASA's communications satellite research and development program. In late 1969, Canada announced that any financially qualified organization could apply for, and expect to be granted, authority to operate a domestic satellite system.

As a result, in November 1972, that country put into orbit the world's first domestic satellite. In addition, the Canadian government abandoned sponsored research in the hope of motivating competition in the development of satellite technology. This Canadian "Open Skies" policy represented a striking contrast to past U.S. policy,18 but it was in tune with the Nixon administration's advocacy of competition. [ 61] Subsequently, in January 1973, budget pressures caused NASA essentially to eliminate its communications satellite research and development program, much of which was carried out at the Goddard Space Flight Center, although the Lewis Research Center was working on advances in traveling-wave tube design and was participating in the Canadian Hermes project. Goddard had been responsible for most NASA experimental (as well as operational) communications satellites, including the ATS series. Meanwhile, the danger of foreign competition, especially from Japan and Europe, loomed large. The Japanese launched the first commercial Ka-band operational satellite, called Sakura 2a, on 4 February 1983. Built by Ford (now Loral) and Mitsubishi, and launched on a Japanese N2 rocket, Sakura 2a also was Japan's first commercial communications satellite.

It was replaced by Sakura 3a, which was launched 19 February 1988. In the 1990s, Loral also built the Superbird and N-Star satellites for Japan, and with Japanese contractors led by Toshiba, Japan's National Space Development Agency designed and built the ETS 6 (Kiku 6) spacecraft.19 At the same time, the Europeans were catching up. The Olympus satellite began development in 1979 as L-Sat and was built by European aerospace companies, of which British Aerospace was the prime contractor. Launched on 12 July 1989 on an Ariane 3 rocket, Olympus was a large multipurpose satellite demonstrating and promoting new applications in television broadcasting, intercity telephone routing, and the use of the Ka-band for videoconferencing and low-rate data transfer for business communication.20 Foreign competition provided NASA a strong argument for reinstating its commercial satellite development program. The question was: what technology ought to be developed? Market studies conducted during the 1970s revealed the crowding of synchronous orbits. The obvious solution to overcrowding was to use higher frequency Ka-band communications satellites.

A compelling synergy exists among the use of Ka-band frequencies, spot beams, and onboard processors. In general, higher frequencies produce smaller beam widths with a given antenna, and so it is easier to make antennas that produce spot beams at Ka-band frequencies. A spot beam covers a smaller area, such as a major metropolitan area, compared to typical beams covering the entire country. These spot beams improve the problem of rain fade at Ka-band by concentrating the signal strength to punch through clouds. Once there are spot beams, it is a natural extension to switch signals between various spot coverage areas (such as routing one signal from New York to Chicago and another from New York to Los Angeles) aboard the spacecraft. Despite the virtual shutdown of the NASA communications satellite research and development program, NASA systems engineers throughout the mid-1970s sought ways to revive their canceled program. Work continued on satellites that were still operating in space, as well as on projects that were too far along to stop. Both the Lewis Research Center and the Goddard Space Flight Center advocated reviving the space communications programs, but along very different lines. Goddard championed public service satellites directly in competition with industry. The technology development program at Lewis supported U.S.

industry, although some companies saw the Lewis approach as subsidizing competitors. The Nixon administration's advocacy of competition thus favored the Lewis approach. The question of federal funding of communications satellite technology development by NASA came before the National Research Council, whose Committee on Satellite [ 62] Communications released a report on the subject in 1977. The committee considered several options and recommended funding a NASA experimental communications satellite technology flight program and an experimental public service communications satellite system. The committee opposed creating an operational public service system on the grounds that it was "inappropriate for NASA."21 In 1978, five years after budget pressures forced NASA to eliminate its commercial communications satellite research and development program, the space agency reentered the field.22 The Lewis Research Center, not the Goddard Space Flight Center, acted as the lead center, in light of the program's emphasis on technology. Lewis worked on the next NASA experimental communications satellite and began a $45 million program of technology development using duplicate contracts, to have the new designs needed for a radically new spacecraft. NASA involved the five major builders of communications satellites--TRW, Hughes, Ford, General Electric, and RCA--by awarding each a study contract.

These contracts ranged in cost from $264,000 (RCA) to $1,213,000 (TRW), and all were completed in the summer of 1981. Joe Sivo, chief of the communications division at Lewis, brought U.S. communications carriers--the users of the technology--into the program to develop a consensus on advanced technology requirements. Between November 1979 and May 1983, the Carrier Working Group, formed by Sivo, met nine times to define flight system requirements and experiments and to review spacecraft designs as they became available from the study contractors. The Carrier Working Group consisted of representatives from American Satellite, AT&T Long Lines, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Comsat, GTE Satellite, Hughes Communications, ITT, RCA, Satellite Business Systems (MCI), Southern Pacific, and Western Union. The Advanced Communications Technology Satellite The efforts of the Carrier Working Group and the industry study contracts led directly to the design and construction of the next NASA experimental communications satellite, known as the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS).

Its unique feature is that it acts as a "switchboard in the sky." The communications payload incorporates steerable, spot-beam antennas and onboard switching that allows signals to be routed aboard the spacecraft. The Ka-band frequencies used by the ACTS (thirty gigahertz for the uplink and twenty gigahertz for the downlink) were new capabilities for U.S. communications satellites, but the Japanese already had used them on their own satellite. NASA makes the satellite available for experiments by industry, universities, and other government agencies, as well as for tests of new service applications. Launched 12 September 1993, the ACTS has been perhaps the most successful of NASA's communications satellites. To date, it has operated for two years without failures and has conducted more than 100 experiments and tests. Furthermore, several commercial systems have proposed using ACTS technologies. For example, Motorola, which built the satellite's baseband processor, is incorporating onboard switching in its Iridium system, while Hughes is working on Spaceway, a Ka-band system with spot beams.

Despite [ 63] these technical and commercial successes, the ACTS had a long and tortuous existence during the 1980s, as Congress and the White House debated the philosophy of having NASA develop technology for the U.S. communications satellite industry. While the satellite was still in the design phase, for example, the Reagan administration deleted the satellite from its budget, only to have Congress reinstate the project. Conclusion NASA's commercial communications satellite program has produced many significant results over the past 35 years. Although some critics have argued that NASA has overstated its contribution to satellite communications,23 one can contend that the program has returned far more to the industry than its cost. One often overlooked key to understanding the value of NASA's experimental communications satellite program is the concept of risk in space design. The high cost of launching spacecraft, coupled with the current impossibility of repairing hardware in synchronous orbit, means that the design of space hardware is driven by the risk of failure. As a result, space hardware designs have been very conservative, using old technology, because of the perceived risk associated with using anything new. Even if a new item can produce greater capability at lower cost, if it increases the risk of failure, it will not be used.

For a new technology to fly, its benefits must be overwhelming, thereby precluding incremental improvements in space technology. As a result, space hardware can lag behind the state of the art by more than a decade. A high risk of failure overshadowed the early years of satellite communications. NASA's launch record in the early 1960s reflected the state of rocket science at the time--namely, rockets failed quite often. Also, the space environment was not well known. The period was a critical time for NASA's involvement in the development of communications satellites. Without NASA, Hughes's Syncom would never have gotten off the ground, and Hughes would not be the world's largest communications satellite maker today. Despite the benefits that NASA's experimental communications satellite program has brought industry, industry does not look kindly on NASA's development of spacecraft or technology that might undermine a firm's competitive advantage. In other words, a NASA spacecraft must develop new technology that all U.S. companies can use, but the space agency must avoid the construction of spacecraft that might seem to compete with any company. Hughes benefited enormously from NASA's involvement in the early days of communications satellites. Today, as a result, Hughes is the largest builder of commercial communications satellites.

In the 1995 Space News "Top 50" list of space companies, Hughes was ranked second.24 The 1973 cancellation of NASA's commercial communications satellite research and development program, in retrospect, benefited the space agency. It forced a complete rethinking of the program. To be reinstated in 1978, NASA had to justify the program from scratch and transform it from a public service demonstration into a technology development program. The public service satellite program looked too much like competition to industry, even though the services NASA provided would not have been affordable to public service users. [ 64] NASA currently is reorganizing its commercial communications program to prepare for the next generation of research and development following the ACTS, although a need for a followup project is not perceived at the moment. Therefore, NASA plans to develop long-term technology improvements and work on both spectrum management and issues of interoperability between satellite systems. NASA has benefited from the Satellite Industry Task Force, an industry advisory committee chaired by Hughes's Thomas Brackey.

At a presentation of its findings on 12 September 1995, attended by Vice President Al Gore, the task force expressed support for the ACTS, but it did not call for NASA undertaking another satellite project. 1. Leonard Jaffe, Communications in Space (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 67. 2. Ibid., p. 80. 3. Delbert D. Smith, Communication Via Satellite: A Vision in Retrospect (Boston: A.W. Sijthoff, 1976), p. 71. 4. John Robinson Pierce, "Communication Satellites," Scientific American 205 (October 1961): 101. 5. Telstar I, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: NASA SP-32, Goddard Space Flight Center, June 1963). Also published as A.C. Dickieson, et al., "Telstar I," Bell System Technical Journal 42 (July 1963).

In December 1965, Goddard issued volume four of NASA SP-32, which related Goddard Telstar experiments. The four-volume set of NASA SP-32 consequently provides a useful compendium of Telstar information. 6. Typed manuscript, Peter Cunniffe, "Misreading History: Government Intervention in the Development of Commercial Communications Satellites," Report no. 24, Program in Science and Technology for International Security, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1991, p. 29, ACTS Project Office, NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, OH. 7. Jaffe, Communications in Space, p. 107. 8. Cited in Lloyd D. Musolf, ed., Communications Satellites in Political Orbit (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), pp. 17-18. 9. John F. Kennedy, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Service, 1961), p. 530. 10. Smith, Communication Via Satellite, p. 74. 11.

Lawrence Lessing, "Launching a Communications System in Space," in The Editors of Fortune, eds., The Space Industry: America's Newest Giant (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 140-41. 12. Richard M. Bentley and Albert T. Owens, "SYNCOM Satellite Program," Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets 1 (July-August 1964): 395. 13. Paul J. McCeney, "Applications Technology Satellite Program," Acta Astronautica 5 (1978): 299-325. 14. Ibid., p. 324. 15. Robert O. Wales, ed., ATS-6 Final Engineering Performance Report (Washington, DC: NASA Research Publication [RP]-1080, 1981). 16. In 1985, the ATS program was transferred from Goddard to the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland to consolidate NASA's communications program. ATS-3 is still operational. Michael A.

Cauley, "ATS-3: Celebrating 25 Years of Service in Space," unpublished manuscript, no date, p. 1, ACTS Project Office, NASA Lewis Research Center. 17. Harold R. Raine, "The Communications Technology Satellite Flight Performance," Acta Astronautica 5 (1978): 343-368. 18. A.D. Wheelon, "Von Karman Lecture: The Rocky Road to Communication Satellites," in AIAA 24th Aerospace Sciences Meeting: January 6-9, 1986, Reno, Nevada, Paper No. AIAA-86-0293, Vol. 4 (New York: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1986), p. 21. 19. Andrew Wilson, ed., Jayne's Space Directory 1993-1994 (Surrey: Jayne's, 1993), pp. 66, 359-60. 20. Ibid., pp. 330-32. 21.

Committee on Satellite Communications, Space Applications Board, Assembly of Engineering, National Research Council, Federal Research and Development for Satellite Communications (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1977), p. 30. 22. Robert R. Lovell, "The Status of NASA's Communications Program," Pacific Telecommunications Conference, January 1982, p. 4, preprint copy supplied by author. 23. See, for instance, Cunniffe, "Misreading History," passim. 24. Laura K. Browning, "The Top 50 Space Companies," Space News 6 (24-30 July 1995): 8. Six Tech Advancements from the 60s That Changed the World :: Tech :: Lists :: Page 1 :: Paste Six Tech Advancements from the 60s That Changed the World By Paste Tech | July 30, 2014 | 12:00pm Share Tweet Submit Pin The 1960s were a remarkable decade of change.

The first generation of the postwar America youth were discovering their cultural identity, the Vietnam War and counterculture was reshaping the political landscape, and the Beatles went from A Hard Day’s Night to Abbey Road. But at the center of it, technology was beginning to develop at an unprecedented pace—most of which the general public only saw the tip of the iceberg. These technologies laid the foundation for an entire half decade of scientific innovations, many of which even resulting in products that we enjoy today. The iconic technological products of the 60s—the microwave oven, the color television, the living room cabinet record player—these are of a different topic of discussion. The following are the technologies that were discovered and implemented in a way that led to the products of the future. These are the six technological advancements from the 1960s that changed the world forever: 1. DRAM (the stuff in your computer) It’s the unsexy little things, really, that end up meaningfully changing the world. Copper wires, LEDs, optic fibers, tin—the discovery of these things drastically increased the efficiency of a much larger tool, thing, or framework, which opened the floodgates that led to the next thing and then the next.

For hard technological infrastructure, specifically the various components that make up the computer, the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) memory chip was the unsexy little thing. Invented in 1968 by Robert H. Dennard, who received his doctorate at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, the chip vastly increased the memory capacity of computers at a cheaper price. This allowed for a diverse set of more powerful technological products to be created for market, which was a for mainstream technology consumers who could, with help of DRAMs, own powerful personal tech on a more affordable budget. Some form of DRAM happily sits in the intestines of your favorite devices: gaming consoles, phones, computers, digital camera, Roku stick, so on and so forth. The memory chip also allowed great gains for companies, as the chip lowered the barriers of entry for companies and wider industries to embrace, integrate, and scale their operations on top of computing power. And that’s a big deal—an increased accessibility to computing power allowed companies to become more powerful, efficient, and effective than ever before.

The memory chip was also vibrant argument in support of Moore’s Law, which (to simplify the technical definition down to bare basics) is the observation that overall processing power for computers will double every two years. The Law pretty much remains intact to this day, though the technical specificities of what constitutes “processing power” has shifted—from internal electrical circuitry to the ephemeral thing we call the “cloud.—Nicholas Quah 2. Telstar, the First Commercial Satellite By 1962, some governments had already launched satellites, largely to carry out extraterrestrial experiments. That year, though, the first commercial satellite went into orbit, forever changing the face of communications. Telstar 1 had its origins in a partnership between Bell Labs (which built it), NASA, AT&T, the UK’s General Post Office (back when it was handling Britain’s telecom services), and France Telecom. The satellite is less than three feet long but weighs about 170 pounds and used solar power when it was in service. This hunk of metal might be infinitesimal in the grand scheme of the universe, but it’s hard to overstate its importance to humanity.

It was the first device our race used to relay phone calls, fax images, and television pictures, including the first transatlantic TV feed, through space. That last one was an especially big deal. On July 11, just a day after launch, Telstar relayed non-public TV pictures. A couple of weeks later, the first live, public TV pictures beamed across the Atlantic, a snippet of a game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago Cubs. The broadcast was supposed to first show John F. Kennedy giving a speech in this moment befitting a president, but the signal was up and running before he was ready, so the Phillies and Cubs got an unexpected moment in the spotlight. When JFK did appear, he fittingly spoke of the American dollar price, which caused some concern across the pond at the time. But, there was a catch. Since Telstar wasn’t in geosynchronous orbit (i.e. fixed to the same point above the spinning Earth), those transatlantic TV broadcasts only lasted 20 minutes during its orbit of 2 hours and 37 minutes. It would be three more years before a communications satellite was in geosynchronous orbit, giving an uninterrupted signal.

Ironically—because Telstar was in part a product of the Space Race between the US and the Soviet Union—it was the Cold War that thumped the first nail in its space coffin. Just a day before Telstar launched, the US tested a high-altitude nuclear bomb which affected the part of the atmosphere that Telstar orbited. The radiation increase the bomb caused, along with other high-altitude tests (including a Soviet blast), damaged the satellite’s delicate transistors and knocked it offline that November. Scientists managed to kickstart Telstar in January, but there was soon another, catastrophic transistor failure. Telstar survived just seven months in service, handling more than 400 total transmissions. It’s still up there, though, floating around as a little piece of history in the vast expanse of space.—Kris Holt 3. BASIC Programming Language If you want to accelerate a revolution, you need to get as many people as humanly possible to actively participate in its machinations. And to do that, you would need to figure out some sort of pathway, some sort of tool, that can help turn people into participants.

Or, to switch metaphors, you can’t cultivate a language without speakers, and if you want to speakers, you need a damn good dictionary. In the initial public revolution of computing, the BASIC programming language was that damn good dictionary. Short for “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,” BASIC was created by two Dartmouth professors, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, in 1964 as part of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System project. What it allowed the user to do was nothing short of revolutionary: previously, “computing” involved incredibly expensive mainframe machines—the kind that fills up rooms and has things that looks like film reels on a projector- as well as an extensive and aggravatingly slow system that involved punch-card production (which would contain the program), several trained operators as middle-men to handle the input and output of the process, and a sizable wait to receive results. The Time-Sharing System rode on a series of technological breakthroughs that allows these processes to happen simultaneously, consolidating the overall “computing” process and marked a dramatic shift in hardware design. BASIC was the language designed to allow users to interact with this new computing configuration.

With it, people could directly communicate with the computer itself through a terminal with keyboards and teletype printers which would later become display screens. It’s kind of crazy to think about it, but the computers we know now—and the way we interact with them, through monitors and mice and keyboards—largely began with this particular innovation. (I mean, who knows? In an alternate timeline, computing could largely be auditory, and we would provide input by verbally going “beep beep boop boop.”) That the language was accessibly teachable, and that the language was designed and fostered in an environment built on teaching, contributed greatly to the expansion of its user base. And this was key: the act and culture of computing were essentially democratized, which allowed an exponentially growing number of people who could work to solve the issues of computing and to explore new ways of integrating it into the wider world. This past season of Mad Men featured a small arc involving the introduction of a computer into its early-1970s world, gesturing towards a moment where computing met advertising.

It is an interesting depiction of an early pre-historic moments that featured computers “eating the world.” These days, the closest equivalent to BASIC that we have is probably the Ruby language and its corollary Ruby-on-Rails deployment framework. Ruby is an exceeding easy programming language to get behind, and with its popularization in the current iteration of the tech industry, Ruby could well do to software what BASIC did to computing as a whole. Whatever happens, it’s still kinda great to think about the fact that 50 years ago, ubiquitous computing started with this rather specific innovation. —Nicholas Quah 4. LEDs and Electroluminescent Panels The world we live in now is constantly lit with the technology of electroluminescence. Whether it’s the billboard you drive by, the computer screen you’re reading this on, or lights in your house, the purveyance of light-emitting capacitors is hard to deny. While the phenomenon of a material emitting light from an electrical current wasn’t invented in the 1960s, the possibilities for electroluminescent panels came into full view during the decade, most notably with the invention of the light-emitting diode (LED).

It’s said that General Electric had patents for electroluminescent panels dating back to 1938, but it wasn’t until 1962 that the first LED was created. The first LED was developed by Nick Holonyak Jr., often referred to as the “father of the LED”, working as a scientist for General Electric in 1962. His was a red LED—and the first LED that could be seen by the human eye. However, just a year earlier, the first infrared LED was accidentally discovered by Bob Biard and Gary Pittman, who found upon it while working attempting to make a laser diode for Texas Instruments. However, until 1968, both red and infrared LEDs remained incredibly expensive and thus, fairly limited in use. None other than the controversial Monsanto Company were first able to manufacture red LEDs for the mass market, first selling their LEDs to Hewlett-Packard (HP) for their products in 1968. They first appeared only in alphanumeric displays, handheld calculators, and as indicators, as they weren’t very bright. But slowly they became more brighter and cheaper, and became integrated in more and more commercial products throughout the 70s and 80s.

The LED is still incredibly common today, especially since the discovery of white LEDs in the late 1990s, which made it a technology that could replace the common incandescent forms of light. But like today, LED wasn’t the only burgeoning source of electroluminescence in the 1960s. While LEDs would eventually be the future of light, the more practical was a technology called electroluminescent panels. These were first shown off by Aron Vecht in 1968 and quickly put to use in watches, vehicles, night lights, and backlights. This technology was further developed to mass market proportions by companies such as Sharp and Planar System and became the dominant means of lighting consumer products throughout the rest of the century.—Luke Larsen 5. Direct Distance Dialing

Question: The first Telstar satellite, that relayed the first television pictures, telephone calls and fax images through space, was designed to provide satellite communications over what area?
Answer: The Atlantic Ocean