Page 58 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

34 IPPOLITO AND PELTON

Konstantin Tsiolokowsky, Hermann Oberth, Willy Lev, Hermann Noordung, and
Robert Goddard, among other writers, engineers, and scientists, envisioned the
possibility not only of rocket launchers, but of communications and navigational
satellites as well. In the late 1930s, Hermann Noordung even wrote about a space
colony in geosynchronous orbit.
Some of these writings were more flights of fancy than presentations of scien-
tific logic. A few were even both. Some of the more insightful but whimsical
thoughts were about the world of satellite communications systems yet to come.
The first of these can be found in the writings of Everett Edward Hale in his book
about a brick moon. Here Hale envisioned an "artificial moon" built of bricks but
inhabited by tropical plants as well as by men (and women) astronauts. These as-
tronauts, without aid of oxygen, would actually provide navigational assistance to
ships at sea from a polar orbit. At the time, solving the problem of accurate oce-
anic navigation was in fact the biggest scientific challenge of the day. The ulti-
mate solution was not navigational satellites, but one that was provided instead by
amazingly precise clocks developed by an English craftsman named John Harri-
son—a story that is well told in a book by Dava Sobel called Longitude.
The flight crew in Hale's fanciful book would not only provide navigational
aids such as longitude to ships at sea, but would also use Morse code to communi-
cate to the earth below—simply by stamping their feet in unison. The polar orbit
he described, however odd his vision seemed a couple of centuries ago, in fact re-
sembles the exact polar orbiting MEO orbits that are used by modern remote sens-
ing spacecraft and GPS networks.

SIR ARTHUR CLARKE: THE FATHER OF THE
COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE

The story of communications satellite technology, however, began seriously in
1945. The overall vision of global satellite communications started in earnest
with the writings of a young author and scientist released from service in the
British Radar Establishment as the end of World War II drew near. In a privately
circulated paper shared with fellow scientists in early 1945 and then in a formal
article published in the fall of the same year, this young former air force officer
outlined the future of satellite communications. In 1945, his article about "extra-
terrestrial radio relays" appeared in a now obscure British publication called
Wireless World. Sir Arthur Clarke, at the time, was neither a knight of the realm,
a world personality, nor a science fiction guru. Rather, he was a young English-
man with a strong yen for ocean diving and adventure. He went on to indulge
these appetites with vigor in both Australia off the Great Barrier Reef and in
Ceylon—now Sri Lanka—where he now lives. In the years that followed, he
wrote an increasing array of science fiction novels and scientific papers, but
none was ultimately as important as his early writings on satellites.