Page 62 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

38 IPPOLITO AND PELTON

Men" for about 2 weeks during the Christmas holiday season. This was followed
by the simple teletype experimental satellite known as Courier IB. Although the
USSR would move on to launch larger satellites, the United States was initially
forced to concentrate on smaller and unmanned spacecraft.
By the 1960s, more serious and practical communications satellite projects
were under way. These included the successful, but ultimately rather irrelevant,
Echo 1 and Echo 2 experiments that bounced signals off giant metallic-covered
balloons, as well as the lesser known military-backed West Ford project. In these
"passive satellite" experimental projects, radio signals were simply reflected off
satellites. This simple reflection of radio signals from satellite surfaces proved to
be a difficult and highly uneconomic way to complete a telephone link. In short,
the ECHO experiment, designed by Dr. John Pierce of Bell Laboratories, and the
West Ford projects both "worked," just as experiments in the 1940s of bouncing
signals off the moon had worked earlier. These trials, however, confirmed that
passive signals that bounced off a reflective balloon were simply not an effective
way to proceed.
These experiments demonstrated that, to be practical and commercially viable,
satellite communications would require radio signals to be received, reamplified,
and returned to earth with a significant power boost. Otherwise the signals would
be too weak and low in capacity to have any practical value.
The Relay satellite (built by RCA) and the Telstar satellite (built by AT&T
Bell Labs), both launched by NASA in 1962, truly set the stage for commercial
satellite communications. These spacecraft proved that telecommunications via
satellite, including the relay of TV signals, was not only possible, but was achiev-
able on an ongoing basis and likely at affordable prices.
The submarine coaxial cables of the early 1960s lacked the capacity to handle
live TV transmissions, and thus these new experimental satellites truly fired peo-
ple's imagination about achieving broadband telecommunications networks in the
sky. AT&T, RCA, and the other telecommunications carriers at this point wanted
to seize the initiative and lead the way forward to develop and deploy this technol-
ogy. However, this particular vision of an industry-led program to create global
satellite communications systems was not to be. A full historical analysis of this
period in the annals of space is contained in a book by the space historian Dr. Da-
vid Whalen (2002), The Origins of Satellite Communications 1945-1965. This
book about the early days of satellite communications explains how the tug of war
between the telecommunications industry and the U.S. government (and espe-
cially NASA) went on for some time.
The early development of communications satellite technology did not all oc-
cur in the laboratory. When President Eisenhower was about to leave office, he at-
tempted on December 30, 1960, to define a national policy on satellite communi-
cations development. He outlined how he thought the technology and satellite
services should evolve and specifically under whose leadership, ownership, and