Voices in orbit : explaining Satellites

Transcript

Narrator: Radio relays in space keeping pace with the Earth were foreseen 12 years before Sputnik by British writer Arthur C Clarke, incidentally an ex-Post Office man.

He believed three synchronous satellites could cover the globe. It'll take 50 years declared most of the experts, it took less than 20.

Man: The Americans began it all by saying they could now put the satellites in orbit, would we be interested, we said yes thanks very much but we'd like to build our own ground station.

Narrator: Meanwhile a communication satellite, Telstar was taking shape in America. This beach ball of electronics developed by Bell Laboratories was a very different animal from Clarke's original idea . Most experts were sure that maintaining satellites thousands of miles from earth would not be practicable for years.

So Telstar was put into orbit a mere 600 miles from earth so close that it hurtled across the sky in sight of each ground station for only half an hour.

Even so, Telstar relayed the first television pictures between America, Britain and France in 1962. In the first Telstar year President John F Kennedy signed the communication satellite act saying:

John F Kennedy: 'The ultimate result will be to encourage and facilitate world trade, education, entertainment and many kinds of professional, political and personal discourses which are essential to healthy human relationships and international understanding.'

Narrator: The team chosen to develop these ideas with other countries wanting to share communications satellites was a novel corporation known as COMSAT. Following this American lead into a revolutionary new technology the nations came together to create the International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium - INTELSAT - a partnership for progress as hopeful as the science that brought it into being.

11 Governments including Britain, signed on the first day and 50 more joined within 3 years, all agreeing to operate their ground stations but apointing COMSAT to manage the satellite in space.