The date: 1965, not 1967
The first commercial communications satellite was launched on 6 April 1965, not in 1967. It was called Early Bird, and it was also known as Intelsat I. It sat in a geostationary orbit over the Atlantic, and it began regular commercial service in June 1965. In 1966 and 1967 the second-generation Intelsat II satellites were launched, so 1967 was a year of expansion for a system that already existed.
Why a new organisation was needed
Experimental satellites such as Echo, Telstar and Syncom had shown that the technology worked. Running a permanent service was a different problem, mainly political and financial. Who would own the satellites? How would countries share the cost and the traffic?
In the United States, Congress answered with the Communications Satellite Act of 1962, signed in August of that year. It created a private corporation, the Communications Satellite Corporation, usually called COMSAT, which was founded in 1963. It was a new kind of body: owned partly by the public and partly by the established telephone carriers, and regulated by the government.
Other countries had their own telecom monopolies and their own concerns about a system dominated by one nation. After negotiation, interim arrangements were agreed in August 1964, and the International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium, known as Intelsat, was formed. It began with a small group of countries, and COMSAT acted as the manager of the system. More countries joined over the next few years. Later, in the early 1970s, permanent agreements turned Intelsat into a full international organisation.
Early Bird (Intelsat I)
Early Bird was built by Hughes Aircraft. It was a small, drum-shaped satellite covered in solar cells, and it was intended partly as a demonstration of a commercial service. Its capacity was modest. It could carry either a limited number of telephone circuits (commonly given as 240) or one television channel at a time, and it was not able to do both together.
That capacity is easy to put in context. The first transatlantic telephone cable, the TAT-1 cable, opened in 1956 with only a few dozen voice circuits, so Early Bird offered several times as many. For television, which no cable could carry, it was a new capability. In its first months it was used for live transatlantic broadcasts, and public demand for such coverage was strong.
Early Bird’s importance lay less in its capacity than in what it proved. The Telstar satellite had been a brilliant experiment, but it could not offer round-the-clock coverage. A geostationary satellite could sit over the Atlantic permanently, and a customer could book a circuit or a television slot at any hour. That is what makes it the first commercial communications satellite, rather than just another test.
Intelsat II in 1966 and 1967
Early Bird was followed by a larger and more capable generation. The Intelsat II satellites were launched in 1966 and 1967. They had more capacity than Early Bird and they allowed service to extend to the Pacific region as well as the Atlantic. Not every launch in the early programme went smoothly, and one of the early Intelsat II satellites did not reach its intended orbit, but the series as a whole extended the network.
In the later 1960s Intelsat III followed with more capacity again, and by the end of the decade the system was close to covering the globe. That expansion mattered for events such as the Apollo 11 television pictures in 1969.
Why it mattered in 1967
By 1967 the idea of a satellite link as an ordinary part of broadcasting was becoming accepted. The Our World broadcast of June 1967, which linked many countries for a single live programme, depended on this kind of international cooperation, although it also used other facilities and arrangements and was a one-off production rather than a regular service.
The international principles under which all this took place were also being written down. The Outer Space Treaty, opened for signature in January 1967, set out basic rules that space should be used for peaceful purposes and that no state could claim sovereignty over it. It did not regulate communications directly, but it shaped the legal setting in which the satellites operated.
Some caution on “firsts”
Early Bird is usually described as the first commercial communications satellite in geostationary orbit. Earlier satellites, including the Syncom series, had been experimental or run by government agencies rather than offered as a commercial service. Details of capacity and exact dates differ slightly between sources, so figures here are given as commonly reported rather than exact.