The First Satellite Communications: A New Era in Technology

What was first, and where 1967 fits

Satellite communications did not begin in 1967. The pioneering steps came earlier: the Echo balloon in 1960, Telstar in 1962, and the Syncom satellites in 1963 and 1964. By 1967 the technology was already in routine commercial use, and the year is better understood as one of expansion than of invention. This article covers the early firsts and then shows where 1967 sits after them.

An idea ahead of its time

The basic concept is older than any rocket. In 1945 the writer Arthur C. Clarke published an article in the magazine Wireless World suggesting that relay stations placed in a particular high orbit would appear to hover over one spot on the Earth, so that a handful of them could cover the globe. That orbit, roughly 35,800 kilometres above the equator, is now called the geostationary orbit.

In the 1940s and 1950s nobody could build or launch such a station. The practical problem was real, though. Long-distance telephone calls depended on undersea cables and on shortwave radio, which was unreliable, and television could not cross an ocean at all. The first transatlantic telephone cable, the TAT-1 cable of 1956, helped with voice, but it had no capacity for pictures.

Echo: a balloon as a mirror (1960)

The space race gave the idea its first test. After the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, American engineers began experimenting with orbiting radio relays. The best-known early experiment was Echo 1, launched by NASA in August 1960. It was a very large inflatable sphere, about 30 metres across, made of thin metal-coated plastic film.

Echo carried no electronics. It was a passive reflector: a signal sent up from one ground station bounced off the balloon and could be picked up by another a long way away. The signals that came back were extremely faint, but the experiment showed that microwave signals could be sent between distant points by way of space. The balloon was also bright enough to be seen crossing the night sky by eye, which made it famous with the public.

Telstar: live pictures across the Atlantic (1962)

A passive mirror could never carry much traffic, so the next step was an active satellite that received a signal, amplified it and sent it back. The Telstar satellite, built by Bell Telephone Laboratories for AT&T and launched by NASA in July 1962, was the first to capture public attention. It was a small sphere, under a metre across, covered in solar cells.

Telstar travelled in a fairly low, elliptical orbit. That meant it was in view of ground stations on both sides of the Atlantic for only short periods during each circuit of the Earth, so transmissions had to be scheduled around its passes. Large ground antennas in the United States (at Andover, Maine), Britain (Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall) and France took part in the first transatlantic television transmissions later that month. The pictures were brief and simple by modern standards, but they were live, and they crossed an ocean.

Telstar’s working life was short. Radiation in orbit, made worse by high-altitude nuclear testing around the time of its launch, damaged its electronics, and it had stopped working reliably by early 1963. Even so, it proved that an active satellite could carry both television and telephone signals. Its name became so well known that an instrumental pop record called “Telstar” topped charts in 1962.

Syncom: the geosynchronous breakthrough (1963 and 1964)

Telstar’s limited visibility pointed to the answer Clarke had suggested. A satellite in a high orbit that matches the Earth’s rotation stays in view of the same region all the time. NASA’s Syncom programme, with satellites built by Hughes Aircraft, set out to prove it.

• Syncom 2 was launched in July 1963 and reached a geosynchronous orbit. Because the orbit was tilted, the satellite traced a figure-eight path in the sky rather than staying fixed.
• Syncom 3 was launched in August 1964 and reached a true geostationary orbit over the Pacific.

Syncom 3 was used to relay some television coverage of the Tokyo Olympics in October 1964 to the United States. The Games opened just days after Japan’s new high-speed railway began running, so the country briefly showed off both a new railway and a new link to the world. A single satellite on the right orbit could now serve a whole ocean region without being tracked across the sky.

From experiment to a working system

These early satellites were experimental or belonged to single organisations. The step that turned them into a business came in 1965, when the Early Bird satellite entered commercial service over the Atlantic as part of an international arrangement set up in the mid-1960s. That story belongs to its own article, so here it is enough to say that the experimental phase was ending within about five years of Echo.

What 1967 added

Against that background, 1967 was a year of growth rather than firsts. The international satellite organisation continued to add and replace satellites in the Atlantic and Pacific, and the idea of a shared live global audience was moving from a technical possibility to a cultural fact. In June 1967 the Our World broadcast linked many countries by satellite for a single programme, and it included a live appearance by the Beatles. The thinker Marshall McLuhan, whose phrase “global village” was popular that year, was describing a world that satellites and television were making easier to imagine.

Colour pictures were part of the same trend. The spread of color television in the United States, and the start of colour on a second BBC channel in Britain in July 1967, meant that more viewers were watching live events relayed over long distances.

A short timeline

Anyone writing or reading about “firsts” in satellite communications should be cautious. Several programmes were running at once, and “first” depends on whether it means the first reflector, the first active relay, the first live television picture or the first geostationary orbit. For all of those, the dates are 1960 to 1964, not 1967.