• 1962 – Telstar relays the first publicly transmitted, live trans-Atlantic television program, featuring Walter Cronkite.

Telstar


Model of a Telstar satellite, on display at
Conservatoire national des arts et métiers

Manufacturer: Hughes, EADS Astrium, Space Systems/Loral, Airbus Defence and Space
Country of origin: United States
Operator: AT&T, Telesat
Applications: Communications

Telstar is the name of various communications satellites. The first two Telstar satellites were experimental and nearly identical. Telstar 1 launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket on July 10, 1962. It successfully relayed through space the first television pictures, telephone calls, and telegraph images, and provided the first live transatlantic television feed. Telstar 2 was launched May 7, 1963. Telstar 1 and 2—though no longer functional—still orbit the Earth.

Description

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Launched by NASA aboard a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, Telstar 1 was the first privately sponsored space launch. A medium-altitude satellite, Telstar was placed into an elliptical orbit completed once every 2 hours and 37 minutes, inclined at an angle of approximately 45 degrees to the equator, with perigee about 952 km (592 mi) from Earth and apogee about 5,933 km (3,687 mi) from Earth{.}  This is in contrast to the 1965 Early Bird Intelsat and subsequent satellites that travel in circular geostationary orbits.

Due to its non-geosynchronous orbit, similar to a Molniya orbit, availability of Telstar 1 for transatlantic signals was limited to the 30 minutes in each 2.5-hour orbit when the satellite passed over the Atlantic Ocean. Ground antennas had to track the satellite with a pointing error of less than 0.06 degrees as it moved across the sky at up to 1.5 degrees per second.


177 ft. long horn antenna at AT&T's satellite ground station
in Andover, Maine, built to communicate with Telstar

Since the transmitters and receivers on Telstar were not powerful, ground antennas had to be 90 ft (27 m) tall. Bell Laboratory engineers designed a large horizontal conical horn antenna with a parabolic reflector at its mouth that re-directed the beam. This particular design had very low sidelobes, and thus made very low receiving system noise temperatures possible. The aperture of the antennas was 3,600 sq ft (330 m2). The antennas were 177 ft (54 m) long and weighed 380 short tons (340,000 kg). Morimi Iwama and Jan Norton of Bell Laboratories were in charge of designing and building the electrical portions of the azimuth-elevation system that steered the antennas. The antennas were housed in radomes the size of a 14-story office building. Two of these antennas were used, one in Andover, Maine, and the other in France at Pleumeur-Bodou. The GPO antenna at Goonhilly Downs in Great Britain was a conventional 26-meter-diameter paraboloid.

In service

Telstar 1 relayed its first, and non-public, television pictures—a flag outside Andover Earth Station—to Pleumeur-Bodou on July 11, 1962. Almost two weeks later, on July 23, at 3:00 p.m. EDT, it relayed the first publicly available live transatlantic television signal. The broadcast was shown in Europe by Eurovision and in North America by NBC, CBS, ABC, and the CBC. The first public broadcast featured CBS's Walter Cronkite and NBC's Chet Huntley in New York, and the BBC's Richard Dimbleby in Brussels. The first pictures were the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The first broadcast was to have included remarks by President John F. Kennedy, but the signal was acquired before the president was ready, so engineers filled the lead-in time with a short segment of a televised game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. The Phillies' second baseman Tony Taylor was seen hitting a ball pitched by the Cubs' Cal Koonce to deep right field, caught by fielder George Altman for the out. From there, the video switched first to Washington, DC; then to Cape Canaveral, Florida; to the Seattle World's Fair; then to Quebec and finally to Stratford, Ontario. The Washington segment included remarks by President Kennedy, talking about the price of the American dollar, which was causing concern in Europe. When Kennedy denied that the United States would devalue the dollar it immediately strengthened on world markets; Cronkite later said that "we all glimpsed something of the true power of the instrument we had wrought."

That evening, Telstar 1 also relayed the first satellite telephone call, between U.S. vice-president Lyndon Johnson and the chairman of AT&T, Frederick Kappel. It successfully transmitted faxes, data, and both live and taped television, including the first live transmission of television across an ocean from Andover, Maine, US, to Goonhilly Downs, England, and Pleumeur-Bodou, France. (An experimental passive satellite, Echo 1, had been used to reflect and redirect communications signals two years earlier, in 1960.) In August 1962, Telstar 1 became the first satellite used to synchronize time between two continents, bringing the United Kingdom and the United States to within 1 microsecond of each other (previous efforts were accurate to only 2,000 microseconds).

The Telstar 1 satellite also relayed computer data between two IBM 1401 computers. The test, performed on October 25, 1962, sent a message from a transmitting computer in Endicott, New York, to the earth station in Andover, Maine. The message was relayed to the earth station in France, where it was decoded by a second IBM 1401 in La Gaude, France.

Telstar 1, which had ushered in a new age of the commercial use of technology, became a victim of the military technology of the Cold War era. The day before Telstar 1 launched, a U.S. high-altitude nuclear bomb (called Starfish Prime) had energized the Earth's Van Allen Belt where Telstar 1 went into orbit. This vast increase in a radiation belt, combined with subsequent high-altitude blasts, including a Soviet test in October, overwhelmed Telstar's fragile transistors. It went out of service in November 1962, after handling over 400 telephone, telegraph, facsimile, and television transmissions. It was restarted by a workaround in early January 1963. The additional radiation associated with its return to full sunlight once again caused a transistor failure, this time irreparably, and Telstar 1 went back out of service on February 21, 1963.

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Telstar, the first television broadcast satellite, celebrates 60-year anniversary

CBS Mornings
3M subscribers

8,217 views Jul 23, 2022 #unitedstates #news #telstar
Sixty years ago, and for the first time ever, three U.S. broadcast networks and the CBC in Canada beamed live programming from the United States to Europe via Telstar – one of the first television broadcast satellites. CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller has more.

#news #telstar #unitedstates

"CBS Saturday Morning" co-hosts Jeff Glor, Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson deliver two hours of original reporting and breaking news, as well as profiles of leading figures in culture and the arts. Watch "CBS Saturday Morning" at 7 a.m. ET on CBS and 8 a.m. ET on the CBS News app.

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