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Subscribe to RSSIt's been 50 years since the launch of the world's first commercial satellite. Not only did it change the way we get our news, it redefined the way we communicate with one another. NBC's Brian Williams reports.
Fifty years ago today, the Space Age gave birth to the age of satellite communication as we know it — though it wasn't clear at the time just how world-changing that outer-space angle would turn out to be. In retrospect, you could argue that the launch of AT&T's Telstar 1 satellite on July 10, 1962, made as much of a mark on the space frontier as Sputnik.
At the time, Americans worried that outer space was turning into a Cold War battleground, thanks to the Soviet Union's launch of the first-ever satellite (Sputnik in 1957) and the first human in space (Yuri Gagarin in 1961). "Only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new, terrifying theater of war," President John F. Kennedy declared in 1962.
Telstar, the world's first commercial satellite, marked the shift from outer space's potential military applications to its peaceful uses — which is the way most people think of space ventures today. Within hours of Telstar's launch on a Thor-Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the satellite beamed a non-public test transmission from Andover Earth Station in Maine to the Pleumeur-Bodou ground station in France. Two weeks later, on July 23, it relayed the first-ever public, live trans-Atlantic TV signal, linking Europe and North America.
That was the start of something big.
In a July 24, 1962 broadcast of The Huntley-Brinkley Report, David Brinkley reports on the public's reaction to the Telstar transmission.
"With Telstar and its successors, the world was made a smaller place, as billions of people around the world had instant access to news, sports and entertainment," Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs, said in a statement marking the anniversary. "The phrase 'live via satellite' became part of the common vernacular. At the time, few people would have believed that 50 years later you could actually talk to your house or car, or predicted that children would play video games with other children 10,000 miles away."
Telstar 1 was capable of carrying just one black-and-white TV channel, plus 600 simultaneous voice calls. It was in operation for less than a year, but it blazed a trail for generations of satellites, including Telstar 18 in 2004.
"Today, as we celebrate the enormous achievement that Telstar represented, Bell Labs researchers are laying the foundation for communications and collaboration for the next 50 years," Kim said.
That vision includes satellite-connected digital personal assistants ... devices that can bring 21st-century medicine to anyplace on Earth or in orbit ... and avatars that can let Earthlings explore Mars from millions of miles away, through virtual reality.
Perhaps the biggest legacy of Telstar 1 lies in how it brought nations together 50 years ago, reassuring us that outer space really could be the "sea of peace" that Kennedy was aiming for. Will it always be that way? Please feel free to weigh in with your reflections on the anniversary in the comment space below.
More about satellite history:
- Sputnik started a satellite revolution
- America's space age turns 50
- How satellites saved the world
- Satellite still in orbit, 54 years after launch
The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum is presenting a "Telstar 50th Anniversary" symposium at the facility on Washington's National Mall at 1:30 p.m. ET Thursday. It will begin with a satellite TV connection to the Pleumeur-Bodou Telecommunications Museum in France, commemorating the first global transmission of a TV signal in 1962. Speakers include Wayne Clough, secretary of the Smithsonian; Francois Delattre, France's ambassador to the United States; and Robert Tate, U.S. consul for western France. Historians and experts from industry and government will discuss Telstar's impact. The symposium will be webcast via the Smithsonian's website. For more information, check Telstar50.org.
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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A wimp by the standards of modern communications satellites, Telstar proved the concept would work. It was a trailblazing achievement. Imagine what we will have accomplished in the next 50 years.
Instead of hearing the human voice, I receive text messages. I am all for progress but, there is a lot to say, for human contact, friendship and social interaction. Sorry feeling lonely today.
I agree, it was an magnificent realization of a technical triumph. Thank god for the dreamers and science fiction writers. Given the acceleration of the last 100 years from light bulb to quantum computing, from Kitty Hawk to Rovers on Mars, I won't be surprised if we have achieved Star Trek or even beyond in the next 350 years. I wonder if conservatives will be afraid of losing their true soul if they teleport?
There was a Star Trek book where Zephem Cochrane feared the same thing. Roughly quoted, Cochrane thought that the original was killed while a copy who thoght s/he was the original reappearred. His fear was put to rest. I am sorry but I forget the name of the book. Enterprise, perhaps.
I am not trying to troll. Take care.
And Kudos to AT&T, for all their bad press, having the balls to develop, build & launch Telstar1
We still had a good laugh considering 1 Black and W TV channel and 600 phone links. All that 50 years of space junk is no laughing matter now.
6 or 7 years ago when unicef and care funded small farms in rural african community, they did so on a great deal of faith. they turned over the land in preparation for the seeds, knowing that there was no rain and the wells were used for human water consumption and bathing. they tried something, the hoodoo women and the christian faith women went out and blessed the land that had been turned over, walking all around the circumference of the fields. ho, what happened next. the ground watered every morning, with ground water. and only the areas that had been blessed. they tried just hoodoo and just christian and it didn't work. it had to be the combined prayers. maybe they should try this in the areas where the cattle are and the ponds. there is always a way when you pray. just enjoyed my oven-roasted ribs and the neighborhood dog neighbors are in bone heaven:-) my grandpa was a cattle rancher in jecori, sonora, mexico, when i was growing up. they got hit by drought when i was a teenager. hundreds of cows died. had a dream when my mother died that all of the cows in jecori came back as did the river. must be in a higher realm. my grandpa was the mayor of tiny little village of jecori. those ranchers fed neighboring moctezuma and cumpas. that's my french/german line. wish i had the energy to go back and visit. my mother used to carry water from the river in two large clay pots slung across her shoulders on a yoke. i think they still have one faucet in the backyard, a wood-burning water tank for a shower and a toilet that you throw a bucket of water in to flush it. kind of like our mountain people. awhile back jon lomberg ran a pick of interesting spirals on mars, he postulated that maybe some ancient martians planted galaxy gardens like the one he planted in hawaii. jon lomber was carl sagan's artist and the series 'cosmos'. i had a weird vision/day dream. i emailed him that i saw a parallel universe collapsing and what was plastered on the face of mars were freeze-dried galaxies, just add water. yesterday, i thought, i wonder if that's what our mountain people are. deep psyche if we tap it with education for those kids. maybe if we educate those children, their psyches will turn on the tap upstairs and it will rain again in the midwest. who knows, stranger things have happened. had another daydream that the asteroids are 'working' in our outer atmosphere, bringing ice from outer space for us to harvest for water, they move in and out like the flagelles in a cell, earth being the nucleus. maybe that's where the water will come from . . . . . . blessings to all, best, anna martina
anna, i am with you! blessings!! the indigo children coming along will share energy we never knew was possible, and harvest water from the asteroids.
Very interesting anna and so refreshing to be lifted above the fear-mongers and nay-sayers.
Blessing to you. . . .
BTW, have you ever 'heard' something from beyond this plane in "Telstar"? I was more sensitive to it when I was a kid but I can still catch glimpses of it today.
sweaver209, if you google 'chris lewicki', you will see that he is the lead of a new company formed to do things in the near future like mine the asteroids and harvest water from them. he was the wiz who did a 'hole in one' with the mars rovers landing after the prior mars probe was 'lost', after all of the round-the-clock hard work of building and planning the rovers mission. he is a product of the university of arizona's lunar and planetary lab.
It also spawned "Telstar" by the Tornados, the first recording by a British group to hit #1 on the US charts. It still gets airplay.
On September two years ago I saw Los Straightjackets, a surf/instrumental rock band from NASHVILLE perform. It was a great show and they really rocked the club real good. The show concluded with "Tequila" but the song they played before that was "Telstar". Man that was one real rock'n'roll party.
Yes, I remember how that song was haunting to my very young mind. It worked well with the black and white imagery on TV wowing the world its nearly incomprehensible sci-fi captivation when the space race offered more fear than celebration.
I still get chills when I hear this song.
The life that song had on AM radio seemed never-ending. Not bad for Britain's first number one hit in America. Hard to believe this song beat the Beatles across the pond first.
"Telstar" by the Tornados is possibly the best instrumental ever.
I was a kid when it came out but even so it gave me goosebumps and a sense of the vastness of space.
It still gives me goosebumps today.
And to think they produced it with just instruments, no computerized fakery.
I have it recorded and burned to a disc. The only song written about a man made satellite.
SORRY ! JetPak has a song devoted entirely to those who went into space & either dint return or returned dead...including Laika, the Siberian Huskie who still circled the earth 2,570 orbits before becoming a flash in the sky...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika
Sweet bird of youth...yes, I remember the song as if it were yesterday. The song was written by Joe Meek in actual tribute to the A&T sateillite. That is Joe Meek himself doing the accompanying vocals in a bathroom during the last half of the song when he produced the record. He claimed the song came to him out of nowhere...a tune he was haunted by until he got a group he was familiar with {Tornadoes} to record it, and the rest as they say, is history. Joe Meek years later committed suicide as the fame that once surrounded him eluded him.
back when my son, christopher, was in elementary school, he'll be 35 this month, he wrote a school paper on arkansas, i kept that paper. government satellites are tested, here, on ft. huachuca, home of signal corp and military intelligence, lots of contractors live here in town. i think it was sci-fi author, arthur clarke, who first envisioned communication satellites. he also envisioned 'space elevators'.
Arkansas ? Fort Huachucha ??
Try ARIZONA, about 45 miles SE of Tucson in Sierra Vista....
and it was decades ago when they were tested here.... nowadays they interrogate
terrorists flown in in black helo's at night & out again the next night .
yep, sierra vista is where i grew up, and where i live now, my dad was a civilian who worked at raymond w. bliss hospital. i went to school with all of the army brats, i was the artist of my graduating class at buena. the arkansas refers to my earlier post about the cattle in drought there. and, yep, those interrogators are a terror in town, too, when i manage to get out and run my errands. they think they're hot stuff. my retired a.f. brother told me about the interrogator school here. most nights i don't manage to get to bed until 3-4 a.m., on a good night. it's bad when it's 6:00 a.m., fried brain all that day when i finally get up. the DAV across the street from me, same thing, he took 3 bullets in iraq, he's the first soldier in 'boots on the ground', as well as his ptsd friend that i met as well. i live in the little trailer i bought from the fachetti's back in 1998 when their lt. col. daughter was the post commander of kuwait.
Re Check your Script and your Data Base. Sputnik Beat Telstar into space
Who said otherwise?
Aha, I see what Mr. Big is referring to. In the video clip, Brian Williams said "the first one" was launched 50 years ago, apparently referring to satellites in general. I think if you give him the benefit of the doubt and consider that he's referring to "satellites that transmit TV signals," that would be closer to the mark. Sorry about any confusion over this.
that news sure makes me feel old....takes me back to my grade schhool days of missile drills lined up in the hallway or crouching under our desks in school.....
Telstar was BIG news back then
I watched it go up on the news that day. I was 11yrs. old and amazed. I wonder what they would find "IF" it was brought back down.???
Hello,
For those who will be in the Washington, DC area on Thursday July 12, a public event is organized at the National Air & Space Museum from 1:30pm to 4:30pm, including a live TVcast between the Washington, DC and Pleumeur-Bodou in France (in the Radôme antenna which is now a museum). For more information, visit Telstar50.org
Excellent, meant to add that in. And you don't even have to be in the Washington area, because the proceedings will be webcast:
http://airandspace.si.edu/events/lectures/webcast/
Remember when TV relayed through such hardware carried the caption 'via satellite?'
No one bothers now. It's no longer special or unusual. It's an everyday given. (Like the obsolete 'Air Mail' stamp. Most of it moves by air now, anyway...)
Would that manned space flight was quite that common already...but it will be.
Live via Satellite remember those days.
Almost makes you want to sing "Happy Birthday" ....
How many satellites are up there now .... ??
Thanks Alan ....
Makes me feel old.
Your commentator on television stated that Telstar was the first satellite, rather than the first commercial or communications satellite. First satellite honors goes to Sputnik.
Agreed ... thanks for making that clear.
Love NBC news, MSNBC, Today, et al.
But Telstar and modern soccerballs were BOTH patterned after Buckminster Fuller's Buckyball?
Oops?
I went to the first shuttle launch, i can still feel the ground shake and the air ripple just thinking about it. Wow what changes! Beam me up Scotty. On Arthur Clarkes elevator!! Energy from the universe, pure white light! When properly focused and harnessed will cure any disease known to man.
Whenever the neon lights above my Grandfather's bar would start flickering, he would start muttering darkly in a mixture of English and Italian about the "Damned satellites". That was in 1957.
Ah, the weird old days.
Alan, I have a question. You know we have been having lots of solar sun flare's this year. What happens to the sattelites when the solar flares hit them. If these are massive flares, with heat traveling faster than the speed of light, would they be melted? You have to admit that we have way more satellites than we had back when we had these solar flares in great volume.
1. Heat doesn't travel faster than light.
2. The flare doesn't melt satellites, it may cause electronics damage because of voltage spike.
That sattelite looks cool, it caught my attention how that robot from Star Wars.. R2D2 would look exactly the same but just without its head.
BTW I was watching the original Hawaii 5-0 and the Telstar Satelite was a part of the show, they explained it in great detail. If we are luckly we might just make it to the era of true space travel like carl sagan wrote about and gene roddenbery envisioned.
And Jules Verne before them
I miss the space shuttle program, I know it was expensive and almost obsolete but what else do we have I know NASA(CIA NSA) has something new but they could have kept one shuttle active just for emergencies
Alan, how about a story on Tiros next? The first weather observation satellite, 1960. Grandpa of all future earth observation satellites, including the ones that governments don't even name!
I was 7 when Telstar was launched and I remember it vividly. It was one of the factors that compelled me to become a scientist working, ironically enough, for Bell Labs. (The other factor for you teachers out there, was having a GREAT grade school teacher). And my first 'favorite song' as a child was, indeed, Telstar. It seemed like a magic age...a union of technology with hope in the future. Beautiful, how beautiful those dreams were. Thank you scientists and engineers everywhere, and to Bell Labs
I remember the days of ducking under school desks and digging bomb shelters in back yards and am grateful those terrors never came to fruition. The peaceful usage of space is a wonderful thing to behold. But, that said, those days were full of wonder and I sometimes wish we could go back to the simpler way of doing things. I do question where it is all going and just how far man can carry communication. I understand the loneliness of technology and much prefer the direct contact of human beings in the same room. A balance between the two is definitely preferable. Celebrating together in DC is a good thing and sharing via computer for we who cannot be there in person, is still a good thing. Thanks.
Anybody remember Echo 1? It was just a big silver balloon that you could see up in space with a pair of strong binoculars or a good telescope.
Hard to imagine fifty years from now (if we're all still here) what the next big leap of scientific discovery will be. I mean something big enough to bring the human race together in a common goal of advancement. Someone being born today could be the individual to amaze and awe us a few years down the road in a way we cannot currently fathom. At least that's what I hope.
Sometimes I think we are all still just cavemen, but with e-devices to make us appear more intelligent. :)
Peaceful use of space? The mentality of the 60s focussed on "the other" as the threat. It wasn't until the '70s that Pogo (Walt Kelly) exclaimed: "We have met the enemy, and he is us". The greatest threat to continued use of space is man-made space debris. Without any international law or treaty, it is likely that mankind will "use up" orbital space, and have to give up its many benefits. What a travesty. When the epitaph is written for low orbital space (< 600 mi.), it will say: "Nobody wanted to accept any limits. "Gung ho" killed the golden goose".
Last Thanksgiving I took my family to Florida to visit the inlaws. We started the return trip but at the right time I pulled us over so we could see the launch (contrails) of the latest Mars rocket. I look forward to reminding my kids in August that we saw the launch after the thing lands.
While slighly off subject, I would not be posting this comment were it not for Telestar.
Take Care.