Telstar is the name of various communications satellites, including the first such satellite to relay television signals.
The first two Telstar satellites were experimental and nearly identical. Telstar 1 was launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket on July 10, 1962. It successfully relayed through space the first television pictures, telephone calls, fax images and provided the first live transatlantic television feed. Telstar 2 was launched May 7, 1963.
Description
Belonging to
AT&T;, the original Telstar was part of a multi-national agreement between AT&T;,
Bell Telephone Laboratories,
NASA, the British
General Post Office, and the
French National PTT (Post, Telegraph & Telecom Office) to develop experimental
satellite communications over the
Atlantic Ocean. Bell Labs held a contract with NASA, reimbursing the agency three million pounds for each of the one launches, independent of success. The US ground station was
Andover Earth Station in
Andover, Maine, built by Bell Labs.
The main British ground station was at
Goonhilly Downs in southwestern England, and it was used by the
BBC. It was the international coordinator and the standards 525/405 conversion equipment (filling a large room) was researched and developed by the BBC and located in the
BBC Television Centre, London. The French ground station was at
Pleumeur-Bodou () in north-western
France.
The satellite was built by a team at Bell Telephone Laboratories, including John Robinson Pierce, who created the project; Rudy Kompfner, who invented the traveling wave tube transponder used in the satellite; and James M. Early, who designed its transistors and solar panels. The satellite is roughly spherical, measures in length, and weighs about . Its dimensions were limited by what would fit on one of NASA's Delta rockets. Telstar was spin-stabilized, and its outer surface was covered with solar cells to generate electrical power. The power produced was a tiny 14 watts.
The original Telstar had one innovative transponder to relay data, which was a television channel or multiplexed telephone circuits. An omnidirectional array of small antenna elements around the satellite's "equator" received 6 GHz microwave signals to be relayed. The transponder converted the frequency to 4 GHz, amplified the signals in a traveling-wave tube, and retransmitted them omnidirectionally via the adjacent array of larger box-shaped cavities. The prominent helical antenna was for telecommands from a ground station.
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 in 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 1000 km from Earth and apogee about 6000 km from Earth)
Due to its non-geosynchronous orbit, Telstar's availability for signals was limited to the 20 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.
Since the transmitting and receiving radio systems on board Telstar were not nearly as powerful or capable as those of today's satellites, the ground antennas had to be huge. Morimi Iwama and Jan Norton of Bell Laboratories were in charge of designing and building the electrical portions of the system that steered the antennas. The aperture of the antennas was . The antennas were long and weighed 380 tons. The antennas were housed in radomes the size of a 14-story office building.
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 made possible in Europe by
Eurovision and in North America by NBC, CBS, ABC, and the
CBC. The batter,
Tony Taylor, was seen hitting a ball pitched by Cal Koonce to the right fielder
George Altman. From there, the video switched first to Washington, DC; then to Cape Canaveral, Florida; then to
Quebec, Canada and finally to
Stratford, Ontario.
During that evening, Telstar 1 also relayed the first telephone call to be transmitted through space, and it successfully transmitted faxes, data, and both live and taped television, including the first live transmission of television across an ocean from Andover, Maine 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 only accurate to 2000 microseconds).
Telstar 1, which had ushered in a new age of the benevolent use of technology, became a victim of technology during the Cold War. The day before Telstar 1 was launched, the United States had tested a high-altitude nuclear bomb (called Starfish Prime) which energized the Earth's Van Allen Belt where Telstar 1 went into orbit. This vast increase in radiation, combined with subsequent high-altitude blasts, including a Soviet test in October, overwhelmed Telstar's fragile transistors; it went out of service in early December 1962, but 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 out of service on February 21, 1963.
According to the US Space Objects Registry, Telstar 1 and 2 were still in orbit as of May 2010.
Experiments continued, and by 1964, two Telstars, two Relay units (from RCA), and two Syncom units (from the Hughes Aircraft Company) had operated successfully in space. Syncom 2 was the first geosynchronous satellite and its successor, Syncom 3, broadcast pictures from the 1964 Summer Olympics. The first commercial geosynchronous satellite was Intelsat I ("Early Bird") launched in 1965.
Newer Telstars
Subsequent Telstar satellites were advanced commercial geosynchronous spacecraft that share only their name with Telstar 1 and 2.
The second wave of Telstar satellites launched with Telstar 301 in 1983, followed by Telstar 302 in 1984 (which was rename Telstar 3-D after carried into space by Shuttle mission STS-41-D), and by Telstar 303 in 1985.
The next wave, starting with Telstar 401, came in 1993; which was lost in 1997 due to a magnetic storm, and then Telstar 402 was launched but destroyed shortly after in 1994. It was replaced in 1995 by Telstar 402R, eventually renamed Telstar 4.
Telstar 10 was launched in China in 1997 by APT Satellite Company, Ltd.
In 2003, Telstars 4–8 and 13 — Loral Skynet's North American fleet — were sold to Intelsat. Telstar 4 suffered complete failure prior to the handover. The others were renamed the Intelsat Americas 5, 6, etc. At the time of the sale, Telstar 8 was still under construction by Space Systems/Loral, and it was finally launched on June 23, 2005 by Sea Launch.
Telstar 18 was launched in June 2004 by Sea Launch. The upper stage of the rocket underperformed, but the satellite used its significant stationkeeping fuel margin to achieve its operational geostationary orbit. It has enough on-board fuel remaining to allow it to exceed its specified 13-year design life.
Derivative uses of the name
Joe Meek composed a popular instrumental recording in 1962, named "
Telstar" after the satellite; it was originally performed by
The Tornados and covered by
The Ventures and
Bobby Rydell among many others.
Sound effects on the record, intended to symbolize radio signals, were produced by Meek running a pen around the rim of an ashtray, and then playing the tape of it in reverse.
Robert Calvert wrote lyrics which he performed in the early 1980s to the tune of the Joe Meek and The Tornados song, which was covered by the instrumental band Hot Butter.
Susanna Hoffs released "Wishing On Telstar" on her 1991 album When You're a Boy.
Takako Minekawa covered the Joe Meek and The Tornados classic song on her 1998 album Cloudy Cloud Calculator.
In the Netherlands, a football club formed from a merger was named SC Telstar after the satellites.
The Scottish band Telstar Ponies included Teenage Fanclub drummer Brendan O'Hare.
The Telstar was also the name of a Ford car sold in Asia, Australasia and Southern Africa.
Telstar Regional High School in Bethel, Maine, is named after the satellite.
football (right)]]
The Adidas Telstar football (soccer ball) was designed for use in the 1970 and 1974 FIFA World Cup tournaments, and its design has subsequently become the stereotypical look for a football.
Project: Telstar is an anthology of robot-and space-themed comics published in 2003 by AdHouse Books.
The Coleco Telstar was a 1970s video game console based on the General Instruments AY-3-8500 chip.
There is an optional boss character called Telstar in the video game Final Fantasy VI.
See also
List of communications satellite firsts
References
External links
Walter Cronkite on the first broadcast using Telstar: http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/20020723.atc.15.ram
List of Communications Satellites
National Geographic Magazine article on Telstar from the May, 1962 issue
Universal Newsreel on Telstar
Category:1962 in spaceflight
Category:Communications satellites
