Exploring the Unknown - NASA's History Office

EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN 7
satellite services, space research services, meteorological services, and Earth resource
services. Throughout its history, however, INTELSAT has confined its activities to fixed
satellite service public telecommunications for several reasons:
• These public telecommunications services were the most well-established, prevalent,
and “desirable” services for its constituent members in terms of revenues.
• The special financial conditions and agreements needed to embark on “specialized”
services posed a barrier to moving into these new areas.
• These other “new” services were largely unproven in terms of market viability.
• Other national, regional, or global ventures and institutional entities providing such
services as maritime communications, regional communications, direct-broadcasting
to home antennas, and remote sensing grew up over the years. Thus it was not easy
for INTELSAT to expand as these organizations developed more specialized markets.
In the quarter of a century that followed the first commercial satellite operations, a
remarkable array of technical developments has ensued. Key innovations have included:
multidestination services among and between very small aperture antennas; the use of
more frequency bands; three-axis stabilization, rather than satellites rotating about their
vertical axis; and large, high-performance antennas on board the satellites themselves.
The last three decades of satellite technology development can be best shown perhaps
by the evolution of the satellites of the INTELSAT system. During this period, many major
technological advances occurred, including the seven shown in Table I–1. The cumulative
result of these technological gains has been to produce fixed satellite designs that are overall
approximately 1,000 times more cost-effective than the Early Bird satellite. In total, the
last three decades have produced satellites that are at least eighty times more effective in
terms of power, are 100 times more frequency efficient, and have more than ten times
greater lifetimes. It is perhaps because fiber optic cables have achieved parallel developments
in cost-efficiency on the Earth that the remarkable and sustained technological breakthroughs
in satellite telecommunications are not more widely recognized or celebrated.
Most advances in communications satellite technology have originated within the
United States; leading developers have been the scientists and engineers of such aerospace
manufacturers as Ball Aerospace, Fairchild, Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed-Martin
(now including General Electric, or GE, and RCA), TRW, and Ford Aerospace (now Space
Systems/Loral). There have been many other contributors, such as NASA, the
Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, universities, and research laboratories
such as Lincoln Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Laboratories,
Comsat Laboratories, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and other NASA centers. 18
In the last decade in particular, the spread of satellite technology has become truly global.
Major capabilities exist in Europe, Russia, Canada, and Japan, and more are emerging
in India, China, Korea, Brazil, Israel, and Australia.
18. See John H. McElroy, ed., Space Science and Applications (New York: IEEE Press, 1986), pp. 183–284.
Although it is difficult to single out precisely and without omission all of the individuals who played the most
important roles in communications satellite development over this period, some of the most important players
were: Wernher von Braun, Richard Marsten, Robert Lovell, and Leonard Jaffe of NASA; Harold Rosen and
Albert “Bud” Wheelon of Hughes Aircraft; Adolph Thiel of TRW; Jack Harrington of Lincoln Laboratory;
Sigfried Rieger, Ernst Dietrich, Martin Votaw, and John Johnson of Comsat and INTELSAT; Joseph Campanella,
Wilbur Pritchard, and Burton Edelson of Comsat Laboratories; Kenneth Rose of Ford Aerospace; Jack Kiegler
of GE/RCA; William Pickering of JPL; J.O. Pastore of the U.S. Senate; Edward Welsh of the National Space
Council; and John Pierce of AT&T’s Bell Laboratories.