Exploring the Unknown - NASA's History Office

EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN 11
technology has been moving in the opposite direction. The satellites’ characteristics have
been moving together in terms of satellite power, antenna beams, and on-board processing.
Many of the latest Ka-band satellites, such as General Electric’s GE Star. can actually
offer fixed, mobile broadcast, and navigational services.
Equally significant is that these new satellite systems, because they can work to
microterminals (fifty to sixty-five centimeters in diameter) and to handheld transceivers,
can “bypass” conventional terrestrial networks. Thus, it can be said that satellite communications
systems are now becoming a truly large, mass consumer business that are starting
to rival terrestrial telecommunications systems.
Innovation has not been limited to the technological arena. Beginning with a single
global telecommunications satellite entity, INTELSAT, there has been a proliferation of
organizational forms for bringing the promise of communications satellites into reality.
The 1984 decision in the United States to modify the traditional U.S. position that INTEL-
SAT was the only authorized provider of global communications satellite services was a key
to this development. [I-30] Both public and private forms of institutionalizing communications
satellite services have emerged, as have several creative hybrid public-private organizations.
Clearly, today, new private and competitive forms of satellite communications
are becoming predominant as both INTELSAT and INMARSAT are spinning off new
commercial entities to provide new forms of satellite services.
The ability to communicate words, images, and data instantaneously around the globe
has fundamentally changed the character of international and intercultural relations.
Through this application of space technology, a “global village” has truly come into being.
Document I-1
Document title: Arthur C. Clarke, “The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications,” May 25,
1945.
Source: National Air and Space Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C.
Document I-2
Document title: Arthur C. Clarke, “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give
World-Wide Radio Coverage?,” Wireless World, October 1945, pp. 305–308.
The Russian theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was the first to note that a satellite orbiting 22,300 miles
above the Earth’s surface would travel at a speed that would make it appear to be stationary from
Earth because its orbital velocity would be the same as the speed at which the Earth was rotating. In
1928, Herman Potôcnik, an Austrian Imperial Army officer, writing under the pseudonym
Noordung, proposed a crewed space station in such a “geosynchronous” orbit, to be used for meteorology,
reconnaissance, and Earth mapping. However, it was Arthur C. Clarke that first called widespread
attention to the utility of the geosynchronous orbit for communications. In May 1945, Clarke,
a physicist and at that time the secretary of the British Interplanetary Society, circulated six copies of
his paper “The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” to his society colleagues. (The paper was not
actually published until 1968, when it appeared in the society’s Spaceflight magazine.) A second
paper, written in June 1945, appeared in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World.