Satellites
SatellitesSatellites have been the guiding force of human space exploration for a long as space exploration has existed. The following material that is being presented is overview of satellite history and I hope all readers of this material find that it is informative and interesting.
A satellite is any object that orbits a larger object. This being so makes the most famous satellite, our moon. (picture of moon from Apollo 11) Since early times humans have been fascinated with our moon, and from this we must credit the first hypothesis on satellite technology. Author C. Clarke originally produced the idea of bouncing radio waves of a orbiting surface, he wrote this idea in Wireless World in 1945. Clarke had most likely got these ideas from a story entitled The Brick Moon, which depicted a space station relaying Morse code messages. Shortly after World War II began bringing about the age of space exploration. After the war, the technology had been developed to send objects into space. Quickly, two nations acted to create a device that could relay radio waves from orbit. The U.S. made the first step.
In 1954, the U.S. relayed a voice message off of the moon. Three years later, in the October of 1957, the Russians sent Sputnik 1 in orbit. Sputnik 1 sent radio beeps from space making the Russians the first to put an artificial satellite into orbit. The U.S. felt the increasing pressure of the need for space technology, and on July 29, 1958 the U.S. government signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA. That October, a theory by a man named Tsiolkovsky created in 1895, was put into effect. The theory of Geosynchronous orbit was proposed to make a communications satellite program possible. The first step in this process was to get proof that it was possible to relay a message from one part of the earth to another. It was done in 1959, when a satellite communication link was established between Washington DC and Hawaii, using the moon's surface. Soon after, the Hughes corporation released a commercial satellite proposal bringing about the beginning of our modern communication system. Satellites were soon launched that could send delayed messages on a large scale. AT&T soon applied to the FCC rights to experiment with using this technology for practical purposes. In October of 1960, an agreement between AT&T and NASA allowed for further development of communication technology. In 1961, AT&T got approval to experiment with satellite technology and things were soon in full tilt. NASA's budget increase led the way for...
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