Electronics: The Room-Size World

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Nothing like a relay satellite was within the reach of the best technology of 1945, but the needed elements were developed as if on cue. Transistors (invented in 1948) and other solid-state electronic devices replaced vacuum tubes, which would have been too bulky, short-lived and power-hungry for use in satellites. High-power rockets were spawned by the U.S.-Soviet race for long-range ballistic missiles. High-speed electronic computers appeared just in time to take over the all-but-impossible task of calculating orbits, solving complex equations in split seconds.

Everything fell into place like matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. By the mid-1950s electronics engineers began to realize that relay satellites were not only possible, they might well prove enormously profitable.

First to fit all the new techniques together was Bell Telephone Laboratories, which built Telstar I, and had it launched at its own expense in July 1962. Circling in a comparatively low elliptical orbit, 600 to 3,500 miles above the earth, Telstar was a striking success; it relayed the first live TV picture (a view of the American flag) across the Atlantic to receiving stations in England and France. Telephone talk over Telstar was as clear as if the speakers were only blocks apart.

But Telstar was only an experiment, as were its successors Telstar II and Relay I and II built by Radio Corporation of America for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On low orbits, they all whirled around the earth faster than the 24-hour period of the earth's rotation; they could be used for communication only during the brief periods when they were within line-of-sight range of their ground stations. Such a system would require many more satellites to be practical.

Desperate Ploy. At Hughes Aircraft Co. in California, however, three young engineers, Drs. Harold A. Rosen, Donald D. Williams and Thomas Hudspeth, were anxious to shoot for a higher target—nothing less than the 22,300-mile synchronous orbit conceived by Clarke back in 1945. They were sure they could lick its formidable problems, but they could not convince the Hughes management. "One day," says Hughes Vice President Lawrence A. Hyland, "Williams walked into my office and laid a cashier's check for $10,000—his entire savings—on my desk. 'Here's what I want to contribute to the program,' he said. 'I'm sorry it's all I can do.'" It was enough. Williams' check was returned, but the company decided that his faith was worth investing in. Out of that desperate ploy grew Early Bird.