AT&T's Telstar 1 rides a Delta rocket into orbit from Cape Canaveral
By 1962, the Soviet Union had held the lead in orbital firsts for five years, ever since Sputnik crossed American skies in 1957. On July 10, AT&T's Telstar 1, a sphere just 88 centimeters wide, rode a Delta rocket into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Thirteen days later it relayed the first live transatlantic television broadcast, linking Andover, Maine, to Pleurmeur-Bodou, France, and Goonhilly Downs, England. A satellite the size of a beach ball had made the ocean irrelevant to a television signal.
AT&T poured $1.4 billion into the technology behind Telstar, betting a private company's balance sheet on a problem the government had mostly left to NASA. Vice President Lyndon Johnson placed the first satellite telephone call through it, and Andover's $10 million ground station became the American end of a communications link that outpaced the Soviets in a race Sputnik had started.
QHow precisely could Telstar synchronize clocks across an ocean?
In August 1962, engineers used the satellite to synchronize time between the United States and the United Kingdom to within one microsecond, a level of precision that had no practical use for television viewers but mattered enormously for scientists and the emerging world of satellite-based timekeeping. It was a quiet demonstration that Telstar was good for more than pictures. The same link that carried a soccer match could carry a signal accurate enough to anchor clocks on two continents.
QWhy did a nuclear weapons test end up killing a television satellite?
Starfish Prime, a high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States in July 1962, pumped a burst of radiation into the Van Allen belts that lingered for months. Telstar 1 was orbiting through that same region, and the radiation gradually degraded its command channel electronics until, on November 23, 1962, the satellite simply stopped responding to instructions from the ground. Engineers managed to revive it that December, a temporary fix before the transmitter gave out entirely in February 1963.
QWhat was the very first image Telstar ever sent across the Atlantic?
Two days before the famous public broadcast, on July 11, 1962, engineers at Andover, Maine, sent a private test transmission to the ground station at Pleurmeur-Bodou, France: a still image of an American flag. No audience watched it live. It was purely a systems check, the satellite's first real trial at moving a picture across three thousand miles of ocean, and it worked before anyone announced anything to the public.
