23rd July: Telstar

On this date in 1962 the American Communications satellite, Telstar, made its first trans-Atlantic transmission. Here are ten facts about Telstar:

1. Telstar was the first space mission to have private sponsorship, and the first to have a commercial payload in space. The satellite was developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories for AT&T.
2. Telstar is about the size and shape of a large beach ball, just under three feet (876.30 mm) long. It weighed 171kg/377lb on take off.
3. It was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 10 July 1962 on a NASA Thor-Delta rocket, and its first transmission was some days later, on 23 July.
4. If it wasn't for Telstar, we wouldn't have satellite TV today. In those days, tapes of broadcasts had to be shipped across the Atlantic if the US and UK wanted to watch each other's television. Telstar pioneered the live broadcasts by satellite which we take for granted today.
5. The first transmission was received on TV sets across Europe. It began with a split screen showing the Statue of Liberty on one side and the Eiffel Tower on the other. The first words spoken on satellite TV came from US newsman Walter Cronkite, who said: “Good evening, Europe. This is the North American continent live via AT&T Telstar, July 23, 1962.” The transmission continued to include a Baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago Cubs, followed by a press conference held by John F Kennedy. For some reason, Europe didn't get to see his opening comments praising Telstar as “another indication of the extraordinary world in which we live” - only a question and answer session on nuclear testing and the devaluation of the dollar. The baseball game was much more popular, certainly with the Daily Mail, whose television critic of the time saying he “preferred to watch Americans play games than talk politics.” There followed a montage of scenes - the Mexican border at Juarez, Niagara Falls, the World’s Fair in Seattle and the United Nations; a talk with astronauts at Cape Canaveral; actors at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, rehearsing “Macbeth.” The finale consisted of close-ups of the stone faces of Mount Rushmore as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
6. The second transmission came three hours later when Europe returned the favour and transmitted live pictures back to America. This broadcast started with a picture of Big Ben and a welcome by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby. Europe's montage included the Sistine Chapel, the Champs-Élysées, The Louvre, The Colosseum and the Tower of London. There was a Lapland girl in the Arctic Circle; Sicilian fishermen tending their nets; paintings inside Yugoslavia’s national museum; Horses performing to Chopin at Vienna’s Spanish Riding School and a performance of “La Tosca” amid ancient Roman ruins. The broadcast lasted 19 minutes before the satellite went out of range.
7. All this proved that satellite television could be done, but that wasn't all Telstar did during its mission. It allowed NASA to learn satellite tracking and also the effect of Van Allen radiation belts on satellite design.
8. Telstar was powered by batteries and 3,600 solar panels on its outer hull. It only used 14 watts of power - one seventh of the power a modern laptop uses. Hence it could only manage to transmit 600 phone calls and one TV channel - in black and white. Which didn't matter as people didn't have colour TVs, anyway. However, the receiving antennas on Earth were 177 feet (54m) long and weighed 380 short tons (340,000 kg) in order to pick up the signals.
9. It only lasted four months before radiation fried its on-board electronics. Telstar 2 launched in May 1963, and many more followed after that. The original Telstar is still up there, orbiting the Earth as a a monument to the birth of satellite communications.
10. During its brief life, Telstar certainly captured people's imaginations. In particular, a record producer called Joe Meek, who wrote the tune, Telstar with space sound effects, using an overdubbed keyboard. The sound of a rocket taking off was actually a tape of a toilet flushing played backwards. It might have seemed an unlikely hit, and the band which performed it, the Tornadoes, actually hated it. However, they did all right out of it - it was the best-selling British single of 1962 and the first song by a British group to hit number 1 in the US. This didn't happen again until two years later when The Beatles I Want To Hold Your Hand reached the top spot in 1964. One last fact about Joe Meek - despite his success Meek committed suicide on February 3, 1967, the eighth anniversary of "The day the music died," because he idolised Buddy Holly and believed he had made contact with Holly's spirit. As well as the song, Ford named a car after Telstar and Adidas produced a soccer ball which looked rather like it.

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