The Room-Size World

(See Cover)

Lyndon Johnson immediately grasped the significance and potential of Early Bird, the new communications satellite hovering 22,300 miles above the equator. Aware that the Russians were flooding European TV stations with films and pictures for the 20th anniversary of V-E day, the President acted swiftly last week to upstage them.;

In Washington, U.S.-network bigwigs were expecting to meet at the White House to complain about the President's increasing pre-emption of prime TV time on short notice. Instead of a meeting, Johnson produced a new short-notice request. As soon as possible, he said, he wanted to use Early Bird to broadcast a V-E anniversary speech direct to Europe. Three and one-half hours later, in a slow and measured drawl, he was chiding Charles de Gaulle live on British and Italian TV screens, and being taped for later rebroadcast in almost every other European nation. r

Global Blanket. As a means of muting Russia's planned propaganda barrage, European broadcasters called it "a master stroke." But the unprecedented transatlantic transmission of the master's voice and face also gave rise to international problems undreamed of a week ago. CBS's Walter Cronkite noted that the President had violated diplomatic protocol by addressing foreign peoples directly without first notifying their governments. A British Broadcasting Corp. official complained that he was forced to disrupt the normal evening schedule on short notice. Foreign chiefs of state, suddenly alert to the prestige potential of broadcasting directly to foreign nations by satellite, began stirring. German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard immediately requested time to address the American people.

Such new problems only served to underscore the new epoch in communications that rose with the drum-shaped, 85-lb. satellite. In an age fast growing familiar with man's race beyond the confines of his own world, Early Bird reached back toward the earth and seemed to shrink it almost to room size. All by itself, the satellite blanketed more than one-third of the globe. If two more soar into orbit, for the first time in history it will be literally true that for every nation instant contact will be possible with every inhabited spot on earth.

World Town Meeting. In Europe and the U.S., television's showmen labored to exploit Early Bird's versatility. At their best, the programs were as moving and immediate as a closeup of Houston's great Surgeon Michael DeBakey repairing a human heart while fascinated doctors in Geneva looked over his shoulder. Europe watched troop movements in the streets of Santo Domingo while bullets still ricocheted across the Caribbean town. The Town Meeting of the World turned international as Barry Goldwater in New York, Dean Rusk and Sir Alec Douglas-Home in London, and Maurice Schumann in Paris joined in a transatlantic gabfest. A mug shot of Canada's most wanted man, relayed by Early Bird and recognized by a televiewer in Florida, gave accused Bank Robber Georges Lemay the dubious fame of becoming the first fugitive nabbed by satellite. NBC teamed up with the BBC and, for a refreshing few minutes, Huntley-Brinkley became Huntley-Dimbleby.

Goonhilly Downs, Pleumeur-Bodou, Raisting, Andover--the unfamiliar places where big, ground-based stations were relaying programs to Early Bird --became part of the language of the communications industry. And between the best and the worst that TV had to offer, imaginative men could pick out the promise of a dream born more than a century ago, when the first crude telegraph suggested that man might some day far outreach the limitations of his speech and hearing.

Magic Factor. As the telegraph matured into the telephone, the telephone into radio, and radio into television, each successive stage in the electronics revolution was hailed by optimistic prophets as a magic factor that would weld all the world into one peaceful unit. But always some technical problem kept the vision from coming quite true. Telephone talk, for instance, could not cross oceans on early telegraph cables, and the first radio-telephones were noisy and capricious. Television proved even harder to handle because its signals ride on high-frequency radio waves that are useful only over line-of-sight distances; unaided, they cannot travel past the horizon, an average of 30 miles away.

Only a few years ago, before the success of the first experimental satellites, electronic communication was still disappointingly short of its theoretical ideal. Plentiful telephone circuits crossed the U.S. and Europe on improved landlines, or by means of microwave beams that hopped between towers on buildings or mountaintops. TV programs used the same beams or traveled overland by coaxial cable. In 1956 American Telephone & Telegraph the British General Post Office, and Canadian Overseas Telecommunications Corp. laid twin cables under the North Atlantic capable of carrying 36 simultaneous telephone conversations. But the cables were expensive and of limited capacity, and TV could not squeeze itself through them.

All but Impossible. Whatever was needed to make possible a system of truly worldwide communication was still missing, although scientists were reasonably sure they knew what that missing link was. In 1945, British Electronics Engineer Arthur C. Clarke, who later became a first-rank science-fiction writer (Childhood's End), published in Wireless World an extraordinarily far-sighted article spelling out in detail his theory that earth satellites on high orbits could act as relay stations carrying telephone and TV to the entire earth.

The biggest space vehicles in existence then were German V-2 rockets with a vertical range of only 100 miles. Even so, Clarke boldly selected a particularly difficult orbit for his relay satellite: it should circle at 22,300 miles above the earth's surface, he said. At that distance, Clarke's calculations showed, it would take exactly 24 hours for the satellite to complete one orbit. "It would remain," he wrote, "fixed in the sky of a whole hemisphere and, un like other heavenly bodies, would neither rise nor set." Nearly 20 years later, Early Bird follows that orbit.

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.

Synchronous satellites, such as the Hughes men wanted to build, have much in their favor. Best of all, they seem to hang in one spot in the sky. But they also have two strikes against them before they take to space. They must be kept as light as possible because of the great rocket effort needed to place them on their high orbits, and in spite of their lightness, they must transmit a radio signal strong enough to be heard at that great distance. Perhaps more serious is the problem of keeping them on station above a selected point on the earth's equator. They are continually pushed out of position by irregularities in the earth's gravitation, by the influence of the sun and moon, and even by the infinitesimal pressure of sunlight. They must carry propulsion devices that will always be ready to nudge them back in place again. These obstacles were formidable, but Rosen & Co. were not daunted.

Syncom I, the Hughes-built oldest brother of Early Bird, reached its orbit in 1963, but an exploding tank of high-pressure nitrogen kept it from succeeding electronically. Syncom II and III, used by the Department of Defense, were successful, but their performance has been kept partially secret. Early Bird, the fourth of the series, was built and launched for Comsat, the private company that was created by Congress to set up a commercial communication-satellite system. In the Syncom family, Early Bird was the big, public success.

Rosen was moved to compose a ditty to the tune of Bye, Bye, Blackbird:

Pack up all your cares and woes,

Retire all those old servos, Bye, bye, tracking.

Get rid of all those rusty gears,

Early Bird will end your fears, Bye, bye, tracking.

So sell your stock in RCA

And buy some Comsat right away,

Tracking, bye, bye.

So many investors have apparently taken Rosen's advice about Comsat stock since it first went on the market last June, the price rose from 20 to a high of 66 1/4 this year.

Left Turns. Early Bird is a miracle of delicate electronics and advanced space-craftsmanship. The first problem was how to get it into an equatorial orbit from Cape Kennedy. If the cape were on the equator, Early Bird's rocket would have been asked only to carry it to the desired height and push it up to the proper speed--about 7,000 m.p.h. But the cape is 28DEG north of the equator, so Early Bird had to make a more complicated maneuver, turning sideways when it reached orbiting height. This left turn in space was accomplished nimbly, and ever since, Early Bird has kept itself on station by firing delicate burps of steam from its hydrogen-peroxide thrusters.

Early Bird's curved sides are covered with 6,000 solar cells to supply electric power, and the satellite spins like a gyroscope to keep stabilized. One short antenna receives radio signals from the earth. They are fed to a transponder which amplifies them and then transmits them back to earth. Much of the transmitted energy is lost in space, but enough reaches the earth to be picked up by powerful receiving stations in the U.S. and Europe and amplified once more before being transmitted to home receivers.

Later Birds. According to Rosen, who makes no secret of his glowing euphoria, Early Bird's remarkable success is only a small beginning. In the works at Hughes are much-improved successors: HS-(for Hughes Satellite) 304 and HS-307, both of which will have more communication channels, more solar cells to give more power, and a better nudging system to keep them on station. Instead of using hydrogen peroxide to generate high pressure steam, they will decompose water electrically into hydrogen and oxygen and combine the two gases in delicate explosions to counteract drifting. HS-304 will have 1,200 voice channels instead of Early Bird's 240. HS-307 can have as many as 50,000 channels.

Among triumphant Hughes men, impressive dollar figures are familiar talk these days. HS-304, they say, will cost $2,500,000, weigh 172 Ibs., and can be put on station by a Delta rocket for $3,900,000. Four HS-304s can be clustered on a single Atlas ($6,500,000), and put on different stations around the earth. HS-307, weighing 770 Ibs., will need an Atlas for each launch. By comparison, say the Hughes economists, the new telephone cable that

A.T. & T. is about to lay between New Jersey and France will have only 128 channels and cost $56 million.

Lag & Echo. Despite such advantages, all communications experts are far from ready to agree that synchronous satellites are about to take over the world's long-distance telephoning and TV. For one thing, the round trip from earth to Early Bird hovering over the Equator is at least 44,600 miles, and radio waves, which move with the speed of light, take three-tenths of a second to go the distance. Smaller delays in landlines add to the lag. This makes no difference for TV and other one-way transmissions, but telephoning, say some critics, may sound disjointed with an extra one-half second between remarks and replies.

What effect this will have on the public can hardly be decided by laboratory tests. President Joseph V. Charyk and members of his board of directors who have already used Early Bird for phone conversations, claim that they cannot detect any time lag. But the lag is there, and it may affect some telephone talkers more than others. Deliberate speakers who listen politely until the other party has put a period on each spoken sentence will have no trouble, but impulsive talkers who constantly interrupt and throw in a word here and there may have difficulty.

Electronic echoes are another problem. They have been all but eliminated over the longest landlines, but at synchronous-satellite distances they may be annoying.*The public's decision will not be known until masses of ordinary telephone callers get real, unstaged experience with time lag and echoes in their talk.

Spaced & Random. Lower-flying satellites on orbits about 6,000 miles above the earth are still in the running as worldwide communicators, and two formidable teams, A.T. & T. allied with RCA, and Thompson Ramo Wooldridge working with International Telephone & Telegraph Corp., are hard at work on them. Spaced at even intervals around their orbits, twelve such birds will ensure that two or more will always be in line of sight from ground stations spotted around the earth.

Low satellites will need comparatively simple propulsion apparatus to keep them spaced evenly, less rocket effort will be needed to put them in orbit, and more weight will be available for extra voice or TV channels. Randomly spaced satellites with no propulsion can be cheaper still, and devote even more of their weight to working electronics. But more of them will be needed--perhaps 18--to avoid gaps in ground coverage. Because they are closer to the earth, both types will sound louder to ground stations, but expensive steerable antennas will be needed to track them across the sky, and skilled operators will be required to pick them up and switch traffic from one to another.

Flares & Sunspots. While the satellite argument goes on, submarine cables are improving fast, and the longlines department of A.T. & T. takes issue with all estimates of comparative cost and capacity. Transistorized cables of the near future, say Bell engineers, will each be capable of carrying one TV channel or 720 telephone conversations. Their life expectancy will be 20 years without repairs, and they will be safe from all the dangers of space. Satellites, on the other hand, cannot be taken in for repairs, and their life expectancy is unknown. It may be expensively short, especially during periods of high solar activity when flares associated with sunspots are bombarding the earth with high-energy particles. Satellite enthusiasts, to be sure, are not intimidated by solar flares. They insist that tougher electronic components can be built to cope with them. Such potential troubles are dismissed, properly perhaps, as mere "engineering difficulties."

Whatever the combination of satellite and cable that is finally developed will have a profound effect on world communication. Enthusiasts like Rosen are already convinced that in a few years large satellites can be put in orbit with enough power to broadcast TV and radio programs directly to individual homes anywhere on earth. No expensive ground-relay stations will be needed on the receiving end. The programs will be picked up by 6-ft. dish antennas that will cost about $100, if mass-produced. If the satellites are synchronous, as Rosen is sure they will be, the antennas will be motionless, staring fixedly at a single point in the sky.

Rosen's group is proposing a special Educational Television Satellite for NASA. It is designed to carry perfect color or black-and-white TV direct to home receivers. "You ain't seen nothing yet," says Rosen. "The benefit to mankind of such a system staggers the imagination. It may well be the major return to humanity of man's venture into space. What we're trying to do is to save the world."

Even less dedicated men than Rosen see a startling communications explosion ahead. A sampling of their predictions for the near future:

>A World Information Center will catalogue and make available the expanding mass of information now threatening to swamp the world's libraries. With easy access to the center by satellite-relayed phone calls from any spot on earth and with computers programmed to do their tedious reference hunting for them, researchers will save countless man-hours as they make use of all the recorded knowledge of the human race.

> Medical men in remote regions will be able to keep in constant touch with their colleagues in the most up-to-date cities. Consultation with specialists will be available over color TV. Cardiograms and electroencephalograms are already sent over existing lines for diagnosis; soon everything but the patient himself may be sent to well-equipped centers for analysis and advice.

> Worldwide telephoning will become as commonplace as the dialing of local calls. A phone call from New York to Tokyo may cost no more than a call from New York to Chicago, because to the distant satellite relay station, the difference in earthly distance will be insignificant.

> Data transmission will bring the skills of giant computers to anyone who needs them. The computers themselves will join forces in a vast network, and automation of industry will become an international reality.

> Facsimile transmission not only promises to eliminate the relative slowness of jet-carried airmail, it conjures up visions of home-printed newspapers. With a satellite network to gather information for the editors and the same network to transmit that information to subscribers, an improved version of office copying machines may soon be hooked to home TV sets to make high-quality reproduction of text and pictures on rolls of reusable plastic.

> Educational television will guarantee that all the world's culture will be available to all the world. The receiving dishes pointing at the sky will be able to collect the most sophisticated technical information for the most backward countries.

Nothing but Greek. Whether or not the spread of such scientific largesse will indeed "save the world" is a problem that will not be solved by scientists alone. The sociological implications are immense. Arthur Clarke, for example, who still keeps a fatherly eye on the multimillion-dollar system he proposed in Wireless World for a modest fee of $40 back in 1945, foresees sweeping changes touched off by communication satellites. Cities, he thinks, may disappear. Their principal reason for being is to cluster people close together where they can see and talk with each other, a process that is not always enjoyable!

When an executive can instantly reach all his contacts, wherever they may be, by television, he will have little reason for leaving home. One of Clarke's more frightening thoughts is that every man on earth will eventually have his own telephone number and will carry personal apparatus that will permit him to be called, even by people who have no idea where he may be.

Clarke also believes that multiple satellites will offer so many kinds of entertainment that no one will need be confined to programs that are not to his taste. The worldwide audience will be so large that it will be profitable to offer programs that carry nothing but chess, say, or plays in Greek.

Besieged by Noise. Some prophets however, see no near-future Utopia brought to reality by Early Bird and its progeny. "I doubt if more food will be grown in India," says RAND Corp Sociologist Joseph Goldsen, "even if every village gets a television set with lecturers teaching new agricultural techniques every hour. It takes generations to change customs and traditions. Only a few years ago, we used to pipe-dream about a TV-satellite system that was ten to 20 years away. It doesn't seem that far off any more, but what will it be used to transmit? Perhaps Russia and the U.S. will each use its satellites for psychological walfare--which would be nothing more than they are doing now with short-wave broadcasts. One thing I'm sure of, the world will be besieged with more and more noise."

At present the U.S. may be the only nation that has the technical resources to set up an effective world-communications system, but the Russians are not far behind. On April 23 they launched their first attempt, which has apparently gone into a twelve-hour orbit that will keep it over the Soviet land mass for a considerable time during each revolution. Two or three satellites would pro vide the U.S.S.R. with communications day and night. This may be all that the Russians are planning, but a powerful satellite sending strong, clear radio propaganda mixed with entertainment to the transistor radios that swarm in every country would be a powerful and potentially dangerous influence. The J.S. could set up the same sort of system, of course, and so could other countries.

Possibilities of Trouble. Probably several will. There may soon come a time when hostile or pirate satellites will creep close to legitimate ones and try to kidnap their listeners. Jamming of programs may be tried, just as the Soviets now jam Voice of America broadcasts Another trick that has been suggested is to learn the frequency and code of a satellite's station-keeping system and send it commands that will make it shove itself out of orbit.

Even if such hostilities never materialize, there will be economic struggles to control the satellites, which are the first space ventures with a big money-making potential. As more and more countries get into the act, so many satellites may be sent into orbit that they could overcrowd the airwaves, making communication difficult or impossible.

The possibilities for trouble are very real; they call for space laws that will be obeyed by all nations. The hope is that the benefits bestowed by satellites will be so great that even the most hostile countries will find it to their advantage to cooperate in harnessing the great communications explosion.

*Eerie echoes were noticeable on some of the first Early Bird broadcasts, but technicians traced them to the system that carried the audio portion of some programs over landlines and cables.

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