Funny story. Back in the 70's, one of my techs was taking some college level classes and needed to write a paper. He asked me for suggestions and I suggested he write something on Arthur C. Clark as he had conceived the concept of the geosynchronous orbit and communications satellite. He came back to me a couple of days later and said he couldn't find this Clarke guy, all he could find was some other guy who wrote a lot of science fiction!
Clarke, it should be pointed out, worked extensively on British radar technology during WWII, and later went on to get a degree in physics and mathematics. He wasn't "just" a science-fiction writer when he worked on the ideas for geostationary ssatellite stations. Years and years ago, before his death, I was a member of a kind of electronic "standing committee" that included Clarke, and a number of other notables. I only ever exchanged e-mail with him once. I was very sad when he died. He "A Fall of Moondust" novel was my first introduction to Science Fiction.
His book "How the World Was One" is also really good. It tells the human stories behind the push for global communications, starting with the first telegraph cable from England to France. It's quite riveting for a non-fiction book.
Yes, Clarke was working in science before he started to write. Interestingly, he decided to live in Sri Lanka a couple of years after Alan Turing's death. He probably left the UK to avoid the history of prejudices and injustices that ultimately killed Turing. Both received less government honors than they certainly deserved.
In some ways it's easier for me to believe we had satellite communications in the 1960s than that we had working transatlantic cables in the 1860s. The technological & materials science infrastructure was so tiny back then. Just as crazy - that broken cable ends could be found & retrieved in the middle of the ocean. Rockets & satellites were very new when I was a boy in the 1960s but they soon became very familiar.
The fax is older than the telephone. The printing telegraph was patented in 1846, the first commercial fax service was established in 1865, the first telephone was patentet in 1876
Finding and retrieving broken cable ends is very believable. - We had naval almanacs and marine chronometers allowing decently accurate measurement of longitude (latitude is much easier to measure). - Hooks on the end of long chains are reasonably easy to make, use that to lift the cable. - You're already doing a splice, so if you can't find the fault from the ends (echoes, resistance measurements, and the like), just open up the cable on board and see which end it's connected to (then repair the cut). - just follow the cable you've lifted until it's broken, there's enough slack to keep it at the surface. It's impressive that we could make cables that long and recoup the cost, but this was well into the era of rail and land telegraph use, so we knew how to make long cables. The transatlantic cables were also pretty badly flawed at first..
We need some more undersea cables. I live in western australia and I'm so sick of being stuck with dial up ass ping because everything has to go to Sydney. We're like this weird internet deadzone left behind by the rest of the world. Sucks for gaming.
@@ASpaceOstrich I think the issue in Australia is poor domestic infrastructure (like Peth having very little FTTP), rather than a lack of undersea fiber.
My time in the U.S. Navy included two years aboard one of the first ships to have digital computers. That was in 1962 and 1963. Our ship also was equipped with some unusual transmitters, one of which I was responsible for maintaining. It was never employed for the purpose I believe it was meant to be while I was aboard. The frequency was the same range as used for ship to aircraft communications, and since we could only do that when they were above our horizon, no more than 36 watt transmitters were needed before the aircraft were out of range below the horizon. But this one could generate 1000W. Those naval communications satellites eventually deployed.
@@HappyBeezerStudios - I worked on a couple of communication projects, in the late 80s and early 90s, where we over-spec'd it to allow for future technology. It was never used, of course, because the technology advances at that time were so fast that most projects were completely obsolete before they could be ramped up and deployed.
Echo-1 was launched in August 1960. I was 17 and we sat out in the evening watching this man made object scud across the dark sky. I was one of many that got a sample piece of the mylar film that formed the balloon. It was even better than the beep-beep-beep from Sputnik several years earlier - we could hear, but not see. All this was at the time that radio communication and navigation across the north was very important due to the need to intercept Russian bombers invading over the pole. Polar communication and navigation was extremely difficult and unreliable due to the distance, the disturbance of the ionosphere by the solar wind (aurora) and the magnetic variation of the Earth.
Ever since I was a child I remember seeing one of the Echo satellites in the sky, watching it while standing in our still dirt street on a warm summer evening. Probably the newspaper or radio talked about it. It was, of course, the first satellite I had ever seen.
I also remember Echo 1. The Newspapers used to publish the times Echo was visible. It was quite bright within an hour of sunrise or sunset, much like the ISS is, and moved about as quickly across the sky. My parents bought a "satellite scope" to see it better. It was a small telescope on a base. It had a mirror so you you could look down. It was great for looking at the moon, too.
Above Sanford University, California, is the Sanford dish. A large radio telescope that was always a mystery as to why the US Air Force funded its construction. It was a top secret project to map radar installations in the Soviet Union. Once a month at the New Moon Air Force personnel took over operation of the radio telescope to collect information about radio waves bounced off the moon from radar installations in eastern Siberia. This was always kept hush hush until the 1990's when it was finally declassified.
My father was a ham operator, in the 1960s, they would contact each other and then exchange post cards. I found a box after he passed with contacts from every continent including a few from the pole. I found it quite amazing considering he was a teenager at the time.
Seriously? Spam report for mentioning that free amateur license study sites exist and referring to one by name? Okay, let me re-phrase, then. They exist, they're free, I'm getting no cut for saying so, and if you want to find one you can do a search. Maybe you'll end up at the one I mentioned that I know to be reliable, maybe you end up on one that upsells you after you spend an hour studying...
@@oasntet you lost me buddy, are you asking for his ham liscense number? I dont think its relevant to go into the attic and find the box to prove a point. Either way its impressive, RIP.
We still send QSL cards today! Although not as common, I do Parks On The Air and send them through email usually but I've sent and received plenty of physical cards
I've found the best way to appreciate any modern technology is understanding the early primitive history. Works the same in computer programming. Scott has done an excellent job here.
I was in a communication unit in the teens. They have been around since the 50s. We had a team who bounced radio waves off of Echo. They have a hall of communication with pictures all around of famous days in communication. One is of the team with a directional antenna on that day. I believe they talked to a team in Europe. I got a huge kick out of using a suitcase sized dish and talking to a geostationary satellite the size of a bus in space. I’ve worked moon bounce personally as part of my hobby. The RF is very fractional and the signal weak.
My uncle was a ham operator who had a massive home antenna array. He would do moon bounce communications among his ham group. It was late in his life where I first heard the word "packet" in reference to information.
Some have, many have not. One of the things they found was that the wires clumped up and didn't spread out properly. Many of the clumps are still up there. If you look up objects called "deb West Ford" you'll find them.
Radio hams use "Moonbounce" it's interesting to hear your signal being received after a delay due to the 1/2 million mile round trip. You need a powerful transmitter and a parabolic dish antenna but it is not uncommon.
Some ham radio operators still bounce signals off the moon, and communicate with others all over the world. Doing so is a considerable technical challenge, but within the capabilities of a real enthusiast with a bit of $$ and skill at their disposal.
For the younger audience: TelStar 1 was such an event that its first two broadcasts (first US to Europe, then Europe to US) became "event TV", with commentators and everything
I remember seeing one or perhaps two of the Echo satellites from my childhood home in suburban St. Louis. My father took us out to see them. I don’t know how he learned about the sighting opportunity, perhaps TV or the newspaper. I did understand what they were used for. I don’t remember whether my Dad explained it to me or whether I heard or read about it myself. I know I learned of the steerable horn antenna at Holmdel, NJ in connection with communications satellites well before I learned of Penzias and Wilson’s use of it to discover the cosmic microwave background.
Long, long ago in a century far, far behind us I ordered some used tape on the large metal reels as I had just picked up a Teac Quadraphonic Four Track Tape deck and damned if the reels were not all labeled Project Echo. The tapes had been erased and I guess were used once and set aside for decades until the whole shebang became Goverment Surplus and someone bought the whole batch at auction I'm guessing and then resold the reels to guys like me who wanted some large metal tape reels on the cheap because I got them from a private party. There is a 50% chance those are still around in the basement or attic as I have no recollection of tossing them but my late wife might have but doubtful she would have without checking with me. She knew better that to mess with my Tools or Audio equipment. Those tape reels are not much when it comes to Space Memorabilia but they are the only examples of bygone early space projects that I have, or at least once had. Very interesting segment Scott, but then again all your detailed explanations are always interesting to me.
In 2019 I visited the radio telescope at Camp Evans, NJ, and they aimed it at the moon and let us bounce our radio voices off it. I said, "that's one small speech for a man," paused to hear the echo and resumed, "one giant leap for radio."
Awesome you taked about project West Ford, always an interesting subject. I also particularly like when you mentioned the "mechanical" solar cells utilizing steam. It got me thinking about this again: It would be fun to test out a setup that used a large fresnel lens type collector to focus onto a boilerless steam system not unlike the mechanism used in the White Steam Car. There would be some losses in energy in that conversion, and again with the turbine generator. Unfortunately on average, steam turbines reliably convert about 35 percent of a heat source into electricity, with about 60 percent representing the highest efficiency of any heat engine to date. Still, with the right design a closed system steam solar system might beat out traditional solar in efficiency but not by much, and i'd imagine not nearly as durable. Another maybe more efficient mechanical solar i've seen is with Stirling engine generators. I've always like the design of the NASA Stirling engine they used in several vehicles, even a Chevy Celebrity that made 62hp (5 less than the stock 4 cylinder IC engine) performed better, and was more fuel efficient and quiet. That series of engines was a redesign of a Siemans Stirling engine from the 1960s. Long story short NASA has continued with their designs and these engines can be reliably mass produced with our current technology with a 55% Carnot efficiency, fixed operating frequency by design. The beauty of Stirling engines is they can run on solar, nuclear heat, fuel combustion, or any other heat source.
The main issue with having a solar-fired boiler and associated steam engine in space is not so much the solar collector or the efficiency, but the sheer impossibility of having an effective enough heat sink to make the cycle work. All heat engines, whether internal combustion, external combustion or stirling type require not just a heat source but also a heat sink, because the useful power is extracted from the flow of heat from hot to cold, aka from source to sink. Here on earth the heat sink is easy enough - you can use air cooling or more often water cooling, which is why thermal power stations are usually sited near large bodies of water (lakes, large rivers or the sea) to use that water for cooling. Likewise with steam power plants on ships, which use the water the ship floats on as the source of cooling for their engines. In space it is a great deal more difficult, since the two most effective forms of heat transfer (conduction and convection) don't exist in a vacuum. So the only possibility is dumping the heat with radiators. Just look at how big the radiator panels are on the international space station - they are almost the same size as the solar panel arrays and often get confused for solar panels. That is just to dump the relatively small amount of waste heat generated by the handful of people living on the station and from the electrical equipment on board. For a solar-fired steam engine in space, assuming that 35% conversion of heat to mechanical power, it would therefore need to radiate the remaining 65% of the heat back into space somehow - and that's assuming that the 35% of useful power does not itself get transformed into heat somewhere down the line after it has done whatever you need it to do. This wouldn't necessarily be impossible, but the radiators required to make it possible would be impractically large at best.
@@lloydevans2900 All great information, was not aware of that. I have only been interested in the terrestrial uses for energy production and transportation using alternative means, and I'm particularly interested in external combustion and solar thermal technology. It would be amazing though if traditional solar panels could reliably break 50% efficiency and be produced inexpensively, but from what I understand that may be far away in the future.
Hi Lloyd @@lloydevans2900. I had never had the idea of needed heat removal up there. Thank you for that. Regarding ISS, never heard talk of your mentioned sink arrays. Oof. But then, I haven’t looked closely at much of anything. I would expect that sun wavelengths would be significant for darker surfaces, and I wonder if the energy arrays gather lots of heat All the solar panels down here are, iirc, dark/black. Cheers from Edmonton.
Way back in the mid 2000s, a company had that idea. They built a bunch of large reflectors that looked like receiver antennas, and mounted a sterling engine at the focus point. The company went backrupt about a decade ago and sold off the project to a different company. The last article I read about the project indicated that the whole thing turned out to be a complete boondoggle and a massive consumer of natural gas. The problem is that sterling engines make great demonstrators, but when there is a load they dont produce enough force to overcome the inertia on their own. So they designed them to also burn natural gas for a warm-up cycle. The issue is that apparently using natural gas to start sterling engines uses more natural gas than if you just burned it to directly generate electricity in a traditional boiler. And that startup energy also has to be considered in your net efficiency, which of course they were not doing. The "31% effcient" Sterling engines werent even close. Add to that the complexity and the cost of the building them, in a time when cheap solar panels flooded the market, and the whole project went under.
@@patreekotime4578The overcoming of inertia problem you mentioned may well have been a design flaw of the stirling engines the "boondoggle" organisation you mentioned were using. But there is nothing inherently wrong with using stirling engines to generate power. In fact the best commercial example is the Swedish engineering company "Kockums", who manufacture large multi-cylinder stirling engines for use in the Gotland class submarines of the Swedish Navy. The heat source is diesel burned with pure oxygen from a liquid oxygen tank, the heat sink is the sea water surrounding the submarine itself. These are highly effective and give the submarines an air-independent propulsion source which can operate for several weeks, and are some of the most effective and efficient non-nuclear submarines ever made. Believe it or not, in a wargame exercise, one of the Gotland class submarines managed to get into a position where it could have fired its torpedoes at an American Nimitz class aircraft carrier without being detected by any of the battle group it was travelling with. Ok, so it would probably have been detected afterwards by tracking the torpedoes back to their source, but by then it would be too late - the carrier would be sunk or at the very least heavily damaged.
I was waiting for you to get to Telstar I knew about Arthur C. Clarke and his importance but was unaware of the tiny copper filaments being deployed in orbit anxiously waiting for part 2.
Hi Scott, great video as always. When you talked about Eisenhower's peace speech being transmitted from a missile flying overhead, a question came to my mind: What was the first rocket designed solely for the purpose of space exploration? Greetings from Uruguay.
@@GeneCashthe thing with vanguard is that (at least as far as I know) it was launched in a Jupiter rocket that was itself a modified redstone missile.
all the old rockets were designed for ballistic missiles and then adapted for space exploration. even the saturn rockets. the space race was used as a public front to con congress into funding an arms race.
@@valentinlong9512 - the Redstone rocket took the first American man to space, but it was first developed as a surface-to-surface ballistic missile. not designed solely for exploration.
Considering that even the Space Shuttle had a dual military purpose from the start... have there really even been any before the current wave of commercial vehicles?
@@valentinlong9512 No, Vanguard was a civilian navy program. You're thinking of Explorer 1, which launched on a Jupiter-C/Juno, which being based on Redstone is not actually a Jupiter rocket (Jupiter-C was just a way to test the heatshield)
as a child at Woomera my father woke my brother and I 2 am we went outside to see a luminous sphere three times bigger than a full moon, upper atmospheric experiment where fine powder was exploded in space 1963
I always find it amusing when there's a perfectly reasonable explanation behind a conspiracy theory, like the pre-satelite era dishes on naval craft. Very informative as always!
It wouldn't have made much difference if Clarke got a patent or not. Patents expire after 20 years. The technology matured just in time for the concept to be released into the public domain.
I remember an Arthur C. Clark story about communication satellites. There's this scientist at a conference in Hawaii and he meets his Soviet counterpart. He relates how the USA is going to start orbiting broadcast satellites and beaming down Western media and the Soviets could do nothing about it. This was published before Telstar and I wish I could remember the name of the story.
Initially, amateur radio operators using CW commonly used moonbounce communication which required a maximum legal limit transmitter of 1500 watts output and an array of at least 4 yagi antennas, 30 feet long. This occurred on both the 2 m and 70 cm bands (144 MHz and 450 MHz) The current state of the art using digital signals requires only 100 watts and a single yagi antenna. In either case the antenna required steering in both azimuth and and elevation. For frequencies of 1296 MHz and above, dish antennas are commonly used. Numerous amateur radio operators have worked more than 100 countries and / or all 50 USA states. The digital mode is called JT65
I can remember at age 7 watching the bright star that was Echo 2 drifting across the heavens. My father worked in telephony, and heard about the overflight from an internal company bulletin, and pointed it out to me.
Amateur radio..... EME, Earth Moon Earth radio signal bounce. Echo Link, I'm wondering if Scott is into Amateur radio? Anyone willing to get licensed can work the satellites. I believe Amateur radio people were a big part to the advancement of world communications.
Historians paint beautiful, hazy pictures of the past. Scientists are incredibly good at studying the present. Only science fiction writers have a clear view of the future.
What? Thats absolute wrong. Please listen to e.g. lectures and interviews with scientist from prof Brian Greene (World Science Festival), by Fraiser Cain, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder or by Lex Fridman. The letures at the Royal Institutions in London show also scientist who have a lot of good ideas and explanations for the future! Many SF-writers (who I love, like the great Stanislaw Lem) have the ideas from science!
Scott, if you have never taken a cruise on the Liberty Ship SS Jeremiah O'Brien out of San Francisco, I highly recommend it. Visit the engine room that was used in the film Titanic, and many more joys.
I remember how difficult it was to make a transatlantic phone call from the UK in the 1960s, you had to book the call with the operator and they would establish the connection and then call you back and connect you. Hard to imagine now...
I remember 'Telstar' by the Tornadoes being released. I was probably 9 yrs old at the time. Also remember 'Stranger on the Shore' by Acker Bilk at about the same time. Wonderful stuff ! Question - is the satellite TELSTAR still in orbit ?
Scott - thanks for including shots of Clarke's original 1945 article. I've known he was the originator of the idea of geosynchronous communications since I was a kid - it's great to get a chance to read his actual words!
The only unrealistic parts of Clarke's article on geostationary communications were the assumption that relays would have to be manned, and the last paragraph predicting very optimistic atomic rockets with exhaust velocities in the %c range.
When I was a kid, we used to call the Hayden Planetarium to find out what time the Echo satellites would pass over NYC and, even with all the light pollution here, it was easy to spot them.
It's funny to think that even then the scientists could predict the orbital decay of Sputnik 1 hence, as a kid, I watched it's terminal death dive as it passed over southern England.
Hmm! the equipment is a bit more modern but a 1927 transatlantic telephone call had a lot in common with sending a transatlantic position report from aircraft 75 years later.
I remember reading in the L. A. Times during Echo One when they printed the time the satellite would past overhead, and sure enough my family and I saw it in orbit. That got me interested in Space.
I enjoyed this video, and I'm looking forward to the next one. I'm a fan of a musical group that had a cover of the song _Telstar_ back then. Their name? _Apollo 100._
Hey Scott, I hope you won't forget to mention the first citizen built communication satellite, OSCAR 3, launched in 1965 by radio amateurs. They were able to piggyback a launch on a commercial rocket.
When talking about West Ford, it reminded me of something I have been wondering about for a while. I know space is big. I know there's lots of room for things in orbit. But it isn't unlimited space. There is a limit to how much we can put in orbit before we start running into problems with getting stuff into space. So, with all these constellations going up, when will we hit that line where there are too many satellites? So far there is Starlink, Kuiper, OneWeb, Iridium, AST, and then there is one that China wants to put up. Again, I know space is big and they are all at different altitudes but when will it be so many that it starts causing major problems? Astronomers already complain about having to remove trails from their data. Then there is also the Kessler syndrome to worry about. We will have to draw a line somewhere and say enough is enough, right?
AC Clarke was not the first to think of the geostationary orbit. He just suggested to put communication satellites there. The first to write about GSO was Ziolkowsky a few decades earlier.
Wernher von Braun's speech on the 50th anniversary of the German Aerospace Association in 1959 also explained these solutions. This speech can also be found and heard on RU-vid.
I still enjoy satellite hunting in the early evenings and mornings. Been doing it since the days of Echo, but it is much easier these days. Not only has prediction (software) become more accurate, there are so many more "targets" now!
at around eleven minutes you talked about the Echo satellite(s). I remember going out one evening to see it go by because my dad had learned from the evening news that we would be able to see it shortly after sunset before it went into Earth's shadow. Amaxing
My dad and I did the same thing. I remember it was very easy to see. Now I drag my kid out to watch the ISS. The thrill has worn off for him, but I still like to step out and watch it.
Oh, I remember that you can bounce signals off the moon. And did the fact that the moon is big and far away and the timing gets spread lead to the idea of phased arrays?
Years ago, shortly before it closed, my career had me go to the Cheltenham Naval Communications Facility in Cheltenham, Maryland where I learned of the Moon operation. I also read a copy of the letter the base commander put into the time capsule buried on the base. I hope I am still around and can attend when that baby is dug up. He had a good grasp on what "people of the future" would want to know.
@@yiwensin5913 😝 He gets fewer comments than I thought. So ... don't look at it as a "spoiler." Think of it more as like a movie trailer. 😎 What the hell was Starfish Prime? How and why did it fry our very first commercial communication satellite? What else did it do? The answer has to do with nuclear physicists acting like little kids with their new toy. 😳😳🥺😨
@@ThatBoomerDude56 Haha, it's okay. I'm not really a movie person. So I have no clue what movie(s) you and Scott are talking about :D So I'm just gonna imagine that a giant nuclear powered starfish was assembled in orbit by some evil corporation, but it got very hungry (no fast food in LEO) so it fried a satellite and it was tasty.
Nice vid as usual man. How far away do you think we are from high speed(600mpbs upload & 200mpbs download) full coverage satellite wifi that can work on any wifi enabled device(Desktop PC, laptop, tablet, phone, etc)? I'm just getting tired of the shitty limited service areas, the overpriced plans etc. & just want a world where there is 100% wifi coverage everywhere in the world. Do you think this will ever be possible?
No one will bother to do that. It's so cheap to carry around a decent antenna already (eg Starlink) that almost everyone will do that instead, for the purpose of getting high speed telecoms in arbitrary locations, and the market for your described use case largely won't ever exist. Depending on how small an antenna you want, it will be technically possible sooner, just largely pointless. This doesn't mean *you* can't have what you want. Just get Starlink, it'll do most of what you want already, and it can be anticipated to improve.
@@sealpiercing8476 Yes, Starlink is already a dream come true. I worked on some DOD satellite receivers, as well as Iridium and the technology of Starlink is an order of magnitude beyond. I have one just for outages, worth every penny.
I think we're quite a bit off, as it requires steering an antenna towards one or more targets that are more than 100km away (so tiny), moving extremely fast (so doppler), with enough error-correction to keep data intact. Emergency SOS on iPhone (which uses satellites) requires you to point your phone at a target, and even then it is so speed-limited the messages are pre-defined
@@sundhaug92 A phased array antenna can do that today, though. The cost is likely to decrease, since there are a bunch of applications which are likely to deploy them at large scale. The antenna will have to be larger than that typically used for wifi, however, because making it that small would be more expensive and pointless for almost all use cases.
Could you do a video on the “Wake Shield Facility” that the Space Shuttle could Deploy? Granted youbare probably plenty busy as is, but I recently heard about it and thought it would be REALLY well suited by your video’s style. It was a vacuum chamber that used the Space Shuttle’s Wake as the Pump. Also may have used the Reentry Plasma for Plasma Cleaning. I think it also essentially did what those “satellite swarms” or whatever did and was independently keeping distance behind once released from the Canadarm. Either way great video as always, i just figured I’d throw this idea out there, no pressure; keep up the great work!
Howdy, Scott! Neato series, and I'm always enthused to see some attention given to passive communications satellites-I hope OV1-8 gets it's own mention in a future installment. If you're ever interested in exploring the subject further, Goodyear published a contractor report in 1966, "Design Studies of Advanced Lenticular Passive Communication Satellites from Low to Synchronous Orbit" involving concepts for extremely large (some in excess of 450' diameter) inflatable satellites, using solar sails for position keeping. I actually got my physical copy via interlibrary loan, consisting of a stack of photocopied sheets about an inch thick (and thanks to the dedicated and very gallant efforts of my local library staff), but thankfully, the whole thing is available online as a PDF.
25S7D (tactical satellite communications). In AIT these were some of the first things we learned, project diana, project echo, and project "needles". We also learned about the first ATT satellite, but funny enough they failed to mention starfish prime
Steam. Powered. Comsat. Crewed. Peak Steampunk. Ultimate Steampunk. My band (External Combustion Orchestra) has got to do something with that (barely) alternative history… (BTW. 73 from KG0XG)
Throwing millions of needles into a polar orbit is a very, very mid-late C20th (but particularly 50s/60s) US solution to a problem. Huge, kinda magnificently simple in the short term and gloriously destructive in the long term.
"These silly science fiction writers......invent impossible things!" Yeah... right: if you read science fiction from the 50s onwards you can find 90% of what we have today. The good and the bad.
It's worth mentioning that Clarke wasn't the first to propose using geostationary communication satellites. Herman Potočnik wrote in his book Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums in 1928 where he described using a geostationary satellite for communication, so 17 years earlier than Clarke. And the concept of geostationary satellites was examined by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky even before that.
Another thing that was used was meteor ionization trails. You can bounce radio waves off of those, and there were systems set up by the military to use this method. Even today, Amateur Radio enthusiasts use meteor bounce for fun -- you can't talk using voice, as the signal to noise ratio is too low, but as the trails last several seconds, you can use morse code.
Stuff like this is why i always argue with people about "why are we spending millions or billions of dollars on space, there's no benefit." We would not have the communications or satellite coverage we have today if it wasn't for that early military spending figuring out how to get rockets that worked, and satellites that worked. Not to put to fine a point on it, solid state electronics benefited greatly from military spending on the technology. How many people use GPS on a daily basis. Yes, that was a US military program, that was partially demilitarized so that the peoples of the world could use it. You're welcome, rest of the world. And that's only one example of a great many trickle down technologies that were paid for by military spending. Especially DARPA.
aaaa YES! talk about perfect timing. I was hoping someone would somehow display how much of our lives would halt, if we didn't have satellites. And how the development has been.
