Courier from Earth

With 35 U.S. and Soviet satellites having achieved orbit, the worldly-birds have lost some of their gee-whiz excitement. But though the public may be getting jaded, U.S. satellites are just getting really useful. Last week, three years to the day after the Russians launched their era-opening Sputnik I, a U.S. Army communications satellite, launched from Cape Canaveral with little fanfare, went into orbit and calmly began to receive, store and spew back a stream of voice and Teletype messages sent up from the earth. Courier 1B is a 51-in.. 500-lb. sphere containing 300 lbs. of electronic apparatus. Developed by the Army Signal Corps, its surface is spangled with 19,152 solar cells, which look like bluish safety-razor blades and generate 62 watts when the sun is shining on them. The power can be used immediately or stored for future use in batteries.

Prodigious Appetite. The most important items in Courier iB are five tape recorders, one of them handling voice and the other four (some are standbys) recording and transmitting high-speed Teletype messages. Soon after the satellite went into orbit, it recorded a taped message from President Eisenhower that was sent up to it while it was passing over the Army's communications laboratory at Fort Monmouth, N.J. When Courier iB approached Puerto Rico, a Signal Corps radio at Salinas commanded it to repeat the President's words. This it duly did, and the message was forwarded by conventional radio to New York for delivery to Frederick Boland. President of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

With this ceremonial off its chest, the satellite really got to work. Whenever it passed over Fort Monmouth or Salinas, the Signal Corps loaded it with hundreds of thousands of words of Teletype messages, including space-filling test items such as the text of the Constitution of the U.S. Courier's appetite is prodigious. During the 14 minutes that it stays within range of a ground station, it can ingest the 773,693 words of the King James Version of the Bible.

Tape Trick. The words are stored on magnetic tape in highly condensed code, and they race down from space so fast that 720 high-speed Teletype machines would be needed to keep up with them. The Signal Corps, of course, has no such Teletype brigade. Its trick is to record the satellite's signals directly on tape, then slow the tape so that normal machines can deal with the signals at their leisure. Beyond this operation, the satellite can be instructed to receive and transmit any message simultaneously. This permits communication on line-of-sight microwaves between places such as Fort Monmouth and Puerto Rico, which are separated by a high bulge of the earth's curvature.

Courier 1B, however successful, is only an experimental job. It communicates with two stations only, and its orbit (500 miles perigee. 750 miles apogee) is too low to bring it in range of all parts of the earth. The Signal Corps plan is to supplant it eventually by three communications satellites spaced around the earth on once-per-day orbits 22.000 miles up. At this altitude each will stay fixed above its own part of the rotating earth. Anyone wanting to send the King James Version--or any message of similar length --from Port Said to Las Vegas or Tokyo will always be able to find satellites to do the job in 14 minutes.

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