Communications Satellites: Making the Global Village Possible

A communications satellite is an artificial satellite stationed in space for the purposes of telecommunications. Modern communications satellites use a variety of orbits including geostationary orbits, Molniya orbits, other elliptical orbits and low Earth orbits.

Early missions
The first satellite equipped with on-board radio-transmitters was the Soviet Sputnik 1, launched in 1957. The first American satellite to relay communications was Project SCORE in 1958, which used a tape recorder to store and forward voice messages. It was used to send a Christmas greeting to the world from President Eisenhower. NASA launched an Echo satellite in 1960; the 100-foot aluminized PET film balloon served as a passive reflector for radio communications. Courier 1B, also launched in 1960, was the world’s first active repeater satellite.

How do communication satellites make the global village possible?
Communications satellites have a quiet, yet profound, effect on our daily lives. They link remote areas of the Earth with telephone and television. Modern financial business is conducted at high speed via satellite.Communication satellites are undoubtedly the most important aspect of technology in the world.
Firstly I must say that the most important application of communication satellite is probably in international telephony.Fixed-point telephones relay calls to an earth station, where they are then transmitted to a geostationary satellite. An analogous path is then followed on the downlink.Telephony is the technology associated with the electronic transmission of voice, fax, or other information between distant parties using systems historically associated with the telephone, a handheld device containing both a speaker or transmitter and a receiver. Telephony plays a major role in our daily lives.
Secondly, th use of television, radio and ,most recent, internet also links different regions of the world. The use of communication satellites are an extension of our senses, particularly those of sight and sound.The basic precepts of communication through communication satellites echoes the speed of the senses. Through the media such as the telephone, television, radio and more recently the personal computer and the 'Internet', we are increasingly linked together across the globe and this has enabled us to connect with people at the other side of the world as quickly as it takes us to contact and converse with those who inhabit the same physical space. We can now hear and see events that take place thousands of miles away in a matter of seconds, often quicker than we hear of events in our own villages or even families, and it is the speed of these electronic media that allow us to act and react to global issues at the same speed as normal face to face verbal communication.The effect of this is a new ability to experience almost instantly the effects of our actions on a global scale, just as we can supposedly do in our physical situations. Consequently we are forced to become aware of responsibilty on a global level rather than concerning ourselves solely with our own smaller communities.
One way in which we can chart the remarkable progress of telecommunications over the years is by comparing speeds. A fast sailihg ship could deliver a one-page letter from London to New York in approximately three weeks, but today when you scan and send this same letter through an e-mail to the same location it will be received in a matter of seconds.Soon, advanced satellites and fiber optics will be sending a page of information in less than one-hundredth of a second. This represents an amazing increase in performance of greater than 100 million times.These modern systems are not only fast, but super reliable. Modern digital transmission systems already typically operate with an error rate of less than one in a million. With forward error correction and other accuracy-boosting techniques, however, the rate could even fall to one in a billion! That is the equivalent of a single typographical error in the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary.
Distance no longer poses a problem when one is separated from family or friends. The means of communicating have grown alongside the increased power of people to shape their physical world as well as with their increasing interdependence.
The dilemma on accurate and speedy communication no longer poses a threat nor a problem. Whereas before it would take months or weeks to know what’s going on around the world, now it simply takes a click on the remote control or on the cellular phone. The generation of today, described as born with mouse on one hand and remote on the other – truly make the world a global village.

Secondary resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_satellite
http://www.gma.org/surfing/satellites/sat_com.html
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/satcomhistory.html