Looking and Listening in the Heavens
By Frederic Golden
Columbia opens a new satellite era by lofting two pay loads into earth orbit
Traveling high over the Pacific Ocean on its sixth swing around the earth last week, the space shuttle Columbia once again made history. Firing its small thrusters, it rolled and turned so that its big cargo bay faced in the direction of flight. Clamshell-shaped sun covers automatically opened, and the cylindrical parcel underneath them was set spinning (at precisely 52 r.p.m.). With the press of a button, Astronaut Bill Lenoir, 43, fired explosive bolts, releasing the spring-loaded clamps holding the parcel. Out it popped, like some extraterrestrial jack-in-the-box. Forty-five minutes later, after Columbia had pulled about 20 miles away and cautiously turned up its tile-covered belly to protect itself from the blast, a rocket ignited and sent the whirling object hurtling out into space toward a permanent parking spot far above the equator. Said one of Columbia's crewmen: "We delivered. We got SBS off on time."
For the first time in the annals of space, a piloted ship had succeeded in launching an earth satellite. The trail-blazing cargo, formally known as SBS-3, was the third in a series of commercial communications satellites owned by Satellite Business Systems, a partnership of IBM, Comsat General and Aetna Life & Casualty. It was one of two look-alike satellites carried aloft by Columbia on its fifth voyage. The other, called Anik C-3 and owned by Telesat Canada, which runs that country's satellite communications, was launched with equal ease a day later. Both satellites are among the most advanced examples of electronic wizardry in orbit. About 21 ft. long, 7 ft. wide and weighing 1,300 lbs. apiece, excluding their boosters, they will provide thousands of new channels for relaying information through space, from voice communications to television, from business data to "talk" between computers.
Columbia's own flight last Thursday morning began just as flawlessly, lifting off about half a second early. Carrying a four-man crew, double the number on previous missions, the spacecraft remained visible for more than 3 min. as it rose on its pillars of fire into a cloudless sky over Cape Canaveral, undeterred by 90-m.p.h. winds. On the last mission, in July, Columbia's big strap-on solid-fuel booster rockets sank into the sea. This time, after separating from their mother ship, they drifted gently to earth under their large parachutes and stayed afloat for later recovery. As the shuttle cruised 184 miles above the earth, President Reagan sent up his greetings. Commented Columbia's commander, Vance Brand, 51, a veteran of the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz linkup: "It's a beautiful world that we're over." Replied Reagan: "We're trying to figure out how to keep the world as beautiful as it is you looking at it from up there."
The five-day flight, due to end this week with another landing on the flats of California's Mojave Desert, also included several other space chores. For the first time in nine years, American spacemen would be taking a space walk, or what NASA calls an EVA (for extravehicular activity). Wearing new, slimmed-down and more flexible pressure suits and life-support packs (cost: more than $1 million apiece), rookie Astronauts Lenoir and Joe Allen, 45, were to float through Columbia's air lock early Monday morning and into the cargo bay. Tethered by safety lines, they were to test not only the suits but also their ability to manipulate tools and instruments while wearing new space garb and operating at zero-gravity. The excursion was originally scheduled for Sunday, but doctors delayed it a day because Lenoir developed a case of motion sickness, a recurring problem for some astronauts.
The mission also included a handful of experiments. One was a so-called glow test aimed at unraveling the cause of a mysterious luminosity that has appeared on parts of the orbiter.
Another was a West German experiment to see how metals mix in zero-g. Three projects, submitted by youngsters, observed the effects of weightlessness on the growing of crystals and sponges and on the behavior of fluids. The only notable technical hitch was the failure of one of three computer display screens in the cockpit. Said Astronaut Robert Overmyer, 46:
"It's a little like your home TV having the picture slip."
Even if the astronauts accomplished nothing else during the flight, the satellite launches alone would have elated the aerospace community, which has been searching for a cost-effective way to place hardware in orbit. Pleased by Columbia's handling of his company's $24 million bundle of silicon wizardry, SBS President Robert C. Hall called the ship "a magnificent tool for the satellite business." Indeed, he and NASA's Canadian customers had every reason to be pleased. The space agency will charge them $8 million to $9 million each for the launches, under a price schedule set years ago to drum up business for the shuttle. By 1988, when the shuttle should finally begin paying its way, the tab will go up to $22 million for comparable payloads.
Once SB53 and Anik C-3 were tossed out of Columbia's cargo bay ("We are two for two," exulted Allen), the satellites became the responsibility of their owners. Sending up radio commands--from rooftop antennas in Washington, D.C., in the case of SB53 and from similar dishes in Ottawa for Anik C-3--controllers steered them into so-called geostationary orbits, at an altitude 22,300 miles above the equator, where their speeds precisely match that of the earth's rotation. Hence they remain locked over one spot and act like a fixed antenna. Eventually NASA hopes to build a space tug that can ferry cargo between low earth orbit (from about 150 to 600 miles), where the shuttle operates, to geostationary orbits, where most communications satellites are positioned.
In their far-off out posts, the new satellites should have plenty of company. At present more than 1,277 operational satellites are whirling around the earth, to say nothing of 1,614 others that have long since fallen silent. Not only do they perform a variety of tasks but they come in numerous shapes, sizes and nationalities--from the Pentagon's Big Bird, a spy satellite that looks like a railroad tank car and has the eyes of a hawk (the word is that it can read the license plates on the Kremlin's ZIL limousines), to tiny experimental electronic packages like India's 77-lb. Rohini satellite, launched in July 1980. Satellites are being sent up at the rate of 168 a year; in the next decade, NASA's shuttles are slated to carry some 200 satellites aloft; hundreds of others will make the trip in conventional rockets like Western Europe's Ariane launcher and the U.S.S.R.'s Soyuz system, as well as in new rockets being developed by Japan, China and India.
The first earth satellite was Sputnik 1, which the Soviets triumphantly launched on Oct. 4, 1957, beating the U.S.'s Explorer 1 by four months. A generation later, it is almost inconceivable to imagine life without these gifted automatons. Half of all telephone calls between the U.S. and Europe now travel via a moth-shaped robot, called Intelsat V, parked high over the Atlantic. Ships and planes establish their locations by "sighting" not the sun but man-made stars. Scientific satellites like IUE (for International Ultraviolet Explorer) help astronomers study distant stars above the earth's veil of obscuring air. When the U.S. makes uncannily accurate estimates of Soviet wheat harvests, the figures come literally from spies out in the cold: earth-surveying satellites equipped with special sensors that can tell the well-being of crops.
International business would now seem impossible without satellites. Banks depend on them for transferring funds. Satellites give multinational corporations easy access to their sprawling operations overseas. Even the Washington-Moscow hot line is linked by satellite. When such spectacles as World Cup soccer matches and the first human steps on the moon can be seen by billions of people, Marshall McLuhan's "global village" no longer seems just a social philosopher's musing.
Until last week's pyrotechnics, satellites could be sent up only with costly and expendable multistage rockets. After providing the initial boost, the lower stages plunged harmlessly into the sea while the upper stages continued to drift in orbit (as did the rockets that kicked SB53 and Anik C-3 up to geostationary orbit). Now the shuttle has gone a long way toward proving a key argument of those who fought for the $10 billion program: that a reusable spacecraft could launch satellites more easily and less expensively than could one-shot rockets.
On future flights, the shuttle's versatility should become even more apparent. In July 1984, the spacecraft will use its big Canadian-built mechanical arm to retrieve an ailing scientific satellite called Solar Max (so named because it was designed to monitor the sun's periodic flare-ups). NASA thinks that it will be a relatively simple matter for shuttle astronauts to fix the $11 million satellite, which otherwise would be a total loss. If the orbital tinkering fails, the shuttle may even bring the satellite back to earth.
In the 25 years since the days of Sputnik and Explorer, satellites have not only proliferated, but also become infinitely more complex and perform an astonishing range of technological wizardry:
Voices from the Heavens. When the British writer-engineer Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) proposed the idea of communications satellites in 1945, he predicted that they would not be developed before the end of the century. Today, only 20 years after the launching of Telstar 1, the first geostationary communications satellite, they are an $11 billion-a-year business for the U.S. alone. In 1965 satellites could handle 240 telephone calls at a time across the Atlantic; today the number is 20,000. By 1993 it is expected to reach 130,000 globally. The chief carrier is the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat). Founded in 1964, the 106-nation organization owns and operates 17 satellites spaced around the globe like a string of pearls. These provide communications links throughout the non-Communist world (the Soviet bloc has its own network, called Intersputnik).
Though they own only 7% of the world's telephones, Third World countries account for a fifth of Intelsat's traffic. Satellites have given developing lands nationwide communications systems almost overnight. International calls are now bargains. In 1965 a 3-min. phone call from New York to London cost $9. Today it is less than $4.
The earliest communications satellites simply reflected radio signals back to earth off their metallic surfaces. Now they are electronic mazes with thousands of components that pick up signals from earth stations (typically a large maneuverable dish), amplify them and direct them back to the ground. But this technology has done more than make faraway places more accessible to telephone users. As much as two-thirds of the programming on local cable systems in the U.S. originates from distant points via satellite. In fact, access to a single transponder, or channel (out of 24), on such domestic communications satellites as Western Union's Westar V or RCA's Satcom III-R, allows a video entrepreneur like Atlanta's Ted Turner to create a "superstation" within reach of any home in the continental U.S. possessing a suitable antenna.
Communications satellites also serve as stellar teachers. In 1975 the U.S. lent India an experimental satellite called AT56 (for Applications Technology Satellite), which, from its position over the Indian Ocean, relayed programs on such topics as farming and family planning from New Delhi to millions of villagers. AT56 was eventually parked over the Pacific, where it was a vital communications link for the far-flung islands of Micronesia. But not all countries welcome the messages from the sky. The Soviet Union and its East bloc allies, as well as many Third World countries, oppose any transmissions from space not authorized by them. Presumably, they object to programming with a Western political accent.
If today's communications satellites seem like fast talkers, the next generation will be positively garrulous. Intelsat VI, the 38.7-ft.-long, $100 million marvel of electronics under construction by the Hughes Aircraft Co., will handle as many as 37,000 telephone calls and four television channels simultaneously. The bird's power comes entirely from the sun, whose rays will be captured by 19,000 solar cells encircling the cylindrical satellite and converted directly into electricity.
On its maiden voyage in January, the orbiter Challenger will carry up an equally impressive bird: the first component of the U.S.'s new Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). The TRW-built satellite will digest the equivalent of 140 encyclopedia volumes in a single, second-long electronic gulp. Eventually the system will consist of four satellites ringing the earth at roughly equal distances from one another. TDRSS will relay signals not only between ground and orbit but also between satellites, thereby eliminating the need for a globe-girdling network of ground stations to keep in touch with spacecraft like the shuttle.
Eyes on the Earth. From their heavenly perspective, satellites can answer many questions about the planet, ranging from the cosmic (Is the protective ozone layer being destroyed?) to the nature of tomorrow's weather. Since meteorological satellites began sending back television-type pictures of cloud formations and weather fronts in the 1960s, there has not been a single death from hurricanes for lack of warning. A new satellite-based typhoon warning system, now being planned by East Asian nations, should save countless lives and drastically reduce the region's $3 billion-a-year storm damage.
Far more detailed imagery has come from another type of "remote-sensing" satellite called Landsat. The first of these NASA observatories in the sky, which can "see" in a variety of colors, some of them beyond the range of human vision, was launched in 1973. Since then three more have been lofted, the latest in July. Instead of traveling along the equator, as do most communications satellites, Landsat 4 circles the earth once every 99 min. via the polar regions. Thus as the planet turns underneath the satellite, Landsat's ever vigilant electronic eyes see a different patch of earth on every pass.
The U.S. has made Landsat images available to any and all customers at nominal costs. Even China and the Soviet Union have purchased the highly useful color photographs, sometimes of each other's territory. The U.S. has also helped set up Landsat receiving stations in a number of countries so that they can receive the satellite data directly. In Pakistan, Landsat imagery has led to the development of new copper deposits. In the Middle East and Africa, the pictures give advance warning of locusts.
NASA is now conducting an experiment to see if photographs can help to trace from space the spread of toxic pollutants in San Francisco Bay.
As valuable as the Landsats have been, they are running into trouble.
At last summer's U.N. conference on space in Vienna, called UNISPACE 82, a number of Third World countries portrayed the Landsats as economic spies that are letting outsiders learn about a nation's natural resources even before it knows of them.
Mineral-rich Indonesia recommended that no orbital photography should be permitted without the express consent of the country observed.
While the Reagan Administration continues to support "open skies" for satellites, it plans to cut off funding for Landsat in 1985. Its argument: if Landsat is as valuable as its proponents say, the program should pay its own way, with private entrepreneurs picking up the tab. Meanwhile, other countries, including India and Japan, are moving in the opposite direction by subsidizing such efforts. France plans to lift Spot, a Landsat-type remote-sensing satellite, in the next few years.
Spies in the Skies. Since the early 1970s, the Pentagon's chief electronic Peeping Toms have been a series of satellites conceived at Lockheed's famed "skunk works," including the Big Birds. The twelve-ton observatories usually travel in polar orbits so they can cover every spot on earth once every 48 hr. in daylight. Big Bird sends back TV images and provides high-resolution photographs, which are ejected in parachute-equipped canisters that can be hooked in mid-air by recovery planes. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union have satellites that can scan the earth with radar beams. One objective: to track naval vessels at sea.
Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. also have "ferret" satellites, or electronic ears, that can eavesdrop on radio transmissions. In addition, the Pentagon has various scientific satellites, including ones that measure minuscule variations in the earth's gravity, information that helps keep missiles on target. Parked far out in space are the Defense Department's Vela satellites, which watch out for bursts of high-energy radiation that may indicate a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, or the eruption of a distant celestial body. Under development is a system called Navstar (for Navigation Satellite Timing and Ranging) that will enable nuclear submarines and other vessels to know their position anywhere in the world within a matter of inches, another factor in firing missiles with deadly accuracy.
To make up for their lag in the spy-satellite game, the Soviets depend increasingly on manned space stations for military observations. On the eve of the Columbia's launch, the orbit of their currently operational station, Salyut 7, was changed so that its two cosmonauts could watch the lift-off from far overhead, including the separation of the recoverable solid-fuel boosters, a class of rockets closely akin to those fired by Trident nuclear submarines. But the space activity that most concerns the Pentagon is Soviet development of an antisatellite system (Asat) that could knock down virtually any low-flying American orbital package.
Since 1968, the U.S.S.R. has conducted at least 20 tests of such hunter-killer satellites, which edge close to a target and then explode, disabling it in a shower of shrapnel. To counter the Soviet threat, the U.S. is working on its own Asat. Rather than using an exploding satellite, the U.S. will rely on a small missile launched from a high-flying jet fighter climbing many tens of thousands of feet to the upper reaches of the atmosphere (but still far short of orbit). The advantage: such a system will give little forewarning. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are aggressively developing powerful lasers and particle-beam accelerators that could conceivably blind a satellite or knock out an incoming missile. Nonetheless, scientists doubt that such Star Wars weaponry will be in orbit any time soon. But if military activities expand in space, the risks of a confrontation could rapidly escalate. At UNISPACE 82, an overwhelming majority of countries urged the superpowers to halt the arms race in space before it gets out of hand.
As usual, the course of technological progress has not always run smooth. According to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, whose radars keep track of everything in orbit, more than 4,800 man-made objects are circling the earth, including empty fuel tanks, the remnants of boosters, and test debris. No manned spacecraft has yet been hit by such high-speed (17,000 m.p.h.) objects, although some scientists suspect that several satellites that mysteriously went dead may have been struck. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics has warned that if the amount of orbital garbage continues to grow at the present rate, space travel could become unacceptably risky within a decade. One costly and difficult solution: to collect some of the debris and rocket it far out into deep space where it would no longer pose any danger.
Some scientists fear that if the number of launches keeps increasing, the exhaust from the chemically fired rockets may damage the upper atmosphere, especially the protective ozone layer. Another concern is the Soviets' use of nuclear fuel, rather than solar cells, to power some of their low-flying military satellites. In 1978, Cosmos 954, a radar satellite, crashed in northern Canada, scattering radioactive debris over a wide area.
There are also political concerns. At UNISPACE 82, Third World countries were concerned that the space powers might grab off all the choice locations in geostationary orbit. (Led by Colombia, countries along the equator claimed "air rights" to everything above them, although the U.N., after two decades of debate, has yet to establish where the atmosphere ends and space begins.) Currently, communications satellites, ringing the earth above the equator, can be spaced no closer than 2DEG apart (out of a possible 360DEG) without interfering with each other. Unless something is done to alleviate this overcrowding--95 of the 180 slots are already accounted for--all will be taken by the 1990s. Engineers believe that the traffic jam can be overcome by technological improvements that will allow closer spacing and give satellites greater capacity. Indeed, some experts envision a day when only three powerful geostationary supersatellites, spaced equal distances apart, will handle almost all the world's telecommunications.
As Arthur Clarke notes, most technological change seems to occur when a pressing social need is met by a particularly useful innovation, like the steam engine or telephone. As it happened, only a few visionaries like Clarke anticipated the need for satellites. Yet somehow, in less than a generation, they have firmly established themselves in the fabric of contemporary life, shrinking time and space, almost as if the world craved to be brought closer together. Perhaps the space age's real giant steps were not the ones on the moon but the ones that are being taken overhead, like Columbia's flight, every passing moment.
--By Frederic Golden. Reported by Sam Allis/Houston and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral
With reporting by Sam Allis, Jerry Hannifin
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