Morning all. So, a some mixed success for Europe's space ambitions in this week's update. First, it seems the dream of a hypersonic reusable airplane-like first stage remains frustratingly beyond reach...
...although the old idea of a gliding spaceplane upper stage is looking more promising (if only those idiots at NASA hadn't abandoned the idea in favour of dead-end space stations in the 1970s! 
)
)In the meantime, the less-sexy rocket-plus-capsule combination continues to provide yeomanly service on the run to and from orbit.
...although the old idea of a gliding spaceplane upper stage is looking more promising (if only those idiots at NASA hadn't abandoned the idea in favour of dead-end space stations in the 1970s!
What is it people say about the Grass on the Other Side?
That's the thing we've got IOTL. The less-sexy rocket/capsule combo has proven itself since 1960 - when a Vostok Capsule took a pair of dogs up and back down. And it's where everyone's going both IOTL and ITTL.
I'm a big fan of the rockets-plus-capsule approach myself, as hauling those wings uphill, then having to heat protect them on the downward leg seems such a waste of payload. In some ways I think spaceplanes are a bit like late 19th century visions of airships as equivalent to sea ships, or the various attempts to make flying cars - often very pretty, but ultimately an attempt to force something shaped specifically by the forces of one medium into a totally different environment.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing Michel Van tackle Europa 5
On the topic of European space efforts, I wonder if a TTL equivalent of the Galileo satnav system will be making an appearance. Despite the fact that IOTL as of 2013 it's still only 4 satellites in IOV (well, and a GEO overlay system called EGNOS), the project was actually kicked off in the late 1990s, so around the timeframe for the end of Part III. IOTL its biggest (some may say to date only) achievement has been the encouragement it gave to the US to switch off Selective Availability on GPS (in an attempt - successful, IMO - to undermine Galileo's business case). Without the threat of a competing satnav system, GPS ITTL could be left far less accurate for non-military users, with big impacts on the geolocation services industry which has become so huge IOTL.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing Michel Van tackle Europa 5
On the topic of European space efforts, I wonder if a TTL equivalent of the Galileo satnav system will be making an appearance. Despite the fact that IOTL as of 2013 it's still only 4 satellites in IOV (well, and a GEO overlay system called EGNOS), the project was actually kicked off in the late 1990s, so around the timeframe for the end of Part III. IOTL its biggest (some may say to date only) achievement has been the encouragement it gave to the US to switch off Selective Availability on GPS (in an attempt - successful, IMO - to undermine Galileo's business case). Without the threat of a competing satnav system, GPS ITTL could be left far less accurate for non-military users, with big impacts on the geolocation services industry which has become so huge IOTL.
That would be on account of how USAF Requirements dictated the design of STS during it's early years. IIRC, STS was only supposed to have small, stubby wings before USAF Long Cross-Range desires forced a switch to the large Delta-Wing shape they gained.
It seems to me that when it comes to Manned Spaceflight, what looks good, usually isn't all that good at all.
Which is the inherent failing of all spaceplane designs. The need to be able to operate both in space and in an atmosphere.
Capsule designs have the exact same basic issue, but are generally geared towards in-space operations with limited capability in an atmosphere.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing Michel Van tackle Europa 5
On the topic of European space efforts, I wonder if a TTL equivalent of the Galileo satnav system will be making an appearance. Despite the fact that IOTL as of 2013 it's still only 4 satellites in IOV (well, and a GEO overlay system called EGNOS), the project was actually kicked off in the late 1990s, so around the timeframe for the end of Part III. IOTL its biggest (some may say to date only) achievement has been the encouragement it gave to the US to switch off Selective Availability on GPS (in an attempt - successful, IMO - to undermine Galileo's business case). Without the threat of a competing satnav system, GPS ITTL could be left far less accurate for non-military users, with big impacts on the geolocation services industry which has become so huge IOTL.
AFAIK, the Galileo SatNav System was a long term goal of ESA IOTL, I would suspect that it's at least in the preliminary stages ITTL. But I would expect the same issues to crop up.
There were substantial aerothermal concerns around the complex interface between the short straight wings of Max Faget's DC-3 proposal and the fuselage (not to mention the sharp wing leading edges), as well as operational concerns with his proposed mode of reentry (which was essentially ballistic, becoming lifting only after slowing to subsonic speeds). Even within NASA the DC-3 did not have universal support, and ultimately I suspect it would have been doomed regardless of the Air Force sticking its oar in. The double-delta was just a better design.
The Jenkins book has a lot of these nitty-gritty technical details (as good as the Heppenheimer book is, it focuses more on the social-political-management aspects of the Space Shuttle's design process), and I really recommend it for anyone interested in these things. Supposedly there's going to be a new version out that looks at the whole program sometime, but in the meantime the current edition (which predates Columbia) is solid enough on these sorts of details.
Not just an ESA goal, but also an EU goal - with the problems of reconciling two fundamentally different ways of working (ESA Geo-Return, where contracts are awarded based on how much each member pays, versus EU single market rules on fair and open competition) leading to all sorts of political and technical headaches. Then there was the chaos caused by the flirtation with Public-Private Partnership (the companies competing for work being expected to work together as a consortium to define the requirements for the system they were bidding to build, then to operate the system - all whilst ESA tried to micromanage the technical side).
I'm sure that ITTL greater rationality will prevail
In practice I think the reusable glider upper stage is the greater challenge.
The reason the Horus is looking good here and the first stage is looking so bad is because the first stage is going straight to its most difficult regime. If they decided to test the first stage's ability to land after an imaginary successful launch, I'm sure it would perform admirably. Of course EuroSpace is complicating things by insisting on an air-breather. A straight up glideback/flyback rocket booster would have been a dead cinch.
In... You know... Rocket science terms:/.
Horus has yet to enjoy hypersonic ascent, orbital insertion and the pleasurable climax of meteoric reentry.
The reason the Horus is looking good here and the first stage is looking so bad is because the first stage is going straight to its most difficult regime. If they decided to test the first stage's ability to land after an imaginary successful launch, I'm sure it would perform admirably. Of course EuroSpace is complicating things by insisting on an air-breather. A straight up glideback/flyback rocket booster would have been a dead cinch.
In... You know... Rocket science terms:/.
Horus has yet to enjoy hypersonic ascent, orbital insertion and the pleasurable climax of meteoric reentry.
Fair point on Horus, they still have a lot of work to do before settling on a final design - at minimum a sub-orbital lob and re-entry test. I think it's broadly comparable to OTL Hopper as a test vehicle.
For the HED, don't forget this is an X-plane like proof-of-concept experimental programme, not a full development programme (it would be massively underfunded for the latter!), so I guess a big part of the point is to pick the least mature technology involved (the hypersonic air breathing engines) and learn more about what would be needed to make that work. Approach and landing tests probably would have worked well as you say, but a lot less would have been learned (especially as it would duplicate a lot of the results taken from Horus).
I like the full-rocket flyback first stage idea, though probably that should be a vertical take-off rather than horizontal to reduce drag - back to the original Hermes concept!
But the point of an airbreather is, it turns the pesky nuisance of the atmosphere into an advantage.
Given the difficulties and disappointments of scramjets as a mode of reaching near-orbital speeds, the only realistic flight to orbit and return design I am aware of is Skylon; and Skylon of course only proposes to use air as a propellant up to about 1600 meters/sec, just 1/5 of the way to full orbital speed. However, if we can believe REL's spreadsheets on the ascent profile and other projections they make, it leverages the atmosphere from liability to asset another way as well--by climbing to 35 km height and reaching that transition speed to rocket mode in horizontal winged flight, it apparently shaves something close to 1000 meters/sec off of the typical vertical-launch rocket mission delta-V; whereas a rocket-launched orbital vehicle requires a mission delta-V of about 10,000 meters/sec the Skylon proposal cuts the excess over mere orbital velocity of just under 8000 in half, to just 9000 total from ground to orbit. How? It seems clear to me that this is because gravity loss is transformed, via the wings, into somewhat more air friction loss than a rocket that punches straight up through the soup--but this air drag amounts to far less than the total combined gravity and air losses of a straight-up rocket.
Obviously if it is flying straight and level before transition to rocket mode, immediately after the air densities and speeds are still such that it makes sense to stay aloft and indeed climb on wing lift. Whereas a rocket at that speed and altitude would be fighting gravity by sheer brute force of engine thrust; Skylon's rockets are accelerating it tangentially, directly toward the goal of orbital speed, while a rocket that scorns to use aerodynamic lift would be turned more than 45 degrees down, robbing it of effective delta-V toward orbit.
Also obviously this changes during the ascent--it cannot attempt to fly a constant-Q trajectory whereby aerodynamic lift is maintained because doing so would subject it to unbearable heat loads; the temperature would rise with the speed to five times what it is designed to sustain. But as the craft goes faster the centrifugal force that at orbital speed fully balances gravity is accruing, reducing the lift thrust required; meanwhile and more importantly, the mass to be lifted is falling as propellant (by mass, mostly oxygen of course) is being consumed rapidly. In terms of total thrust that needs to be diverted downward there is a narrow passage (in terms of residual thrust left to accelerate) at an intermediate speed, followed by continually improving circumstances as the fuel is depleted. The latter is true of vertical-launched rockets too of course; the 1000 km advantage (which knocks something like 25 percent off the all-up weight at the moment the rocket mode kicks in) comes from using aerodynamic lift while it is practically available.
So it is quite true that Skylon's wings are dead weight once the craft climbs high enough and sets course for orbit. But they buy a significant reduction in the total delta-V required (and of course serve again before the mission is complete, enabling gliding flight and horizontal landing on a standard runway). The upshot is, despite Skylon's prodigal use of hydrogen in the airbreathing phase, expending more than twice as much as is needed merely to fuel the jets (because that much total is needed to pre-cool the intake air) a very substantial reduction in the total propellant mass required; the point being not so much to save fuel as such, but to minimize the admittedly daunting structural requirement of volume enclosed.
The Flash Gordon look of Skylon is (assuming the thing works, as I am convinced it can) functional, relating to the fact that it is using the atmosphere instead of merely battling with it.
Given the difficulties and disappointments of scramjets as a mode of reaching near-orbital speeds, the only realistic flight to orbit and return design I am aware of is Skylon; and Skylon of course only proposes to use air as a propellant up to about 1600 meters/sec, just 1/5 of the way to full orbital speed. However, if we can believe REL's spreadsheets on the ascent profile and other projections they make, it leverages the atmosphere from liability to asset another way as well--by climbing to 35 km height and reaching that transition speed to rocket mode in horizontal winged flight, it apparently shaves something close to 1000 meters/sec off of the typical vertical-launch rocket mission delta-V; whereas a rocket-launched orbital vehicle requires a mission delta-V of about 10,000 meters/sec the Skylon proposal cuts the excess over mere orbital velocity of just under 8000 in half, to just 9000 total from ground to orbit. How? It seems clear to me that this is because gravity loss is transformed, via the wings, into somewhat more air friction loss than a rocket that punches straight up through the soup--but this air drag amounts to far less than the total combined gravity and air losses of a straight-up rocket.
Obviously if it is flying straight and level before transition to rocket mode, immediately after the air densities and speeds are still such that it makes sense to stay aloft and indeed climb on wing lift. Whereas a rocket at that speed and altitude would be fighting gravity by sheer brute force of engine thrust; Skylon's rockets are accelerating it tangentially, directly toward the goal of orbital speed, while a rocket that scorns to use aerodynamic lift would be turned more than 45 degrees down, robbing it of effective delta-V toward orbit.
Also obviously this changes during the ascent--it cannot attempt to fly a constant-Q trajectory whereby aerodynamic lift is maintained because doing so would subject it to unbearable heat loads; the temperature would rise with the speed to five times what it is designed to sustain. But as the craft goes faster the centrifugal force that at orbital speed fully balances gravity is accruing, reducing the lift thrust required; meanwhile and more importantly, the mass to be lifted is falling as propellant (by mass, mostly oxygen of course) is being consumed rapidly. In terms of total thrust that needs to be diverted downward there is a narrow passage (in terms of residual thrust left to accelerate) at an intermediate speed, followed by continually improving circumstances as the fuel is depleted. The latter is true of vertical-launched rockets too of course; the 1000 km advantage (which knocks something like 25 percent off the all-up weight at the moment the rocket mode kicks in) comes from using aerodynamic lift while it is practically available.
So it is quite true that Skylon's wings are dead weight once the craft climbs high enough and sets course for orbit. But they buy a significant reduction in the total delta-V required (and of course serve again before the mission is complete, enabling gliding flight and horizontal landing on a standard runway). The upshot is, despite Skylon's prodigal use of hydrogen in the airbreathing phase, expending more than twice as much as is needed merely to fuel the jets (because that much total is needed to pre-cool the intake air) a very substantial reduction in the total propellant mass required; the point being not so much to save fuel as such, but to minimize the admittedly daunting structural requirement of volume enclosed.
The Flash Gordon look of Skylon is (assuming the thing works, as I am convinced it can) functional, relating to the fact that it is using the atmosphere instead of merely battling with it.
Part III, Post 11: Commercial satellite communications from 1965 to the end of the Cold War
Good afternoon everyone! It's that time once again, and once again we're here with this week's installment of Eyes Turned Skyward. We've touched on several of the major commercial operators ITTL--ALS, Lockheed, EuropaSpace, and the Russians. This week, we're looking at the commercial market those launch vehicles serve--satellite communications--and how the growth of cheaper providers and past successes are leading people to speculate on new uses for the future. So, without further ado, let's get into position to beam down...
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part III: Post #11
To all practical purposes, the beginnings of commercial satellite communications can be dated quite precisely to the 6th of April, 1965, when the first satellite designed and built for Intelsat, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, was launched. While experiments had certainly taken place earlier, such as the well-known Telstar or the less-known Syncom, they had been just that, experiments, and not intended for real operational use. By contrast, Intelsat I--or Early Bird, as it was nicknamed--was designed to solve a real problem facing the eleven founding countries of what was at first known as the “Inter-Governmental Organization”: a serious lack of capacity in transoceanic communications. Before the development of the communications satellite, the only possible methods to transmit messages across oceans were the century-old technology of submarine cables or the more recently developed technology of radio, bypassing line-of-sight limitations by bouncing signals off of the ionosphere or the Moon.
While both were serviceable enough, both also had serious problems using the technology of the time. Building and laying submarine cables, especially lengthy submarine cables, is a slow, expensive business, it is difficult to maintain or upgrade a cable which may be miles underwater, and the copper-cored electrical wires then in use have a very limited transmission capacity; by way of example, by 1965 five different telephone cables had been run across the Atlantic Ocean, from stations in New Jersey and Newfoundland to France and the United Kingdom. Despite spending nearly a decade building the system, and despite many decades of experience with submarine telegraph cables, the five TAT lines could handle only about 500 simultaneous voice circuits, sharply limiting access to transatlantic telephony. Ionospheric or lunar relay radio had fewer problems with construction times, but suffered more from unpredictable day-to-day fluctuations in ionospheric conditions; one day one might be able to reliably connect halfway around the world, the next be hardly able to transmit even slightly farther than line-of-sight. Additionally, while cable capacities could theoretically be upgraded any amount by simply building more cables, and had been increasing on a per-cable basis (the third TAT had quadruple TAT-1’s capacity at laying), the amount of bandwidth available for radio transmissions was fixed by nature, and could never be expanded past a certain amount without having to deal with excessive noise.
From the point of view of the Intelsat nations, then, the capacities of the communications satellite were revolutionary. By itself, Early Bird was able to carry some 240 simultaneous voice circuits, increasing transatlantic telephone transmission capacity 50% in a single fell swoop, while by the end of 1967 three more second generation Intelsats--with the same capacity but twice the expected lifetime--had joined it in orbit, expanding Early Bird’s transatlantic service to transpacific and transindian routes as well. However, that was just the barest taste of what was to come, as the third-generation satellites, launched beginning in 1968, could carry 1,500 each--nearly four times as many as all transatlantic cables ever laid put together. Although in 1970 cable operators added a fifth cable, able to carry more than 800 voice circuits, Intelsat had already launched eight third-generation satellites, and in 1971 began launching a fourth generation--now able to carry 4,000 voice circuits and two television channels (while even the original Early Bird had been able to carry television signals, as shown by its usage in the broadcast Our World, doing so required tying up dedicated telephone circuits). By 1974, Intelsat’s network could carry up to 20,000 phone calls and five television channels simultaneously, an exponential increase on what had been possible only a few years before, and the beginning of the vast increase in international communications which would continue for the rest of the century.
While decried in later years as a bloated bureaucratic mire of a socialist organization, in truth Intelsat was responding quickly and with aplomb to what its customers wanted. It was just that its customers were not, at first, individual telephone users, or even large businesses, but instead entire national telephone networks: American Telephone and Telegraph, Post Office Telecommunications, Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones, and more. As government-regulated monopolies or nationalized firms, their concerns were less those of individual customers, and more those of maintaining a solid, cheap to maintain network--certainly attributes that would benefit their customers, but not ones those same customers directly cared about. It was not until the deployment of the fourth-generation Intelsats, with their television transmission capabilities, that Intelsat started to really address large businesses directly, and even then their customer base was numerically dominated by large nationalized European television networks, with many of the same issues of corporate interest. At the same time, the number of countries involved in the Intelsat consortium had nearly octupled from its founding by its tenth anniversary, vastly increasing the number of “stakeholders,” as a later age would put it, and increasing the difficulty of deploying new systems and upgrading new technology. While the first seven years of Intelsat’s existence had seen the development and then deployment of four distinct generations of satellite, each a significant improvement over its predecessor, the next nine saw only an intermediate IVA generation, providing 50% more voice circuit capacity per satellite as its fourth-generation predecessor, and then a fifth generation, which doubled simultaneous call capacity again. While not insignificant upgrades, they paled in comparison to the rapid rate of improvement offered earlier in the decade.
With Intelsat at once a government-mandated monopoly and stagnating in its own success, real interest--and money--turned during the 1970s to using the technology developed for the now “solved” problem of transoceanic communications to address more specialized communications issues. Shipping firms, oil and gas corporations, and other companies whose business depended on spending long period of time away from fixed communications links were interested in smaller, more mobile earth stations, able to be mounted on a ship or easily moved by a truck to wherever communications might be needed. Large countries, like Canada, Australia, or Brazil, with huge areas of thinly populated land where building conventional wired or microwave links would be prohibitively difficult were interested in using satellites to bring modern telecommunications to their most remote populations. Other countries, like Indonesia or India, with little existing telecommunications infrastructure, saw satellites as a cheap method of bypassing the time-consuming and expensive need to build conventional links. There was growing interest from firms involved in nationwide or international business in dedicated satellite links, offering potentially improved security against hostile eavesdropping or spying attempts and increased speed and reliability compared to conventional communications. RCA was beginning to develop the first broadcast satellite television system, heralding a wave of copycats to come in the next decade. And, of course, there was always the American government, and especially the military, always interested in new, faster, and more reliable methods of linking together their ever-growing systems of airplanes, tanks, headquarters, satellites, and more into a single network.
All this activity, even if it was mostly on behalf of government customers, drove rapid growth in the satellite business. Major satellite construction firms, like Hughes, General Motors, Ford, and General Electric expanded their satellite production lines to accommodate rapidly growing demand, while launch vehicle manufacturers like McDonnell Douglas and Martin Marietta saw increased demand for their products. And, of course, a variety of new firms were founded to try to capitalize on this expanding business, both in building satellites and in providing satellite services. While attempts to break into the launch vehicle and satellite construction businesses were mostly unsuccessful, with the notable exception of American Launch Services, Inc. (which did not even attempt to address the communications business at the time), attempts to build new businesses addressing these new needs with new customers were far more rewarding. In the United States, especially, the chinks opening in AT&T’s long-held monopoly on long-distance communications opened a wealth of business opportunities for those cunning enough to seize them. By the mid-1980s, even Intelsat found itself suddenly faced with competition in the international market from American firms aiming at the most lucrative of satellite communication markets, while it itself had slowly taken aim at many of these new markets, offering specialized domestic and business services to new customers.
The rapid churn and bustle of the industry through the decade raised hopes that the last twenty five years of rapid growth in the business could continue virtually indefinitely. Although threatened by the recent deployment of high-capacity fiber optic links on domestic and international routes, which promised to erode the traditionally huge cost per unit capacity advantage satellites had over conventional links, satellite communications was still far cheaper to roll out nationwide than any cable network, and seemed to have great promise in broadcasting, as with NBC Satellite and its copycats, and in cheaply connecting burgeoning markets in developing countries. More than this, though, the revival of an idea from nearly the dawn of the space age promised a vast new market to manufacturers and launchers alike, totalling as many as several hundred satellites over the next several decades.
While the first serious proposal for satellite communication, by Clarke in the 1940s, was based on geostationary platforms, by the time came in the early 1960s to actually begin building such a network it faced competition from a newer AT&T proposal. Rather than large satellites in geostationary orbit, AT&T argued, a system of satellites based in low Earth orbit--like Telstar, a prototype funded and sponsored by AT&T--ought to be used for global satellite communications. While Telstar proved successful enough, AT&T’s monopoly position and the increased difficulty of coordinating and communicating with a system of rapidly-moving low Earth orbit satellites rather than fixed geostationary satellites, led their proposal to be bypassed in favor of Intelsat’s geostationary network, and the idea fell into dormancy. Until the late 1980s, the idea largely languished, with new entrants into the business focusing instead on geostationary satellites, which could provide similar coverage at a much smaller overall cost, or, for some users at high latitudes, Molniya orbits to provide improved coverage.
These advantages, though, came at a cost; more than twenty thousand miles from the Earth, and using relatively low-frequency radio bands, geostationary satellites required large antennas, several meters in diameter, to provide a two-way connection to earth stations. Although of little consequence for network backbone links, building-mounted antennas, or even ship- and aircraft-mounted stations, such a setup was obviously impractical for personal or small vehicle use. If, however, a network of low Earth orbit satellites--a constellation, in industry parlance--was built, with space terminals only a few hundred miles away from earth stations, a much smaller earth station could be built. So small, in fact, that it looked like a reasonable amount of technological development, well within the budget of major electronics and telecommunications firms, could build a mobile telephone handset that would actually be a very small satellite earth station. In one fell swoop, providers could offer global mobile coverage without the massive investments in fixed infrastructure that would be necessary with a conventional system, potentially mushrooming their customer base and profits. More, as was soon realized, if such a system was developed, it would offer another advantage: shorter latency. Ever since satellites had been introduced into the international communications market, customers had noticed irritating lag unavoidably introduced by the distance of the satellites from the Earth when they made calls routed over them. Satellites in low Earth orbit, although necessarily more sophisticated and greater in number, would have virtually no lag compared to those in geostationary orbit, and only slightly more than conventional ground-based links. While this would merely improve the quality of voice service, it could be critical to new and quickly growing telecommunications services, perhaps even not-yet invented ones, offering another market where an entrant could grow big, and one with little competition from any rival satellite firms.
Together, it seemed clear that the next big thing in satellite communications--indeed, in the entire field of telecommunications--would be building these constellations. Electronic giant Motorola was already investing heavily in its own in-house satellite telephone project, while a plethora of smaller firms and investors were following close behind. This momentum, in turn, was beginning to trickle down to the launch vehicle business, where the ongoing recession and end of the Cold War were winnowing the field of competitors, leaving only the strongest standing but limiting capacity. With a new age of brilliance on the horizon, though, investors soon forgot the last round of failures and once again began to look skyward.
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part III: Post #11
To all practical purposes, the beginnings of commercial satellite communications can be dated quite precisely to the 6th of April, 1965, when the first satellite designed and built for Intelsat, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, was launched. While experiments had certainly taken place earlier, such as the well-known Telstar or the less-known Syncom, they had been just that, experiments, and not intended for real operational use. By contrast, Intelsat I--or Early Bird, as it was nicknamed--was designed to solve a real problem facing the eleven founding countries of what was at first known as the “Inter-Governmental Organization”: a serious lack of capacity in transoceanic communications. Before the development of the communications satellite, the only possible methods to transmit messages across oceans were the century-old technology of submarine cables or the more recently developed technology of radio, bypassing line-of-sight limitations by bouncing signals off of the ionosphere or the Moon.
While both were serviceable enough, both also had serious problems using the technology of the time. Building and laying submarine cables, especially lengthy submarine cables, is a slow, expensive business, it is difficult to maintain or upgrade a cable which may be miles underwater, and the copper-cored electrical wires then in use have a very limited transmission capacity; by way of example, by 1965 five different telephone cables had been run across the Atlantic Ocean, from stations in New Jersey and Newfoundland to France and the United Kingdom. Despite spending nearly a decade building the system, and despite many decades of experience with submarine telegraph cables, the five TAT lines could handle only about 500 simultaneous voice circuits, sharply limiting access to transatlantic telephony. Ionospheric or lunar relay radio had fewer problems with construction times, but suffered more from unpredictable day-to-day fluctuations in ionospheric conditions; one day one might be able to reliably connect halfway around the world, the next be hardly able to transmit even slightly farther than line-of-sight. Additionally, while cable capacities could theoretically be upgraded any amount by simply building more cables, and had been increasing on a per-cable basis (the third TAT had quadruple TAT-1’s capacity at laying), the amount of bandwidth available for radio transmissions was fixed by nature, and could never be expanded past a certain amount without having to deal with excessive noise.
From the point of view of the Intelsat nations, then, the capacities of the communications satellite were revolutionary. By itself, Early Bird was able to carry some 240 simultaneous voice circuits, increasing transatlantic telephone transmission capacity 50% in a single fell swoop, while by the end of 1967 three more second generation Intelsats--with the same capacity but twice the expected lifetime--had joined it in orbit, expanding Early Bird’s transatlantic service to transpacific and transindian routes as well. However, that was just the barest taste of what was to come, as the third-generation satellites, launched beginning in 1968, could carry 1,500 each--nearly four times as many as all transatlantic cables ever laid put together. Although in 1970 cable operators added a fifth cable, able to carry more than 800 voice circuits, Intelsat had already launched eight third-generation satellites, and in 1971 began launching a fourth generation--now able to carry 4,000 voice circuits and two television channels (while even the original Early Bird had been able to carry television signals, as shown by its usage in the broadcast Our World, doing so required tying up dedicated telephone circuits). By 1974, Intelsat’s network could carry up to 20,000 phone calls and five television channels simultaneously, an exponential increase on what had been possible only a few years before, and the beginning of the vast increase in international communications which would continue for the rest of the century.
While decried in later years as a bloated bureaucratic mire of a socialist organization, in truth Intelsat was responding quickly and with aplomb to what its customers wanted. It was just that its customers were not, at first, individual telephone users, or even large businesses, but instead entire national telephone networks: American Telephone and Telegraph, Post Office Telecommunications, Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones, and more. As government-regulated monopolies or nationalized firms, their concerns were less those of individual customers, and more those of maintaining a solid, cheap to maintain network--certainly attributes that would benefit their customers, but not ones those same customers directly cared about. It was not until the deployment of the fourth-generation Intelsats, with their television transmission capabilities, that Intelsat started to really address large businesses directly, and even then their customer base was numerically dominated by large nationalized European television networks, with many of the same issues of corporate interest. At the same time, the number of countries involved in the Intelsat consortium had nearly octupled from its founding by its tenth anniversary, vastly increasing the number of “stakeholders,” as a later age would put it, and increasing the difficulty of deploying new systems and upgrading new technology. While the first seven years of Intelsat’s existence had seen the development and then deployment of four distinct generations of satellite, each a significant improvement over its predecessor, the next nine saw only an intermediate IVA generation, providing 50% more voice circuit capacity per satellite as its fourth-generation predecessor, and then a fifth generation, which doubled simultaneous call capacity again. While not insignificant upgrades, they paled in comparison to the rapid rate of improvement offered earlier in the decade.
With Intelsat at once a government-mandated monopoly and stagnating in its own success, real interest--and money--turned during the 1970s to using the technology developed for the now “solved” problem of transoceanic communications to address more specialized communications issues. Shipping firms, oil and gas corporations, and other companies whose business depended on spending long period of time away from fixed communications links were interested in smaller, more mobile earth stations, able to be mounted on a ship or easily moved by a truck to wherever communications might be needed. Large countries, like Canada, Australia, or Brazil, with huge areas of thinly populated land where building conventional wired or microwave links would be prohibitively difficult were interested in using satellites to bring modern telecommunications to their most remote populations. Other countries, like Indonesia or India, with little existing telecommunications infrastructure, saw satellites as a cheap method of bypassing the time-consuming and expensive need to build conventional links. There was growing interest from firms involved in nationwide or international business in dedicated satellite links, offering potentially improved security against hostile eavesdropping or spying attempts and increased speed and reliability compared to conventional communications. RCA was beginning to develop the first broadcast satellite television system, heralding a wave of copycats to come in the next decade. And, of course, there was always the American government, and especially the military, always interested in new, faster, and more reliable methods of linking together their ever-growing systems of airplanes, tanks, headquarters, satellites, and more into a single network.
All this activity, even if it was mostly on behalf of government customers, drove rapid growth in the satellite business. Major satellite construction firms, like Hughes, General Motors, Ford, and General Electric expanded their satellite production lines to accommodate rapidly growing demand, while launch vehicle manufacturers like McDonnell Douglas and Martin Marietta saw increased demand for their products. And, of course, a variety of new firms were founded to try to capitalize on this expanding business, both in building satellites and in providing satellite services. While attempts to break into the launch vehicle and satellite construction businesses were mostly unsuccessful, with the notable exception of American Launch Services, Inc. (which did not even attempt to address the communications business at the time), attempts to build new businesses addressing these new needs with new customers were far more rewarding. In the United States, especially, the chinks opening in AT&T’s long-held monopoly on long-distance communications opened a wealth of business opportunities for those cunning enough to seize them. By the mid-1980s, even Intelsat found itself suddenly faced with competition in the international market from American firms aiming at the most lucrative of satellite communication markets, while it itself had slowly taken aim at many of these new markets, offering specialized domestic and business services to new customers.
The rapid churn and bustle of the industry through the decade raised hopes that the last twenty five years of rapid growth in the business could continue virtually indefinitely. Although threatened by the recent deployment of high-capacity fiber optic links on domestic and international routes, which promised to erode the traditionally huge cost per unit capacity advantage satellites had over conventional links, satellite communications was still far cheaper to roll out nationwide than any cable network, and seemed to have great promise in broadcasting, as with NBC Satellite and its copycats, and in cheaply connecting burgeoning markets in developing countries. More than this, though, the revival of an idea from nearly the dawn of the space age promised a vast new market to manufacturers and launchers alike, totalling as many as several hundred satellites over the next several decades.
While the first serious proposal for satellite communication, by Clarke in the 1940s, was based on geostationary platforms, by the time came in the early 1960s to actually begin building such a network it faced competition from a newer AT&T proposal. Rather than large satellites in geostationary orbit, AT&T argued, a system of satellites based in low Earth orbit--like Telstar, a prototype funded and sponsored by AT&T--ought to be used for global satellite communications. While Telstar proved successful enough, AT&T’s monopoly position and the increased difficulty of coordinating and communicating with a system of rapidly-moving low Earth orbit satellites rather than fixed geostationary satellites, led their proposal to be bypassed in favor of Intelsat’s geostationary network, and the idea fell into dormancy. Until the late 1980s, the idea largely languished, with new entrants into the business focusing instead on geostationary satellites, which could provide similar coverage at a much smaller overall cost, or, for some users at high latitudes, Molniya orbits to provide improved coverage.
These advantages, though, came at a cost; more than twenty thousand miles from the Earth, and using relatively low-frequency radio bands, geostationary satellites required large antennas, several meters in diameter, to provide a two-way connection to earth stations. Although of little consequence for network backbone links, building-mounted antennas, or even ship- and aircraft-mounted stations, such a setup was obviously impractical for personal or small vehicle use. If, however, a network of low Earth orbit satellites--a constellation, in industry parlance--was built, with space terminals only a few hundred miles away from earth stations, a much smaller earth station could be built. So small, in fact, that it looked like a reasonable amount of technological development, well within the budget of major electronics and telecommunications firms, could build a mobile telephone handset that would actually be a very small satellite earth station. In one fell swoop, providers could offer global mobile coverage without the massive investments in fixed infrastructure that would be necessary with a conventional system, potentially mushrooming their customer base and profits. More, as was soon realized, if such a system was developed, it would offer another advantage: shorter latency. Ever since satellites had been introduced into the international communications market, customers had noticed irritating lag unavoidably introduced by the distance of the satellites from the Earth when they made calls routed over them. Satellites in low Earth orbit, although necessarily more sophisticated and greater in number, would have virtually no lag compared to those in geostationary orbit, and only slightly more than conventional ground-based links. While this would merely improve the quality of voice service, it could be critical to new and quickly growing telecommunications services, perhaps even not-yet invented ones, offering another market where an entrant could grow big, and one with little competition from any rival satellite firms.
Together, it seemed clear that the next big thing in satellite communications--indeed, in the entire field of telecommunications--would be building these constellations. Electronic giant Motorola was already investing heavily in its own in-house satellite telephone project, while a plethora of smaller firms and investors were following close behind. This momentum, in turn, was beginning to trickle down to the launch vehicle business, where the ongoing recession and end of the Cold War were winnowing the field of competitors, leaving only the strongest standing but limiting capacity. With a new age of brilliance on the horizon, though, investors soon forgot the last round of failures and once again began to look skyward.
Outstanding work!
The best part of this TL is the incredible detail. So kudos to you e of pi and collaborators.
The best part of this TL is the incredible detail. So kudos to you e of pi and collaborators.
Thank you very much for the kind words, and I know this timeline wouldn't be what it is without our collaborators; Brainbin, Nionshead and now Michel all bring so much to the table in terms of fleshing this world out. However, I want to take a moment to draw your attention to Workable Goblin, the co-writer of this, especially since this is one of his posts. I may get the reflected glory of posting all his amazing work and handling a lot of the thread comments, but I want to make sure he get due credit for the astounding work he puts in behind the scenes on all of his writing for this TL.Outstanding work!
The best part of this TL is the incredible detail. So kudos to you e of pi and collaborators.
Then I'd have to recommend that you remember to point out who wrote each post then, so we all know who did what part.
Looks like the Commercial Satellite sector is about to get a brand new kick to it. IIRC, there was an attempt IOTL to build such a network of LEO Communication Satellites for Satellite Phone use - late 90's-early 00's AFAIK - which failed due to a lack of customers. Seems to me like there's gonna be a bigger market here which should easily allow it to succeed commercially.