Satellites, 50 Years On
Fifty years ago yesterday, the rather-inauspicious metal ball pictured above changed history and launched the space age — and the satellite industry.
If you’re still guessing, that’s Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to be put into geocentric orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957.
Scott LaFee at the Union Tribune observes that Sputnik launched an idea that’s still sky high:
By current standards, it was crude: a 184-pound, basketball-sized sphere that contained only a radio transmitter, batteries and a thermometer. In orbit, the only thing Sputnik, which means “traveler” in Russian, did as it whirled around the world, one revolution every 98 minutes, was beep.
But that signal had a singular strength. It heralded a new era….
At last count… there were at least 863 active satellites, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, each circling or hovering somewhere between 49 and 22,356 miles above the Earth’s surface.
Unlike Sputnik, these modern working satellites are marvels of technology and purpose. Two-thirds are involved in communications, some military, others civilian, handling everything from phone calls to television to the Internet….
In 1998, the satellite industry boasted revenues of about $38 billion, according to a Merrill Lynch study. Projected revenue for 2008 was $171 billion. Advocates say the sky’s the limit.
A concerned scientist wonders if a new new era is upon us, however:
Bruce Dorminey describes how the International Space Station (ISS) has been a successful collaboration between the US, Europe and the Soviet Union and is giving us insights into how the human body reacts to long periods in orbit.
But the ISS has swallowed such vast sums of money (NASA alone has contributed $100m) that many have questioned if the scientific pay-back from the 200 or so experiments carried out on the station in low-gravity conditions have been worthwhile.
Another concern, as Laura Grego from the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, is the potential weaponization of space. Satellites are sitting ducks for enemy nations, who might find it tempting to use a missile to knock out, say, a crucial military spy satellite.
Moreover, when China destroyed an ageing weather satellite earlier this year in a test of its nascent anti-satellite weapon system, the explosion created some 2500 new trackable pieces of "space junk", ranging from spent rocket stages and disused satellites to smaller items like astronauts’ rubbish bags, and immediately increased the chances of a low-Earth-orbiting satellite colliding with another object by up to 30%. As Edwin Cartlidge reports, many observers think that more needs to be done to persuade nations to prevent further space junk being created in the first place.
For a preview of what may lie in the future, check out the day the heavens opened up.
