Information about these and other materials is available to teachers from local Telephone Company business offices Contents Introduction 8 part 1: Satellite Communications 10 Ronald M. Foster, Jr., Editor part 2: Satellite Communications Case Histories 38 1. Franz T. Geyling How Do We Calculate a Satellite’s Orbit? 41 2. Peter Hrycak What Color Should a Satellite Be? 48 3. Jeofry S. Courtney-pratt How Can We Make Optical Measurements on a Satellite? 53 4. Kenneth D. Smith How Do We Keep Solar Cell Power Plants Working in Space? 62 5. Peter D. Bricker Would Time Delay Be a Problem in Using a Synchronous Satellite? 70 6. E. Jared Reid How Can We Repair an Orbiting Satellite? 78 Suggested Reading 87 Introduction Despite the title, this is not a physics textbook, and it will tell you only part of the fascinating story of satellite communications. However, we have tried to tell this story in a rather special way. Part I explains why we are so interested in communicating by means of man-made satellites, describes the important events in the progress of satellite communications (with special emphasis on Project Telstar), and points out some of the very knotty problems that had to be solved. Then, in Part II, we pick out six typical satellite communications problems and go into them more deeply. These case histories are examples of the things scientists and engineers are constantly faced with. To narrate them we have called on six experts—Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers and scientists who actually have been working on the problems. The second half of our book is taken up by their accounts of their own personal experiences. We hope that reading them will give you an insight into what it is really like to be a scientist or engineer working in a laboratory on an important new venture into the future. We hope you will see that what they do is not all excitement and glamour. It involves hard work, ingenious thinking, and plugging away at tough problems. But this is what scientists and engineers enjoy—along with the excitement and glamour, of course. Only a part of what our authors talk about can strictly be called “physics”—it is also engineering, chemistry, mathematics, and even psychology. But almost all their work _is_ based—when you get down to fundamentals—on basic principles of classical physics taught in high school.