Once humans managed to put artificial satellites into orbit, the next natural question was,

what can we do with this?

One of the first applications of satellites, and still one of the biggest uses today, has been for communications.

Using satellites for communications requires cutting-edge technologies in spaceflight, solar power, radio engineering, and computers.

Learn more about satellite communications, its history, and how it works, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. The origin of satellite communications actually goes back to before the first satellite was put into orbit.

British science fiction author Arthur C. Clark had been a proponent of the idea of space travel since the 1930s.

In 1945, he wrote an article for Wireless World magazine titled,

Extraterrestrial Relays, Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?

In this article, he proposed the idea that if a satellite were to be put into the correct orbit,

the time it would take to orbit the Earth would be precisely the same as the amount of time

it took the Earth to rotate on its axis.

The end result would be a satellite that would stay in one spot above the Earth, just as if it were hung

from the ceiling.

It's known as geosynchronous orbit.

The location of this orbit lies 35,76 kilometers or 22,236 miles above the equator.

A satellite in such a spot could receive a radio signal from anywhere on Earth that it could see

and send a radio signal to anywhere on Earth that it could see.

It was this potential for satellite communications that was one of the biggest driving forces behind the very early space race.

The first thing that could even be called a communication satellite was the SCORE satellite, launched in December 1958.

And SCORE stood for signal communications by orbiting relay equipment.

All it really was was a tape recorder that could receive record and transmit voice messages.

It was by far the largest object ever put into orbit at this time as it was 80 feet or 24 meters long,

...