What The Tech?! Satellite Linking

The development of Transponder carrying Satellites changed the way we consumed media.

While we’ve all heard of the Space Race, which included the Mercury and Apollo projects the importance of the space race for Humanity is often quite misunderstood. The successful carrying of man into space required new materials, mathematics, design and communication methods to go with the all new Saturn V rocket which was scheduled to carry man to the moon. One of the most powerful man made objects, the Saturn V was an engineering marvel in it’s own right, but today we’ll be looking at where the space race began, with man made satellites orbiting the earth.

While few readers are older enough to recall the Space Race, it’s pretty commonly known that it eventuated in what was known as the Sputnik crisis, as the USSR’s Sputnik became the first man made satellite to successfully orbit the earth. This leap forward marked one of the great successes of the space race and proved the viability of receiving a simple signal from space

Sputnik: The First Step

Launched on October 4th, 1957 Sputnik was a polished sphere with two pairs of transmitting antennas extending from the body. Relatively simplistic in design, Sputnik drew it’s power from a small Silver/Zinc Battery bank. This gave an estimated 2 weeks of battery power for it’s…