75-07-A3
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Satellites[edit]
Transcript[edit]What goes up doesn't necessarily have to come down. I'll be right back. Bolivia and Oman have just joined an international organization that's one United Nations that actually works. It's INTELSAT the International communications satellite consortium that's beaming telephone calls and television around the globe. The satellites are shrinking distances at an ever increasing rate. They carry the Moscow-Washington Hotline. They carry educational programs into Brazilian jungles. They flash the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight and Princess Anne's wedding to remote islands and mountaintops thousands of miles apart at the same moment and the whole phenomenon is only 10 years old. Since the first working satellite went into orbit a decade ago, worldwide traffic has been growing at the rate of 20 percent a year. Today 89 nations belong to INTELSAT. We can thank American technology and ingenuity for most of these advances. Most of the traffic is carried today on seven American-made satellites operated for INTELSAT by COMSAT, the company that is partly owned by stock market investors and partly by the U.S. government. In all there are a dozen or so satellites orbiting around the Earth right now. Satellite technology has advanced with such speed that today there are 103 giant antenna scattered around the globe to receive messages beamed from the satellites. That's double the number just five years ago. The numbers are about to shoot up again. Algeria is building its own antenna network of 14 to crisscross its deserts. Indonesia's considering linking its two thousand islands with a network of sixty antennae. Man's quest for new frontiers to conquer seems to have spurred the technological boom in satellite communications. The result has been fast, reliable, economical communications within reach of more and more nations. The first satellite Earth station was built in Maine just a dozen years ago. It cost fifteen million dollars. Today the largest, most advanced antenna costs only two million, little more than a tenth of the original price tag. Orbiting some 22,000 miles up in the sky the satellites are virtually trouble-free. Not being affected by weather since there isn't any where they operate, this contrasts sharply with the older carriers of international communications, the undersea cables. They were expensive and in need of constant maintenance. The satellites on the other hand are living beyond their designers own expectations. The first one was supposed to operate for only a year and a half. Today satellites have a life expectancy of seven years or more. Their efficiency has increased too. The first one could handle 240 telephone conversations at one time. A later model jumped to four thousand circuits and a new one scheduled for launching this year will nearly double that. One benefit of this is a dramatic drop in the cost of trans-oceanic telephone calls. A call to London from New York cost $12.25 years ago. Today the same call costs $5.40 cents. The satellite industry is spurred on not only for the satisfaction of beaming education and better communication into underdeveloped parts of the world but also by a powerful incentive: making money. Last year COMSAT's profits were more than 36 million dollars, up 45 percent from the previous year. So it's true after all, if you build a better mousetrap the world will be the path to your door. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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