THE TELSTAR STORY

Among his catalogue of 1960s chart toppers were "Johnny Remember Me" ( for John Leyton, also a star of such films as "The Great Escape" and "Every Day’s A Holiday" ), "Have I the right to hold you?" ( for The Honeycombs - a band unusual in having a girl drummer ) and "Just like Eddie" ( for Heinz Burt ). Probably his best known production however was "Telstar" for The Tornados - the first British instrumental record to hit number one in both Britain and the USA.

Joe Meek was definitely one of a kind, especially in his approach to recording electronic music – hence the affinity he felt with the Telstar communications satellite which inspired him. Even today "Telstar" remains a happy, feelgood tune and – like the similar contemporary electric sound of The Shadows - captures the mood of the era when people thought that the World was just getting better all the time with the march of technological progress.

After the rationing and deprivation of the War years too, the 1950s and 60s represented an explosion of new possibilities, colour and music. Teenagers, for example, were no longer little copies of their parents but had their own world of formica-tabled coffee bars with jukeboxes playing rock ‘n’ roll. And although the USA and USSR seemed ever more ready to unleash nuclear war on each other, Britain celebrated the Coronation of a new Queen, independent television and the conquest of both the summit of Mount Everest and the sub four minute mile.

Although he also foresaw these being manned, his idea of placing the stations in geosynchronous orbit ( around 22 000 miles up where the artificial moons would make one orbit every 24 hours – in effect standing still over one spot on the Earth ) was the foundation of modern communication satellite practice. In fact if you are reading this on the Internet outside Britain you may well have a communication satellite to thank! Obviously turning ideas into practice is not always easy, but Telstar paved the way with a little help from an earlier satellite named Echo.

Echo 1

Many successful link ups were made across the World before leakage of gas caused it to deform and lose its reflecting power. Echo was also a highly visible object in the night sky before it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on 24 April 1968.

A second aluminiumised Mylar balloon – Echo 2 – was launched on 25 January 1964. This was 134’ across, made of thicker material, and permitted the first collaborative communication satellite programme between Britain and the USSR when signals were bounced from Jodrell Bank – founded by Gloucestershire man Sir Bernard Lovell - to Russia. Previously the Cheshire based radio telescope had received signals from Holmdel, New Jersey courtesy of Echo 1, despite its low orbital height of between 800 and 1 000 miles.

Telstar 1

After a busy life at an orbit of between 593 to 3 503 miles, Telstar became unserviceable during February 1963. A more reliable Telstar 2 was launched on 7 May 1963 to a higher orbit of 604 to 6 713 miles and continued working until May 1965.

However, because the Delta rockets used to launch Telstars 1 and 2 were not powerful enough to put their payloads into geosynchronous orbits, the satellites rose and set like the Moon. Telstar would be visible from Britain for 40 minutes and then invisible again for the next two and a half hours – an awkward phenomenon if a televised sporting event went into extra time.

Similarly, the ground receiver would have to track a beach ball sized object travelling at 14 000 mph 2 000 miles away to pick up the relatively weak satellite signal. As a result, just before Telstar was launched, the General Post Office ( as it then was ) opened a new ground station at Goonhilly on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall. Not only was this the southernmost point in Great Britain – maximising the visibility of Telstar – but because the granite bedrock made a super stable base for the first open satellite dish in the World.

Unlike smaller dishes – such as the Distant Early Warning examples at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire which sheltered under plastic domes - Goonhilly’s dish was 30 metres across, weighed 1 180 tons but could turn a complete circle on railway tracks in three minutes while also moving from horizontal to vertical. Known as Arthur, it mainly stays still nowadays as satellites are truly geostationary, but despite the advent of Sky dishes on many household roofs the big white Cornish structure still handles a vast amount of international data. Not bad considering it was designed in the 1950s to carry one TV signal or 600 phone calls. But not both at the same time!

This diagram shows three Intelsats ( International Television Satellites ) in equatorial geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans while the Soviet Molniya 1A satellite travels at 65 degrees to the equator in an elliptical orbit which maximises its visibility to ground stations in the former Communist bloc.

From Early Bird's geosynchronous orbit the whole of the Earth is visible as opposed to just the curvature experienced by earlier Echo and Telstar satellites

In 2006, satellites in geosynchronous orbit allow road vehicles, aircraft and shipping to position themselves to within a few metres of their required locations, news reports and sporting events to be beamed all around the planet, and international mobile telephone calls.

On the downside however, placing 9 000 satellites of all kinds around the Earth has generated over 100 000 pieces of space debris. This includes the junk that wrecked the French satellite Cerise and the fleck of paint travelling at 17 500 mph which nearly punched a hole through a Space Shuttle windscreen. Several thousand kilograms of space junk also falls on land each year.

For many years one of the few Gloucestershire connections remaining with Meek’s sometimes erratic genius was in the name of Telstar Cruisers Ltd, hirers of self drive power boats, based at Riverside Walk Back of Avon in Tewkesbury