Arthur C. Clarke did not invent the geostationary orbit. What he did, in a 1945 article for Wireless World, was propose putting a set of satellites there to form a communications network spanning the globe. The first satellite reached that orbit in 1964, 19 years after his paper.
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What makes the orbit special?
A satellite about 35,786 km above the equator travels at a speed that matches the Earth turning beneath it, so it hangs over the same spot. To someone on the ground it looks fixed. Antennas can then point at it and stay put, with no need to track it across the sky. The BBC notes that each such satellite’s footprint covers 40% of the globe.
Clarke’s idea rested on earlier work. Herman Potocnik and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had both written about geostationary orbits before him.
Where the idea came from
In 1945 Clarke was an RAF electronics officer and a member of the British Interplanetary Society. His article, “Extra-terrestrial Relays”, argued that such satellites would make ideal relays for telecommunications. NASA’s history adds that he pictured them as crewed stations handing out television programmes.
Late in life, Clarke told IEEE Spectrum he could not name the exact spark. He guessed it was Phobos, the Martian moon, which he believed kept a stationary orbit. He had talked the idea over with friends in the society, he said, but got little response, so it was his own work.
Why the long wait?
According to NASA historian David J. Whalen, the article seems to have had little lasting effect at first, even after Clarke retold it in The Exploration of Space. NASA’s history names John R. Pierce of Bell Telephone Laboratories as perhaps the first to weigh the options with care. He did so in a 1954 speech and a 1955 article. Pierce reckoned a satellite could carry about 1,000 telephone calls at once, against 36 for the first transatlantic cable.
Clarke and Pierce were friends, and they were in touch through the 1950s. Pierce was instrumental in developing Echo I and Telstar.
The satellites that finally made it work
By mid-1961 NASA had hired Hughes Aircraft to build SYNCOM, a satellite for the 24-hour orbit about 20,000 miles up. Syncom 3 reached geostationary orbit over the Pacific in 1964 and relayed the Tokyo Olympics to the US, the first TV link across that ocean. On April 6, 1965, COMSAT launched Early Bird from Cape Canaveral, and global satellite communication began.
Clarke never tried to patent any of it. Asked why, he told IEEE Spectrum that a patent is really a licence to be sued.
