Space’s Lead Balloon: Echo I

In 1965, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke published Voices from the Sky which contained a tongue and cheek chapter titled “A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time.”[1] In the chapter, Clarke reminisces about being a board radar operator in the British Royal Air Force during WWII. In his spare time, Clarke wrote a paper about using space-based stations to relay communication messages all over the globe. Clarke sold the article to Wireless World for $40 in 1945.[2] Of course, satellite communication took off and created a billion-dollar industry. Clarke is fully aware he cannot take credit for creating the satcom industry, but sometimes Clarke likes “to imagine what I could do with even a minute royalty,” maybe buy a “space yacht.”[3]

The satcom revolution Clarke envisioned in 1945 got a kickstart when – on October 4, 1957 – the Soviet Union surprised the world by launching Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth. While Sputnik shocked most of the Western world, the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, seemed undismayed by the development. Ike knew much that the general public did not. First, Sputnik – while an impressive technological development – possessed little to no military threat to the United States. Second, the US was actively working on its own rockets and not nearly as far behind as many fearmongers claimed. Third, the United State’s military strength still dwarfed the Soviet’s. Much of the information Eisenhower knew came from covert US actions, such as the U2 spy-plane program, and was therefore classified. Since Ike was unable to tell the American people what he knew, his opponents, such as Democratic Senators John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, could claim there was a “missile gap” between the US and USSR.[4] The fear Sputnik generated, along with the claims of a missile gap, led to America diving into a space race with the Soviets. While the space race is best known for the Apollo Program which landed the first men on the Moon, there were many side projects and programs associated with space, and the race to win space influenced many institutions, not least of which was the communications industry.

While Eisenhower himself was unconcerned about the growing space race, saying it was “a contest which [I] had never considered a contest,” his administration realized the American public were concerned and space was not something they could ignore.[5] Eisenhower’s confidents in America’s capability to answer the Soviets in space, was further questioned when, on December 6, 1957, the Vanguard Test Vehicle 3 (TV3) rose about 4 feet into the air, lost thrust, and fell back onto the pad in a huge fireball explosion. This led to the press dubbing Vanguard as “Flopnik” or “Kaputnik.”[6] With the failure of the VT3 launch and triumph of the Soviet Union’s Sputniks I and II, the Eisenhower administration realized they needed a win in space for the United States.

America answered the Soviets on January 31, 1958, with Explorer I, America’s first successful satellite. But merely answering the Soviets was not good enough for a country which wanted to take the lead in the space race. For the three months Sputnik I orbited, millions of Americans could see it in the night sky. US government officials desired a satellite that could be unmistaken seen as it orbited over the Soviet Union. Project Echo fit the bill perfectly.[7]

The Echo I team stand in front of their balloon. “Echo-1,” NASA, accessed January 11, 2022, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Echo-1.jpg.

Project Echo, the brainchild of aeronautical engineer William J. O'Sullivan, was a 100-foot-diameter metallic balloon. O'Sullivan originally conceived of Echo as a means of testing drag and other effects in Earth’s upper atmosphere. It was a balloon because deflated it could fit into the small payloads of the rockets. Once in the upper atmosphere, it could be inflated to a large size, which allowed ground-based stations to easily track it. Made from new Mylar-plastic, the balloon could withstand the extreme cold temperatures of the night side of Earth. The Mylar was then coated in aluminum. The aluminum served to reflect sunlight on the day side of the orbit and keep the balloon from overheating. The metal coating also served to make the satellite very reflective. The reflectivity would also aid in making the satellite easier to track, serve as a means for bouncing signals off for communication, and make the balloon highly visible to the naked eye. Placing a giant reflective balloon into low Earth orbit sounded a little crazy. Even O'Sullivan half-jokingly said, “It will probably go over like a lead balloon!”[8]

But O'Sullivan’s “lead balloon” had enough selling points for the US government to fund it.

While the concept of launching a balloon into space was simple enough, O'Sullivan’s team needed to solve many technical issues to make it possible. They needed to figure out how to fold the balloon so it would fit into the rocket and then inflate without tearing. Fitting the 100-foot-diameter balloon into the upper stage of a Thor-Delta rocket was, in the words of historian James Hansen, “was somewhat like folding a large Rembrandt canvas into a tiny square and taking it home from an art sale in one’s wallet.”[9] After much trial and error, and after engineer Ed Kilgore found inspiration from his wife’s folding rain hat, the team successfully found a way to fold the balloon.[10] Another major engineering challenge was how to inflate the balloon in space. Not any easy problem as any gas released in the vacuum of space would expand so violently it risked tearing the balloon. The solution was to use benzoic acid. Benzoic acid is solid material that, in the vacuum of space, undergoes sublimation, or the transformation from a solid state directly to a vapor. In the balloon, its conversion to a gas is limited by the rate at which it absorbs heat from the sun. Therefore, it would “gas off” slowly, not instantaneously.[11] The team did not solve these technical problems overnight. It required much testing, much failure, and much perseverance.

Their perseverance paid off. On August 12, 1960, Echo I successfully launched on a Thor-Delta rocket. A few minutes after launch, the balloon inflated. The new satellite, or “satelloon” as it was fondly dubbed, was used to relay a pre-recorded message from President Eisenhower from NASA’s Goldstone facility in California across the country to Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey.

This is President Eisenhower speaking… This is one more significant step in the United States’ program of space research and exploration being carried forward for peaceful purposes. The satellite balloon, which has reflected these words, may be used freely by any nation for similar experiments in its own interest.[12]

Echo II. The successor to Echo I, Echo II was 135-feet-in-diameter and orbited from January 25, 1964 to June 7, 1969. “Echo II,” NASA, May 19, 1961, accessed January 11, 2022, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Echo_II.jpg.

A day after the President’s message was relayed, engineers were able to use Echo I to relay a pre-recorded message from Senator Lyndon B. Johnson from Bell Labs back to Goldstone. Johnson said,

The American people and freedom-loving people all over the world should be proud of this great space experiment. There can be no question but that the day will come, and in the not too distant future, when one man, one program, can be seen and heard simultaneously in every living room of the world. Let us all continue to work to see that these new means of communication replace suspicion with understanding, hostility and isolation with free exchange of knowledge. The Congress sends its congratulations to all those who have made it possible.[13]

After its initial success, Echo I settled into its role as a communications satellite. Arthur E. Summerfield, Postmaster General of the US, used Echo to send the first “Space Letter” on November 11, 1960. The letter, addressed to “Mr. & Mrs. America,” was a piece of facsimile mail, or what later commonly became known as a “fax.”[14] The concept of facsimile mail dates to the mid-1800s when European inventors worked out means of generating graphic images from electronic signals. By the 1920s, engineers at RCA worked out a means of sending the signals wirelessly and created a radio facsimile system. With Echo now in orbit, wireless facsimile mail signals could be sent into space, bounced off Echo, and returned to Earth to a receiver. The New York Times ran a story about this first space letter sent off Echo:

The first successful facsimile transmission of a “space letter,” using the Echo satellite as a relay station, was announced Friday [November 11, 1960]. The letter – which carried only the Post Office’s traditional Christmas message, “Shop and Mail Early” – was fed into a facsimile transmitter in the Postmaster General’s office in Washington. The resulting signal was sent by wire to the Naval Research Laboratories at Stump Neck, Md., beamed by microwave to the Echo satellite orbiting 1,000 miles above the earth, bounced off the passive reflector and picked up by a tracking antenna at the Holmdel, N.J. station of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. A wire line carried the letter to the Postmaster’s office in Newark, N.J., where it was converted to its original form by a facsimile transmitter. It took about five minutes from the time the letter was fed into the facsimile transmitter until it was reprinted by the facsimile receiver.[15]

To honor the achievement of the space letter, the US Post Office immortalized Echo I in December 1960 when the satelloon was featured on a 4¢ stamp.[16]

While Summerfield’s space letter proved Echo could be used to send faxes, Echo’s days as a communication satellite were numbered. Echo served as a passive satellite, meaning it could only reflect signals from Earth and not actively create signals itself. Indeed, just a few months after Echo I’s launch, NASA launched an active communications satellite, Courier 1B in October 1960, and the launch of Telstar in July 1962 further proved the worth of active satellites. While these active communication satellites took the place of Echo, Echo I continued to prove its worth in other aspects. The satelloon remained in orbit until May 1968, significantly longer than most engineers expected, thus proving the strength of its Mylar construction. In its final days, Echo I also fulfilled William J. O'Sullivan’s original purpose of measuring the upper atmosphere as it de-orbited.[17]

While Echo I was not America’s first satellite in orbit, that honor belonged to Explorer I, Echo gave, as historian Donald Elder writes, “the Eisenhower Administration its greatest triumph in the space race.”[18] Through Echo I’s eight years in orbit, it served as a highly visible symbol of freedom of communication.

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[1] Arthur C. Clarke, Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (New York: Pyramid Books, 1965), 105-112, archive.org/details/voicesfromskypre00clar. [2] For Clarke’s article see, Arthur C. Clarke, “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage?,” Wireless World 11, no. 10 (October 1945): 305-308, www.gr.ssr.upm.es/docencia/grado/csat/material/extraterrestrial-relays.pdf. [3] Clarke, Voices from the Sky, 112. [4] Jim Newton, Eisenhower: The White House Years (New York: Random House, 2011), 329. [5] Donald C. Elder, Out from Behind the Eight-Ball: A History of Project Echo (San Diego: American Astronautical Society, 1995), ix. [6] Mark Garcia, “60 Years Ago: Vanguard Fails to Reach Orbit,” NASA, December 6, 2017, accessed January 8, 2022, www.nasa.gov/feature/60-years-ago-vanguard-fails-to-reach-orbit. [7] James R. Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution: NASA Langley Research Center from Sputnik to Apollo (Washington: NASA SP-4308, 1995), 163, history.nasa.gov/SP-4308/. [8] Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 172. [9] Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 187. [10] Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 187. [11] Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 186. [12] Quoted in Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 188; Homer Bigart, “Satellite is Used to Relay Voices in Two-Way Test,” New York Times, August 14, 1960, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1960/08/14/99784213.html?pageNumber=1; and Donald C. Elder, “Something of Value: Echo 1 and the Beginnings of Satellite Communications,” in Beyond the Ionosphere: Fifty Years of Satellite Communication, ed. Andrew J. Butrica (Washington: NASA SP-4217, 1997): 39, history.nasa.gov/SP-4217/ch4.htm. [13] Quoted in Bigart, “Satellite is Used to Relay Voices in Two-Way Test.” [14] Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, Object 84-16. [15] “Space Letter,” New York Times, November 13, 1960, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1960/11/13/issue.html. [16] “Echo I 1960 Issue-4c,” US Post Office, December 15, 1960, accessed January 11, 2022, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Echo_I_1960_Issue-4c.jpg; and Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 192. [17] Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 191. [18] Elder, Out from Behind the Eight-Ball, 1.