How Satellites Work

In little over a third of a century, the launching of a satellite has gone from stopping the nations' business to guaranteeing that it runs like clockwork. Today, satellites are commonplace tools of technology, like clocks, telephones, and computers. Satellites serve us for navigation, communications, environmental monitoring, and weather forecasting. Appropriately, the word satellite means an attendant.

In 1957, the launching of the Russian satellite Sputnik changed the course of our nation. The United States immediately launched massive efforts to compete against a "backward" empire in a breakneck Race to the Moon. In the space of a decade, our nation of arm-chair explorers sat glued to their television sets while Alan Shepard went up and down in a Mercury capsule in 1961, as John Glenn circled the globe 3 times in 1962, and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969.

That sense of discovery has become muted over time as we became accustomed to miracles of space travel. The launching of a Space Shuttle mission may not even come up in a class discussion of current events (unless those students are involved in the classroom use of satellite technology). Yet satellites bring those same students the Olympics, the weather, and news of other events from around the world that are considered "newsworthy."