Six Typical Problems
The questions we listed in [Part I] cover a very broad area of science and technology. Their answers involve, more than anything else, physics, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. Some, however, also require that the men who work on them know chemistry, metallurgy, mathematics, and occasionally even biology, psychology, geography, and economics.
We obviously can’t show you how all the problems in [Part I] can be solved. Rather, we have picked six of them as examples. They are not necessarily the most important ones, but they seem to us to be typical of what engineers and scientists working in the satellite communications program actually have to do. These are the six problems we will be talking about at length:
- How do we calculate a satellite’s orbit?
- What color should a satellite be?
- How can we make optical measurements on a satellite?
- How do we keep solar cell power plants working in space?
- Would time delay be a problem in using a synchronous satellite?
- How can we repair an orbiting satellite?
As you can see, we have picked problems that offer a good deal of variety. Some of them have been satisfactorily solved; for others the solutions are not yet complete. Some deal with basic scientific research; others are much more concerned with the engineering applications of technical knowledge. Some were solved by careful, logical thinking; others were solved almost by accident. Some deal with a particular immediate task (in this case, Project Telstar); others are more concerned with general planning for satellite communications.