Advantages And Disadvantages Of Communication Satellites

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More often than not research and inventions for the space programs can be applied into common society shaping the world to what it is today. Society began to readily advance when ideas were shared between people all over the world since building on ideas has created many of the technologies used today. One very important invention, which initiated the transfer of ideas as well as made it quite easily possible, is global communication via satellites or COMSATS [1]. In this essay the advantages and limitations of (global communication satellites with regard to social and cultural factors will be discussed and evaluated.

The very first attempt at a communication satellite was during the 1950’s called, project communication moon relay launched by the USA, attempting to develop a reliable method of wireless communication by using the Moon as a natural communications satellite. Although the project was not successful it did initiate the idea for global communication. The first artificial satellite, a balloon named Echo 1, used solely for global communication was launched on August 12th 1960 was able to Send data up into space and beam it back down to another point on earth [20. Using the very same concept many countries innovated the idea and launched their own satellites. Today when a satellite is launched and is geosynchronous (rotates with the earth orbit) it is ready to begin. It then beams messages to ground stations which then receives these messages in code consisting of 0’s and 1’s, and using a device called a transponder, interrupts the message and distributes it where it is to be received [3]. The very process occurs while sending emails, text messages, searching the Internet etc. and the process in the 21st century takes le...

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...ugh power transmitters with strong antennae are located on earth’s ground stations, a lot of signal loss does occur while transmitting the messages to space since the signal weakens the further it is beamed. This presents little problem as the strength of the signal received on the up link is not as critical as that received on the downlink. The downlink signal is critical because the signal transmitted from the satellite is very low in power [8].

In conclusion global communication satellites have more of an effect on society that can possibly be understood. Numerous studies have gone out to grasp how dependent we have become on the artificial satellite orbiting the earth, which connects society to people around the country as well as the world. As any other object they also have their limitations, which, hopefully with further research, will also be overcome.

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