Launched
October 4 ,
1960 ,
Courier 1B was the world’s first active repeater satellite. Courier was built by the
Palo Alto, California –based Western Development Labs (WDL) division of
Philco , previously known as Army Fort Monmouth Laboratories and now the
Space Systems/Loral division of
Loral Space & Communications .
Proposed by the
U.S. Army Signal Corps in September
1958 , this satellite was a flown in 1960. The first satellite in the series, Courier 1A, blew up in the rocket 2.5 minutes after take off. This satellite was a follow-on to the
Project SCORE launched in that 1958. It used approximately 19,000
Solar Cell s and was also the first satellite to use
Nickel Cadmium storage
Batteries . It had an effective message transmission rate of 55,000 bit/s. After completing its first orbit, a message from President
Eisenhower to the
United Nations was transmitted from
Fort Monmouth and relayed to a ground station in
Puerto Rico .
After 228 orbits in 17 days, the payload refused to respond to commands from the ground. It is believed that the clock-based access codes got out of synchronization, therefore the satellite would not respond to what it interpreted as unauthorized commands.
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