|Intelsat 1 (Early Bird)
- The world's first operational geostationary communications satellite, also known as Intelsat 1. It was launched in 1965 and provided 240 telephone channels from
its station over the Atlantic at a time when transatlantic cables only
provided 412 channels.
- A commercial Earth resources and reconnaissance satellite owned by
EarthWatch of Longmont, Colorado. Images from Early Bird – the
world's first private "spy" satellite – were to have shown detail
as small as three meters across and been available to anyone for a fee
of a few hundred dollars. However, contact with the spacecraft was lost
shortly after its launch on Dec. 24, 1997, by a Start 1 rocket from
Svobodniy into a 479 × 488 km × 97.3° orbit.
AND SPACE PROBES