Despite the title, this is not a physics textbook, and it will tell you only part of the fascinating story of satellite communications. However, we have tried to tell this story in a rather special way. Part I explains why we are so interested in communicating by means of man-made satellites, describes the important events in the progress of satellite communications (with special emphasis on Project Telstar), and points out some of the very knotty problems that had to be solved. Then, in Part II, we pick out six typical satellite communications problems and go into them more deeply.

These case histories are examples of the things scientists and engineers are constantly faced with. To narrate them we have called on six experts—Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers and scientists who actually have been working on the problems. The second half of our book is taken up by their accounts of their own personal experiences. We hope that reading them will give you an insight into what it is really like to be a scientist or engineer working in a laboratory on an important new venture into the future. We hope you will see that what they do is not all excitement and glamour. It involves hard work, ingenious thinking, and plugging away at tough problems. But this is what scientists and engineers enjoy—along with the excitement and glamour, of course.

Only a part of what our authors talk about can strictly be called “physics”—it is also engineering, chemistry, mathematics, and even psychology. But almost all their work is based—when you get down to fundamentals—on basic principles of classical physics taught in high school.

Now, a word of caution. In Part I, in talking about satellite communications in general, we have kept things at a level that should be understandable to almost everyone—even those who have never taken a high school science course. But we warn you this isn’t true of Part II. Our authors have tried to tell their stories as carefully and as logically as possible, but some readers may have trouble in following all they say. This we expect. We haven’t tried to sugar-coat or gloss over any essential details of the problems or their solutions. We don’t want you to think that solving them was any easier than it actually was. And, since this is not intended as a textbook, we may sometimes omit elementary material and go right to the heart of the matter.

When this book was written satellite communications was still a technological infant. It is growing and changing so swiftly that much of what we say may soon be out of date. That can’t be helped, of course, and we ask you—who may be reading it long afterward—to be tolerant. Our problems may well be forgotten when new, more sophisticated ones appear. But we are dealing here in methods, not in history; the ways in which these problems were attacked are just as lasting and important as the problems themselves.