to a pressure that caused the metal layers of the laminate to plastically deform slightly, while the polymer was still in the elastic range. This resulted in a rigid and very smooth spherical shell. A beacon telemetry system provided a tracking signal, monitored spacecraft skin temperature between , and measured the internal pressure of the spacecraft between 0.00005 mm of mercury and 0.5 mm of mercury, especially during the initial inflation stages. The system consisted of two beacon assemblies powered by solar cell panels and had a minimum power output of 45 mW at 136.02 MHz and 136.17 MHz. Flights Five suborbital ballistic tests to determine whether the launch, deploy, and expansion mechanisms would work were flown using the Shotput test vehicle. The first Shotput flew at 5:40 pm on 27 October 1959. Shotput 1 successfully delivered the Echo prototype to the desired altitude, but a small amount of residual gas in the folds of the balloon violently expanded, bursting the test article. People up and down the Atlantic coast witnessed what looked like distant fireworks as thousands of pieces of shredded Mylar reflected sunlight in a display that lasted for about 10 minutes. Four more Shotput tests were flown on 16 January, 27 February, 1 April, and 31 May 1960. On 13 May 1960, the first attempt to orbit an Echo satellite was made. The mission, which was also the maiden voyage of the Thor-Delta launch vehicle, failed before deployment of the payload. Echo 1 lifted off from Cape Canaveral's LC-17A, and the Thor stage performed properly, but during the coasting phase, the attitude control jets on the unproven Delta stage failed to ignite, sending the payload into the Atlantic Ocean instead of into orbit. On 12 August 1960, Echo 1A (commonly referred to as Echo 1) was successfully put into an orbit of by another Thor-Delta. A microwave transmission from the JPL Goldstone facility in California, was relayed by the satellite to Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, that same day. It was originally expected that Echo 1A would not survive long after its fourth dip into the atmosphere in July 1963, although estimates allowed the possibility that it would continue to orbit until 1964 or beyond. It ended up surviving much longer than expected, and finally reentered Earth's atmosphere and burned up on 24 May 1968. On 25 January 1964, Echo 2 was launched on a Thor