U.S. Army Signal Research and Development Laboratory (SRDL) at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The overall program was conducted in such secrecy that only 88 people were aware of its existence. Before the date of the SCORE launch, 53 of the 88 people had been told the program had been canceled and they were not to mention to anyone that it had ever existed. That left only 35 people who knew of the mission of Atlas 10B with the rest of the engineering crew, including the launch crew, under the impression that they were working solely on a test launch of the rocket. The night before launch, however, Rear Adm. John E. Clark, deputy director of ARPA, was asked at a news conference whether he could deny that Eisenhower's voice was on the recorder. He replied, "No", and news reports that day suggested the voice might well be the president's. Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment This first communications satellite experiment consisted of 2 identical communications repeater terminals mounted in the guidance pods along the sides of the launch vehicle. The experiment was to test the feasibility and explore problems associated with, using satellites for communications purposes. No modulation was received on the carrier wave from experiment package no. 1. Voice and teletype messages were sent and returned in real-time, and also from experiment tape recorder no. 2. The tape recorder was loaded with new material 28 times and failure finally was due to battery depletion. The experiment receiver and transmitter operated on 150 and 132 MHz, respectively. Mission The payload weighed , and was built into the fairing pods of the Atlas missile. Combined weight of the total on-orbit package was . SCORE was launched into an orbit with a perigee of , an apogee of from LC-11 at Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex, Florida, inclined at 32.3°, with a period of 101.4 minutes. Its batteries lasted 12 days and it reentered the atmosphere on 21 January 1959. The communications repeater installed on the missile would receive a signal, amplify it, and then retransmit it. Two redundant sets of equipment were mounted in the nose of the SCORE missile. Four antennas were mounted flush with the missile surface, two for transmission and two for reception. SCORE's other equipment included two tape recorders, each with a four-minute capacity. Any of four ground stations in the southern United States could command the