ed and managed through this agency. Many others were very direct: systems and equipment developed for space (and military) telecommunications found terrestrial and civil applications including special antennas and microwave frequency equipment, digital communications techniques such as source and channel coding and modulators and demodulators, and SO on. While many of the initial satellite applications were in the military and scientific domain, soon these were used for civilian telecommunications. The theoretical background of satellites communications had been well known before Sputnik. Arthur C. Clarke a radar specialist in the British Royal Air Force and a member of the British Interplanetary Society, and later a famous science fiction writer, in a letter to the Wireless World magazine in the dying days of the Second World War in February 1945 proposed 'Peaceful Uses for V2' rockets. He suggested these German rockets could be used to carry instruments to space and measure the characteristics of different layers of the ionosphere. At the end of his letter he showed how three geostationary satellites may be used for telecommunications purposes [1]: 1 NSSDC, NASA: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASputnik_asm.jpg Satellite Communications An 'artificial satellite' at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth's surface. Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet. A mere 6 years after the launch of Sputnik, the first geostationary satellite was placed in the Earth's orbit, and was later used to directly broadcast television from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. This milestone can be considered to mark the birth of our 'global village' where faraway events can be witnessed in real-time on our TV screens. The establishment of the Intelsat in 1964 as a commercial intergovernmental organ