Human Use Of Space Technology (1986)

[Music] We developed the technology to explore space. It in fact has begun the most surprising exploration of our own planet earth and it is profoundly changing the way we live on it. >> You can actually get a associate of arts degree by watching television programs. >> Satellite imagery can give you some warning on this of famine in Africa in particular. Now with advanced miniaturization technology, we're able to implant much smaller pacemakers. >> Scientists designed vehicles to explore the universe. Almost no one guessed what this would do to life here on Earth. Our story begins with the fact that in order for man to explore space, a few very basic problems had to be overcome. First, a vehicle had to be created that could get into space and stay there. [Music] Astronauts had to survive and their daily needs to be supplied in a new world of zero gravity. They had to be able to work, communicate back and forth to Earth, and all of this within a miniaturized world floating in the sky. amazing check just to make sure that everything was okay. >> In order to accomplish this, the decision was made to spend billions of dollars in both the United States in the Soviet Union. By the time they had finished, they had created a space program. All right. But they had also created a technological revolution on Earth. It was one that spawned industrial giants, changed the everyday products of life, and created ways to communicate around the globe never imagined. This is President Eisenhower speaking. It is a great personal satisfaction to participate in this first experiment in communications involving the use of the satellite balloon known as Echko. As Echo beamed its little satellite message across the world, it's safe to say that neither Eisenhower nor anybody else for that matter, with the exception of a few futurists understood that we were about to become a world of satellites. And even the futurists probably only had the dimst knowledge of what that would mean. Because in fact, the ability to beam picture and sound from a satellite in the sky down to a dish on the earth was about to revolutionize the way we live in a profound way. Take shish for example. Below this plane live approximately 400 people in a community that has existed in near total isolation from the rest of civilization for centuries. This is the village of Shisharf by the Arctic Circle not too far away from the Soviet Union right off the tip of Alaska. And this dog sled is how they used to get information and messages back and forth, which meant that not much did. Even with the advent of airplanes and cars, it didn't help too much because it was so remote. It actually wasn't until the space age came in that shisharf was transformed. Space technology probably did as much to connect Shisharf to the rest of the world as it did to send man to the moon. They were using the power to now they're using 10 as much as possible. >> They're going back in time. >> One of the first things to happen to them was TV via satellite. >> These this is the machine. >> Many of these Eskimo children still haven't been out of shush themselves. But they explained that they had already seen the world in ways their parents never dreamed of via TV. >> Is this easel? I know what the middle school is, but I'm never >> Their parents at best would have had one, maybe two teachers to live in Shish and give them their entire education. >> Today, a multitude of teachers and courses comes across to them on TV. >> Let me ask you, do you think you learn a lot more having these programs come in on television than your parents did before they had this? >> Yeah. Is it good >> to learn about the rest of the world and these things? >> Their parents harvested sea mammals and reindeer herds. These children can now receive an entire college education via the satellite TV and the satellite telephone. >> Yes. Good afternoon. This is Charlie and Dillingham calling for the uh the conference this afternoon. >> Hi. It's possible now with the technology that we have and some of the programs that are working between the community colleges and the university system that you can actually get an associate of arts degree by never attending a classroom by watching television programs that you take for credit. >> Education and communication are done by Alaskcom satellite in Shisharev. Even medicine here is done by satellite. and take your cod off. >> The lone nurse responsible for this entire community is connected via a hotline to a team of doctors who are able to give her expert advice on a complicated case or rush in a plane for a patient in a genuine emergency situation in a community that still makes OBGYn calls on a dog sled. Shisharf is not alone. Satellites have become so ubiquitous over the years that they have become not only the new dog sled on the ground, but the earth's new workhorse in the sky. >> The Soviets say that they have done as much to help the Soviet Union as the Eskimos in Shish morality. >> Even very small and modest facilities which we have now in space already have changed our way of life. We have space-based telecommunication which made our own planet as uh very uh homelike. Now everyone could get a telephone call from another continent over the ocean uh instantly for cheaper price uh television any kind of uh service. [Music] They've taken over so many jobs that filling the sky today is such a startling array of satellites that some worry that we are about to have the first traffic jam in space. A lot of this traffic is from satellites beaming TV all over the earth because without question satellites are totally transforming the world of television. [Music] A few years ago, having the Ayatollah Hommeni broadcast live into your living room via satellite as he was about to take over Iran would have been impossible. >> Today, it's business as usual. >> Seeing the Olympics live in your tent in Saudi Arabia in the past would have been unthinkable. Today, it goes on every time the Olympics go on. >> This is the Great Wall of China. It is said to be the only man-made object. In short, I can talk to you instantly from the Great Wall in China, from the Soviet Union, or from the Straits of >> Hormuz, and plenty of it. >> The ability to beam and receive TV pictures instantly around the world has totally changed what people can see, hear, and know about the world. [Music] The impact of this politically and economically is so great that most experts feel that short of the invention of the television itself. This has been the most important revolution in communications, >> a revolution in both the content and the structure of a powerful industry. Houston now controlling. Mission control confirms roll maneuver started. Thrust looks good. Roll maneuver completed. One nautical mile in altitude. Throttling engines down to 65% now. Plotboard status looks good. Mission control. >> Thank you. [Music] >> Okay. Fino tango here. Yes. Thanks you uh television program. Big football match from Brazil. Please check my video audio. >> We see you Tanga. Labels are excellent. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Hello. [Music] Some of the most significant changes were felt here. This is ABC. And in the past, it wielded an impressive amount of power over what people saw on television. It was one of the four major networks that existed in the United States. And the handful of people running them decided what you would see on television. If they chose to spend the money to bring back film from a foreign war and put it on television, you saw it. If they didn't, you didn't. Today, that's all changed. Satellites today have made broadcasting so instant and so cheap that over a 100 different channels have sprung up in the United States alone. News is coming instantly from everywhere. In other words, satellites change the power within a major industry in the United States. and the news you see. >> The change in communications has gone far beyond formal television broadcasts. We in fact have become a world of omnipresent information in which distances no longer mean much of anything. Almost anybody can see anybody for that matter. Almost anybody can talk to anybody via satellite anywhere instantly. >> Greetings from Washington. Chancellor Cole is with us all the way from Athens, Greece, along with you astronauts hovering in space with me here in Washington and the whole world listening. This is one heck of a conference call. >> The new world of conference calls and satellite phones is creating a new world of business possibilities. You can now instantly phone your local stock broker in Kuwait to trade some oil futures while you sit in London. Okay. >> Not only can you use the equipment to find better deals faster, you can even use it to find people. Have the satellites made much of a difference with the search and rescue problem out here in Alaska? >> Satellites have been a great innovation as far as rescues been concerned. In fact, uh before the American satellite was launched, the Russian satellite has been responsible for uh a total of almost 500 rescues throughout the whole of the United States. In Alaska itself, it's been responsible for about 20 to 30. Um, but now that we have our own American satellite up there, that's helping out as well. >> Yeah. March 2nd about 1,700 hours. We had a Noah helicopter was going Nome to Fairbanks. Had some bad weather and encountered some turbulence and he landed on the ice offshore from Moses Point. Wasn't sure where he was. He took off and hit some turbulence and crashed. SARSAT satellite that picks up ELT signals had picked up these different various hits and then we plotted them here on the board and the aircraft in area searching were picking up the ELT in this area. Finally they went over and tried in this cluster and they found the helicopter offshore about 11 milesi from Moses Point the Civil Air Patrol plane found some hard ice landed nearby picked up two survivors who had spent the night and uh brought them back to Gnome. The next day they went out with another helicopter to try to recover the fuse lodge and the helicopter and the ice had drifted and the helicopter had sunk. So these two men from Miami for Florida were extremely lucky that the civil air patrol found them when they did cuz the next day their wreckage had sunk. >> The ubiquitous satellite however is only one part of the space age transformation of Earth. The second part of the story is computerization. As the space race escalated, billions of dollars were poured into designing ever more advanced computerization for the spacecraft. The White House funded millions of dollars worth of R&D in the computer world. In addition, the Department of Defense poured millions in for its own R&D needs. >> A lot of money goes into expensive technology. The result is a technological revolution in computerization that is only beginning say the experts. >> So because of the orbit calculations which went on here at the Smithsonian Observatory, it was necessary to have what was then the most advanced kind of computer that the scientists could get, which happened to be an IBM 704. It filled an entire room uh because of all the vacuum tubes in it and it had such a small memory. Nowadays, if you have a personal computer sitting on your desk, you have far more memory and far more speed than that entire room had. This will soon have further ramifications. You'll be able to do your banking from home, order your theater tickets from home, check up to make sure you've locked the front door when you're away. IBM of the old vacuum tube calculator began to get massive contracts from President Kennedy to develop computerization to make the space program work. He wanted something to guide the twoman Gemini capsule. Guidance for the Saturn launches, to track the Mercury vehicles and astronauts, to compute theoretical space exploration, to operate computers on the orbiting astronomical observatories, and to land men on the moon, to also computerenhance photos of Mars. By the time it was all done, IBM and others in the computer world had created electronic computers that could execute instructions in a billionth of a second. They had perfected data processing that worked 400 times faster than it did in the mid-50s at 1/200th of the cost. As one expert put it, President Kennedy probably did as much to create IBM as its own founder did. Together, they created today's new world of high-tech computerization. Silicon Valley and the microchip industry exploded onto the scene with a new world of high-tech, fierce competition, and billions of dollars to be made from products that are filtering down from space technology into the home and the office. It has become a new world of miniaturized personal computers, digitalized alarm clocks. This new world of tiny ticking devices that can calculate, think, and perform, along with the new lightweight materials to enase everything sent into space has begun to impact almost every walk of life. One of them is medicine. Well, see, at the time that we were uh trying to put man in into space, there wasn't anything any way really to do any kind of remote monitoring. I mean, physicians had traditionally uh been able to sit you on an examination table or you're in a chair and take a stethoscope and my stethoscope tubes are this long and I put the stethoscope on you and here I was being asked to stretch a stethoscope really to 100 miles and finally 240,000 miles out to the moon and then we're talking about stretching it further out to Mars. It called for a whole new way of doing things. And so we started doing that. And as we began to develop that kind of instrumentation then all of the monitoring techniques that we have today, whether you have a coronary and you end up getting picked up at home in an ambulance and your electroc cardiogram can now be sent ahead to the hospital and they can be talking to the corman and the in the uh the technician in the ambulance and telling them what to do to you, how they how you should be treated. All of that came from our activity. >> A president is shot. >> President Reagan is the first president in the history of the United States to have been hit by a bullet and survived. The reason in large part is the technology. This is the emergency room where they brought President Reagan when he was shot. Here at George Washington University Hospital, as at every other major big city hospital, space age technology has completely infiltrated medical technology. >> While this surgeon used laser beams to treat his patients problem, the surgeon down the hall was using artificial arteries made from space materials to treat his patient. According to him, these are but a few of the medical techniques developing from space. >> This is one of the latest devices from spec space b space technology and it's used as an implantable infusion pump. We can infuse insulin, cancer chemotherapeutic agents or antibiotics for prolonged intravenous infusion without patients having to have repeated injections or through having to come into the hospital for prolonged periods of time. One of the recent advances from space technology has been the development of digital subtraction arteriography. This uses the same kind of technology that was used to photograph Mars and Saturn and is called computer enhancement of images and thus we can see that an arteroggram like this. This shows this very tight narrowing of one of the blood vessels to the brain which we will then need to operate upon. This is one of the older pacemakers. A pacemaker is a device used to control heart rate and rhythm. And in the past, it was necessary to implant this under the skin in order to keep some people alive. Now, with advanced miniaturization technology as well as lighter weight materials, we're able to implant much smaller devices and they last five times as long. As you can imagine, this has led to dramatic improvements in the quality of patients lives. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music]