The six antennas of the Astra 3B carry television and the Internet to households from Ireland to Kazakhstan. But even a small error in the angle or contour of one of the dishes could translate into a large gap in coverage. So one of the steps in testing a satellite is to map the surfaces of the dishes with microwave-reflection scanners in an anechoic room lined with energy-absorbing foam cones. Photo: Simon Norfolk

To the technological visionary Arthur C. Clarke, the potential for television to help to forge a “world society” just after World War II was obvious. Except for one little problem: Unlike, say, AM radio transmissions, which follow the curvature of Earth, television signals follow a straight line right out into space. TV can’t get a signal over the horizon.

In a 1945 article, Clarke outlined the problem and proposed what would become, 20 years later, the solution: a device parked over one spot on the globe, 36,000 kilometers above the equator, revolving with the same 24-hour period as Earth itself. Just three such geostationary satellites could channel TV and microwave signals to most of the populated world. Admittedly, Clarke imagined these as permanently crewed stations. (Someone had to replace the vacuum tubes!) But the groove inhabited today by these comsats is still sometimes called the Clarke Orbit.

A total of 288 active communications satellites circle the planet—including Astra 3B, owned by Luxembourg-based SES Astra. Launched on May 21, 2010, Astra 3B is designed to relay Internet and 500 channels of TV to most of Europe and the Middle East—on 10 kilowatts, about a tenth the broadcast power that WCCO-TV uses to cover Minneapolis. And if the availability of, say, Serbian MTV in Bosnia and Herzegovina has failed to bring about a peaceful world society, well, the fault is ours, not Clarke’s. Here we see for the first time the launch of the Astra 3B: its construction in Toulouse, France, its contact with Earth in Luxembourg, and its launch from the European space center in French Guiana.

Because Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America, is about 500 kilometers north of the equator, a satellite launched from there tends to go into an orbit at about five degrees off the equatorial plane. (That’s called its inclination—in one revolution the satellite traces a path between 5 degrees north latitude and 5 degrees south.) Controllers have to correct for that, either during or just after the launch, to maneuver the satellite into position directly above and parallel to the equator. The satellite’s altitude also needs adjusting. The 655 tons of fuel carried by the Ariane rocket that took Astra 3B to space pushed the payload to a highly elliptical geostationary transfer orbit, 36,000 kilometers at apogee but just 250 kilometers above Earth at its low point. Astra 3B had to use its own fuel to boost itself into a more circular orbit—a constant 36,000 kilometers—but ended up with more fuel than expected for future maneuvering, which could prolong its service life. Though an SES spokesperson points out we won’t really know until sometime after 2025. Photo: Institute Artist Management

Like enormous gray flowers—the largest are 13 meters across—most reflectors at SES Astra in Luxembourg face the sun, south by southeast, pointing toward three of the five orbital slots where the company has comsats. Some of these handle two-way communications with the satellites, performing housekeeping functions like orbital corrections; most of the others are broadcast uplinks, sending signals to be retransmitted back to Earth. From its position at 23.5 degrees east, more or less due south of Athens, Astra 3B’s footprint covers almost all of Europe (except the far reaches of Scandinavia) and the Middle East from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean to Afghanistan. Each of the satellite’s 60 television transponders, which may handle six or more broadcast channels apiece, transmits at a power of only 150 watts, less than a microwave oven. Four other transponders are for Internet service, a new business for SES. The amount of data flowing back and forth across this network is staggering (even allowing for the fact that so much of it appears to consist of soccer game broadcasts). Photo: Institute Artist Management

Building, testing, and preparing to launch a modern communications satellite takes about three years, and costs between 250 million and 300 million euros (including one of the most significant expenses, insurance). But simulating the actual conditions of orbital flight, like weightlessness, isn’t easy—engineers have been wrestling with the problem since the earliest days of space travel. One technique is to put aspiring astronauts and their equipment on a jet plane and send it into a steep up-and-down arc, which provides 20 to 30 seconds of near-zero-gravity flight time. (NASA’s plane for this maneuver, a modified C-9 transport, is nicknamed the Vomit Comet.) But you can’t stuff a 5.5-metric-ton satellite onto a C-9. The translucent bubble visible at the rear of this testing chamber is a 4-meter-wide balloon filled with enough helium to create neutral buoyancy for up to 40 kilograms—plenty to suspend antennas and photoelectric panels in midair. Photo: Simon Norfolk

After Astra 3B was shipped to Kourou, technicians assembled it atop a 166-foot-tall Ariane 5 rocket. The mission—Flight 194—also carried a German military satellite. Rockets have gotten a lot more powerful since Clarke was writing, obviously, but they are still constrained by the ironclad trade-off between fuel and payload. On the launchpad, the Ariane 5 weighs 780 metric tons (1.7 million pounds), of which almost 90 percent is fuel, and the payload accounts for just a little more than 1 percent. Astra 3B weighed around 5.5 metric tons at launch, and about 2 tons of that was its own propellant, which it will use up, a few grams at a time every couple of weeks, over the next 15 to 20 years. That’s because a geostationary orbit is only theoretically stationary. The attitude, orbital inclination, and position of Astra 3B is subject to a host of perturbations, including impacts with micrometeorites, solar wind, and the gravity of the moon above and the Himalayan mountains below. Left on their own, satellites in geostationary orbits would eventually drift to one of two nodes of gravitational stability, one over the Indian Ocean and one over the eastern Pacific, so their positions are regularly tweaked by engineers on the ground to stay within their orbital “box,” typically a region 150 kilometers by 150 kilometers and 40 kilometers deep. This is particularly important for satellites like Astra 3B, which shares an orbital position with another SES Astra satellite, 3A; the minimum safe separation is considered to be around 4 kilometers. The main limiting factor on a satellite’s useful life, in fact, is the amount of propellant it can carry into space. Eventually, SES engineers will use Astra 3B’s last reserves of fuel to hoist it into a graveyard orbit several hundred kilometers farther out, where it will circle Earth indefinitely among its retired predecessors. Photo: Simon Norfolk

The Ariane 5 has the familiar tri-part configuration of the (much larger) space shuttle launch system, with a liquid-fuel main engine and two external solid-fuel boosters. The boosters provide 90 percent of the thrust at liftoff, burning through a million pounds of propellant in two minutes. They were manufactured in French Guiana, eliminating the need to transport highly explosive propellant by ship. For powering the main engine, science in all its ingenuity has not improved on the power released when hydrogen combines with oxygen, perhaps the most fundamental reaction in the universe. Most satellite launches at Kourou take place around dusk. The timing is dictated by the position of the sun, which the satellite will use to orient itself when it reaches its first apogee. Protected by a trio of lightning rods, the rocket sits poised on the launchpad during the seven-and-a-half-hour countdown, awaiting the signal to begin turning chemical bonds into kinetic energy, pitting its force against the entire mass of Earth. Photo: Simon Norfolk

The main engine fires for seven seconds on the pad—the last time a launch can be aborted—before the external boosters ignite and lift the whole massive assembly skyward. This 20-second time exposure shows the path of Ariane to the point where it began to bend toward its orbital trajectory. Communication was handed off, over the next 23 minutes, from Kourou to a station at Natal, near the easternmost point of Brazil, then to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, then to Libreville on the coast of Gabon, and finally to Malindi, Kenya, on the Indian Ocean. Two minutes and 21 seconds into the flight, the empty external boosters detached and fell into the Atlantic. At three minutes, nine seconds, Ariane reached 106 kilometers altitude, outside the atmosphere, and the fairing around the satellite, at the nose of the rocket, was jettisoned. At 27 minutes, six seconds, at an altitude of 981 kilometers, Astra 3B separated from the Ariane assembly and coasted into its transfer orbit, the fulfillment of another everyday miracle. Photo: Simon Norfolk

Jerry Adler (jadler9999@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to Newsweek.

Simon Norfolk (simon@simonnorfolk.com) is a London-based landscape photographer.