A Delta rocket carried Intelsat I, known as Early Bird, into geostationary orbit over the Atlantic, inaugurating the era of live commercial satellite communication. The compact 76-pound satellite could relay a single television channel or 240 simultaneous telephone calls between Europe and North America, instantly shrinking the transatlantic communication gap.
Before Early Bird, a telephone call between London and New York traveled by undersea cable, and live television broadcasts across the Atlantic were essentially impossible except through crude, unreliable means. Built by Hughes Aircraft Company and operated by the newly formed Intelsat consortium, the satellite was small by later standards, roughly the size and shape of an oil drum with solar panels.
Once parked in geostationary orbit at 28 degrees west, appearing to hover motionless over the mid-Atlantic, Early Bird began relaying television programs, telephone calls, and even the first transatlantic fax transmissions between ground stations in Andover, Maine, and Europe.
Its capacity sounds absurdly modest today, a single black-and-white TV channel or a couple hundred phone circuits, yet it proved the commercial viability of satellite communications almost overnight, prompting a race by governments and corporations to launch successors. Early Bird operated far past its planned eighteen-month lifespan, staying in active service for years and briefly returning to duty during the Apollo 11 moon landing coverage in 1969 as a backup, before being retired in 1990.