Project Echo

This vintage recording recently found in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory audio archives comes from NASA's first successful communications satellite, Project Echo. The project involved bouncing radio signals off a 10-story-high, aluminum-coated balloon orbiting the Earth in 1960. This form of “passive” satellite communication – which they dubbed a “satelloon” -- was an idea conceived by an engineer from NASA’s Langley Research Center and a project managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. JPL sent and received signals through two of its 85-foot-diameter antennas at the West Coast Goldstone tracking station in the Mojave Desert.

Recording by NASA. 

Part of the Space is the Place project - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/space