a Satellite, in 14.5 seconds.
I want you to go back a hundred years, to 1911. That year, a pilot landed on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania—the first time anybody had landed an aircraft on a ship. Eight years earlier, the Wright Brothers achieved powered flight for the first time in history. Superconductivity was discovered in April, and on the night it happened, the sky was devoid of everything but rocks and ice.
It wasn’t until 1957 that the Soviet Union flew Sputnik 1 into low Earth orbit—the first artificial satellite. Within four years, there were a hundred and fifteen. Today, roughly three thousand artificial satellites hover over the earth, in a freakishly-crowded net of orbits. We take their presence up there so much for granted that we barely consider the possibility that the term “satellite” might refer to anything other than a man-made, multi-million-dollar space machine.
Satellites today perform a vast range of sophisticated tasks for us: observing the sun, transmitting phone calls, broadcasting reruns of Seinfeld, and directing us to the nearest highway exit. Some, we presume, perform more secretive tasks (though none nearly as creepy as that of the second Sputnik, whose only doomed passenger was a part-Samoyed terrier named Laika). Up there, hundreds of experiments and millions of words and bits and images pass silently in the night in a tangled mess of complex purposes and plans. By contrast, that first, lonely Sputnik’s only directive was simple—to beep, regularly, in all directions.
That’s what our Fastest Possible Satellite is up to (though the term “boop” seemed more hilarious as I drew it). The radiating arcs that we now think of as a Wi-Fi symbol are, to my mind, the universal sign for transmission-from-space, and here indicate the travel of a benign “boop” towards some small hamlet in Brazil. Finally, our Fastest Possible Satellite has two dish antennas: one pointed out to space, listening for news from friends; and the other pointed down at us, to remind us that it is up there, keeping us company and helping us find our way home.
