Science Museum

Satellite: Innovation in Orbit
Doug Millard

There are thousands of artificial satellites orbiting Earth. Ubiquitous but mysterious, they are a technological infrastructure in space on which society depends, yet we think of them only rarely – when our sat nav goes wrong, for example, or our TV stops receiving. The story of the satellite is, however, remarkable: an astonishing history of imagination, experiment and ingenuity. At first they symbolized Cold War political prestige, as satellites such as Sputnik, Telstar and Early Bird became household names, but they evolved into cultural signifiers, catalysts for design, even the subjects of pop records. These narratives are brought together for the first time in Satellite, an illustrated history that deconstructs the satellite as a cultural, political and technological artefact.