Humerous old Varian ads

Cool.

A great book is "The Inventor and the Pilot", the history of Varian, by Dorothy Varian.

This brings back memories of standing in line at the Varian cafeteria having lunch with Sig and Russ. They were an Air Force contractor for TWTs in the IDCSP communication satellite program, for which I was the System Engineering Director. (This was the early 1960's.)

Thanks so much!

That was a really weird contraption:

Pretty cool, though. That orbital injection scheme was pretty radical for 1967--several times more complicated than Apollo 8, and (I should think) comparable to Apollo 11.

How long did they last on orbit, Virg?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'd forgotten that I wrote this!

The Titan had been carrying concrete ballast during tests, so this was a way of using its payload capacity to get near synchronous orbits for a "low risk" satellite system.

They each had a "magnetic core" counter, set to disable any RF emissions after n years. There were rumors that someone disabled this before launch. At any rate. some were still working five years later!

Concrete? Reminds me of an old joke. ;)

That's pretty good going for that era. Intelsat 1 (Early Bird) worked for about 4 years off and on.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Was that in Palo Alto? Hansen Way?

We used to go down there a lot, when we sold to the Varian NMR division. Agilent acquired that operation and moved the engineering to Santa Clara, and shut down the Walnut Creek operation.

One of the brothers used to walk around Palo Alto with a pet anteater..

You're welcome. I also stumbled across a bunch of very early AM broadcast transmitter manuals. I'm still sorting everything out, but there are Gates, RCA and GE among others.

Didn't our first satellite, Explorer I, launched 4 months after Sputnik went up and a month after it came down, last 11 years?

Its transmitters "only" ran for a few months until their batteries ran out.