The Nome Nugget

Telstar Relays
TV Programs
Across Atlantic
By ALTON BLAKESLEE

NEW YORK (AP) -- Telstar, America's chatterbox new satellite, zoomed through lonely space today on its pioneering mission to bring the world a new voice, ears and eyes.

In a triumphant baptism Tuesday night, it sent television pictures spanning the Atlantic to France and England, as well as into U.S. homes. It relayed a telephone call from Maine to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson in Washington as loud and clear as the best of local calls.

Then for an encore, the versatile Telstar--only a yard wide--simultaneously transmitted news stories at a 1,000-word-a-minute clip, relayed photographs perfectly and supplied two-way telephone calls with perfect aplomb from a 3,000-mile height in space.

Remarkably clear television pictures were received in France, and were relayed by tape into French homes today.

French television officials planned to beam a return program to the United States late tonight or early Thursday French time, which is six hours ahead of New York in Eastern Standard Time.

In Britain, faint and fleeting pictures were picked up as Telstar received, amplified and reradiated the program beamed into space from a powerful horn antenna in the little town of Andover, Maine. The first telecast via space opened with a view of the American flag rippling in the breeze.

Telstar's first feats were a prodigious demonstration of things to come in a future worldwide satellite communications system to meet mounting demands for telephone, news, business, and television circuits spanning oceans and continents.

Praising this joint venture of private industry and government American Telephone & Telegraph Co. footed the entire $4 million cost of building, launching and tracking Telstar -Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, remarked:

"Now we have increased opportunity to increase the flow of information among all nations, to surmount the walls of ignorance and prejudice and to use mass communications hopefully to avoid mass destruction."

Telstar was designed and built by the Bell Telephone Laboratories.