 This week, I'm coming to you live via satellite. Okay, that's not true. I'm actually coming to you from a completely different place in space time than your own, but live via satellite was a phrase that was popularized by one of my favorite satellites, Telstar One. Telstar One was launched in 1962 and it was the very first telecommunications satellite. So it was the very first satellite to be able to broadcast worldwide television. In a way, Telstar One was iconic in bringing about a connected world and the idea of the democratization of space. When Telstar One was launched in 1962, not many people were sure how many satellites there would actually be and who would own any satellites. But within even a few years, different companies were actually scrambling to figure out how they could get their own satellite. So it wasn't quite a time where people were getting their own satellites for their own households and were still not quite in that time yet, which is a discussion for a completely different space pod, but it was the start of the democratization in a small way of space exploration in that different companies could actually own different satellites. The Telstar One unfortunately died in 1963, supposedly due to the nuclear testing that was going on that actually fried its circuitry. But the Telstar One is still actually in orbit to this day. I would say it's saying hello to us, but it's dead. Despite being dead, Telstar One actually left quite a legacy. It became this iconic symbol, actually so iconic that today's soccer ball, which was popularized via Adidas, was actually influenced by Telstar One. Adidas in the 1960s actually created a soccer ball based on the famous white and black design that we're so used to seeing today, but they called their soccer ball Adidas Telstar. As you might guess, they named it Telstar after Telstar One because the black and white paneling on the soccer ball actually resembled the black and white paneling on Telstar One. The black panels on Telstar One were its solar panels. To this day, the Adidas Telstar soccer ball is an iconic look for all soccer balls everywhere in the world. Day to day, you'll probably find it in your emoji along with a lot of other relics from the space age era. Most notably that rocket ship emoji that you've come to love so much that has the iconic rocket ship fins that's actually in part thanks to the V2 rocket, which was the very first human made object to cross the boundary into space. After the V2 rocket, a lot of other rocket designs became more sleek and rocket fins were no longer needed, but you can still see the V2's iconic rocket fins in things like your emoji or in pretty much anywhere else that promotes space exploration. Another icon you'll find on your phone in your emoji is actually the whole earth icon. That whole earth icon doesn't actually include any clouds on it. And this is because this is how the earth was actually viewed prior to space exploration, specifically prior to the launch of the ATS3 satellite. The ATS3 satellite actually released the very first image of the entire earth in 1967. The most notable thing about that image was all the clouds that it showed that were over earth. Prior to the satellite image of the whole earth, people didn't really think about the earth as having clouds. Of course, they knew that there were clouds, but they didn't really include it in any of their icons or illustrations. And so this emoji that doesn't include any clouds really is part of an era that was before space exploration. That's it from me this week, so wishing you all an outdated rocket ship, space invader, whole earth dance party. Oh yeah, and don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, leave a comment, and also please donate to the Patreon for Spacepod so that all of us can continue geeking out with you week to week.