I am Badri Younes; I'm the Deputy Associate Administrator for Space
Communication Navigation. Before TDRS we communicated with our missions in
space through direct transmission to the ground. We needed ground station at different
parts of the world to have as much contact with the mission as possible but
you know, two thirds of the Earth is water. So much of the ground stations that we have were
on the ground and sometimes we relied on ships in the ocean to provide some
coverage. Altogether we couldn't support more than 50% of the time to
provide daily support to any, any, any mission. That's when the concept for a
different way of doing business, it came about in the mid 70s. It was a revolution.
It increased our support from 15% to more than 85%. From way up in space you
can have full visibility of, you can see, from one single point in space, from a
geosynchronous orbit almost half of the Earth. Missions that are flying
beneath that geosynchronous orbit, now they relay data to that data relay
satellite and then transmitted to a point on the ground.
So, with two data relay satellites you are providing coverage, you know, like
full-time, global coverage to all missions close to, if not more than, 85%
of the time. The mission needs are growing. We are sending humans to
deep space. We are seeing the requirements and the communication needs
growing exponentially as opposed to today and NASA has decided to establish
a permanent presence in the solar system and as you send the humans into deep
space on a journey that may take up to three years even more than that, you need
to still provide them the kind of quality of life that they learned or
they have been accustomed to on the space station or on the ground. So you'll
need to expand the bandwidth available to them. I have made a commitment that
communication will not be a showstopper and enabling future space exploration.
The whole thing is has been a team effort. I'm grateful to what Goddard has
done, to the TDRS team, to all our folks down at the launch
services down at the at the Cape, and as well as the ULA. Boeing has done a
wonderful job and readying in a very capable spacecraft and this is going to
help us in meeting the requirement in the 2020s and the early 2030s. It's
helpful that NASA allows you to be creative, innovative, bring crazy
ideas, you know, out-of-the-box ideas. We are all
driven by that curiosity, by that wandering spirit trying to discover and,
you know, the unknown that's what NASA is all about. The place for dreamers and for
those who believe that they can make the dream come true.
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