Closing remarks
Michael James Lighthill · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A Mathematical and Physical Sciences · 1975
Abstract I said in my opening remarks that we wanted to discuss during these two days the relation between, on the one hand, the world’s problems regarding the educational needs of its majorities and, on the other hand, the enormous developments in what I call the arts and the technologies of broadcast communication. There has been a danger of neglecting what I put first, the great developments in the arts of broadcast communication (as well as of the technologies), and I want to come back to that point. Starting with the technologies, I think that this exchange of information has been useful because there is still a lack of general public information about what has been achieved in the technologies of broadcast communication by satellite. As Dr Smith said, ‘the technology has worked’, and in that respect there has been a success story in at least the strictly technological sense. On the one hand we have the very good reliabilities and availabilities of the Intelsat system, as mentioned by Mr Jowett. At the same time, however, the educational satellites have their own frequency allocations, as Sir Michael reminded us. The ATS-F satellite, as we have been told by Mr Norwood, is the most powerful communication satellite yet developed and it has been well adapted to the particular problems concerned. I believe that the general public is not aware of this remarkable development of an attitude-controlled geostationary satellite transmitting on a 1° beam. Much is said about the need to match educational programmes to local or to regional needs and about the fact that the local environment is the environment in which the teaching must take place, but with this narrow-beam satellite, of course, this need has to some extent been met. A very good example is the fact that quite small areas of India can be served with separate programmes through the medium of this satellite.