New products and techniques for medicine have developed from the need to measure astronauts response to space flights. Many of these products and techniques are useful to patients in hospitals. To take just one example, there is a unit as small as a cigarette package which can be strapped to a patients arm to report on blood pressure, temperature, breathing, and other important information. Such devices allow a single nurse to observe changes in the condition of as many as sixty-four patients in an intensive-care unit.
Besides contributing to education, industry, and medicine, the space program has benefited communication. As a matter of fact, space satellites have revolutionized world communication. By 1960, the demand for overseas telephone and telegraph message for the United States was growing even faster. Industry could see no way to lay undersea cable. Transoceanic television was considered impractical. Satellites have changed all this. From thousands of kilometres above our earth, a communications satellite receives a signal from one side of the world and relays it directly to the other.
The first experiments with communications satellites were conducted in the early 1960s. Today about half the worlds long-distance telephone, telegraph, and television traffic is relayed by satellite. Through international agreements, the cost of transoceanic communication has cut almost in half.
An example of other ways in which satellites can benefit mankind was provided in 1970 by an international congress on post-graduate medical instruction. The American participants were in Texas; participating Europeans were in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. For three hours by satellite, 30,000 doctors saw and heard their colleagues across the sea.
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