These Soviet satellites once provided light-speed links between Leningrad and the Arctic. Now, their ground segment lies abandoned.
Header image source: Andrey Podkorytov/YouTube
Last week, I wrote about the forthcoming Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission, which will provide high-speed internet to military and government customers across the circumpolar north. The two-satellite constellation will use a highly-elliptical orbit (HEO) modeled on a Molniya orbit, a path first discovered by Soviet scientists in the 1960s. Molniya orbits are useful for countries in the world’s high northern latitudes, like Russia and Canada, and allowed for the first satellite connections between the Soviet Arctic and Moscow.
More temperate countries can make use of the geostationary orbit, which lies 35,786 km above the Earth’s equator. Satellites placed into its thin band have an orbital period equal to the Earth’s, allowing for continuous communication with instruments on the ground that can see it. Since such satellites appear to hover constantly directly overhead, they are called “geostationary.”
Geostationary satellites have issues reaching areas on Earth lying above 60° north or south. From such extremes, the satellite would be below the horizon. This presents a problem for countries like Russia and, previously, the Soviet Union, Norway, and Canada. Russia’s northernmost point, Cape Chelyuskin, lies at 77°43’N, Svalbard extends up to 80°49′N, and Cape Columbia in Nunavut reaches 83°07′ N. (There are no equivalents in the southern hemisphere save for Antarctica, since Australia and New Zealand’s southernmost points lie between 50°-55°, meaning both countries’ territories lie within sight of geosynchronous satellites.)
Molniya orbits and satellites: A short history
Enter the Soviet scientists who discovered the Molniya orbit, named after the Russian word for “lightning,” and engineered the eponymous Molniya satellites.
The first Molniya satellite, Cosmos 41, was launched from what is today the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in 1964. At its lowest point in orbit, Cosmos 41 flew just 400 kilometers above the Southern Hemisphere, while at its highest point, it floated 40,000 kilometers above the Northern Hemisphere. Though the satellite failed to properly operate, it had, as researcher Larry Ninas wrote, an “unprecedented field of view (FOV) that included the North Pole, most of the Northern Hemisphere and at that time the entire Soviet Union.” For the first time, most of the Arctic could be seen at once.
The first operational Molniya satellite was launched in April 1965, approximately four years after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space. With more launched in subsequent years, the Molniya satellites gave rise to the first instantaneous link between Moscow and Vladivostok. Each satellite would transmit over the Soviet Union for approximately six hours before passing off to the next satellite. The process was overseen by scientists like Mikhail Sergeyev, who an Izvestiya newspaper article from April 9, 1968 called “chief controller of the ‘earth-space’ radio bridge.”
Turn on, tune in, drop out of the tundra
From the steppes to the tundra, 60 antennas sprung up across the Soviet Union to receive the satellites’ signals. The combination of the Orbita ground network with the Molniya satellites produced the world’s first national satellite television network. By late 1967, the innovation allowed reindeer herders in Chukotka to watch programs recorded in and uplinked to the satellites from Moscow. The aforementioned Izvestiya newspaper article, which was targeted at “20 million television viewers of the Far North, Urals, Far East, Siberia and Kazakhstan” claimed, “Now these people do not have to spend their evenings of rest without the latest television news from the capital.” Instead of being out on the land, they could be glued to Soviet soccer matches.
Molniya’s black-and-white signal seemed to be transmitted clearly across the country, if the communist newspaper is to be believed. The article claimed, “Reports from Yakutsk, Magadan, Kemerovo, and other cities come over the teletype: ‘The program was received in full. Picture and sound were of good quality.'”
Color television came shortly afterwards in 1969. Most people’s television sets, though – if they had them – remained black-and-white until the 1980s.
Satellite surfing: From Playboy to ЦТ СССР
Until its collapse, the Soviet Union remained impenetrable to the average Westerner save for highly regulated visits operated by the state-run travel agency, Intourist. Yet those who could tap into Molniya’s signals could access a more accurate picture of what life was like.
One day, a New Yorker named Ken Schaffer figured out how to access the Central Television of the USSR’s signal. Schaffer, who the Washington Examiner called “the most interesting man in the world,” was a good candidate for such tinkering, as he was both a radio engineer and rock-and-roll publicist.
Schaffer recollected rather vaguely that “the idea of pulling domestic Soviet television from the northern sky came to me through a series of powerful serendipities.” The aforementioned researcher Larry Ninas, however, claims those “serendipities” entailed Schaffer searching for Playboy with his satellite dish in 1982.
Regardless of how the American Renaissance man happened upon it, Schaffer began pulling the Molniya transmission out of the New York skies. He sought an educational sponsor to improve his effort, yet was rebuffed by many professors who claimed that they didn’t even watch American television. Schaffer realized they were probably older and still glued to the written form, much as TikTok is passing by today’s Millennial and Boomer professors stuck on Instagram, X, and Facebook.
Eventually, the radio engineer heard from a professor named Jonathan Sanders, who was the assistant director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union. Sanders saw the value in showing Soviet television to students at Columbia.
One muggy afternoon in summer 1984, students gathered around a television somewhere in New York City. Around 4:00 pm EST, just as Molniya began powering up to transmit to eastern Siberia at what would have been 7:00 am in Vladivostok, Schaffer managed to capture Molniya’s morning signal. Recalling the moment, Schaffer wrote, “There It Was! The Molniya picture was clearer than the picture any U.S. network gets from its own local cameras, thanks to the more up-to-date French SEACAM video system used by the Soviets.”
Good day, sunshine
While the Molniya satellite program brought Muscovites and Chukchi reindeer herders closer together, along with everyone else in between and in the Soviet near abroad, it also unwittingly struck a chord with a handful of open-minded Americans. “It is hard to hate a country when you get to know its weatherlady,” Schaffer quipped.
Another person who tracked Molniya satellites, Mark Dahmke, said in a comment on a YouTube video about the technology, “One day in 1991 I tuned in and heard Rod Stewart and realized that things really were changing in Russia.”
American interest in Soviet television went beyond a few quirky engineers. In 1987, when ABC was broadcasting a television show called Amerika depicting a Soviet-occupied U.S., the Discovery Channel contracted with Soviet broadcasters to air 62 hours of Soviet television from February 15-22. The broadcast would include “game shows, cartoons, rhythmic aerobics led by shapely comrades and in-depth documentaries on farm implements.” Only the news programs, however, would be translated.
Space Age relics on the tundra
Today, the once futuristic Orbita system sits in a state of disrepair and abandonment. The huge antennas that were once necessary to receive satellite television signals have long been replaced by much smaller dishes.
The LiveJournal blog by Zavodfoto peers into the abandoned Orbita station in Chukotka pictured earlier in this post. Dozens of photos capture a more connected and cosmological time, including from inside the station, whose vibrant murals glorifying Soviet space exploration still shine. Another Livejournal blog by Anthrax-Urbex looks at the largely abandoned station in Irkutsk.
Given the relatively short lifespan of Molniya and the Orbita network, one has to wonder how long the new ground station terminals that have built in northern Norway and at Clear Space Force Base in Alaska to receive the signals from the forthcoming Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission will last. Yet one thing is for sure: in a renewed time of deeply fractured relations between Russia and the West, we will need to rediscover inventive ways to turn on, tune in, and drop in to determine what is happening beyond the drone wall.
