Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: Who launched the first satellite?
ISRO built India's first satellite, Aryabhata, which was launched by the Soviet Union on 19April 1975. It was named after the mathematician Aryabhata. In 1980, Rohini became the first satellite to be placed in orbit by an Indian-made launch vehicle, SLV-3. ISRO subsequently developed two other rockets: the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) for launching satellites into polar orbits and the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) for placing satellites into geostationary orbits. These rockets have launched numerous communications satellites and earth observation satellites. Satellite navigation systems like GAGAN and IRNSS have been deployed. In January 2014, ISRO used an indigenous cryogenic engine in a GSLV-D5 launch of the GSAT-14.
One of the most earliest and notable achievements of SUPARCO activities was its unmanned space flight programme that was recorded on 7 June 1962. SUPARCO made research in the development of first solid-fuel expandable rockets, an assistance provided by the United States. On 7 June 1962, SUPARCO landed a record achievement when it launched first unmanned solid-fuel sounding rocket and took its first initial space flight from the Sonmiani Terminal Launch. The rocket was developed in a joint venture with Air force in a team led by PAF's Air Commodore (Brigadier-General) WJM Turowicz. Known as the "Rehbar-I" (lit. "Teller of the way"), Pakistan had secured its distinction as the third country in Asia and the tenth in the world to conduct successful spaceflight. The unmanned spaceflight mission continued under Turowicz, and according to SUPARCO, since 1962 til the partial termination of mission in 1972, ~200 sounding rockets took high success space flights from Sonmiani Terminal Launch. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) publicly hailed the space flight programme as the beginning of "a programme of continuous cooperation in space research of mutual interest."
The SUPARCO negotiated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for the launch of the satellite and approval required from the United States Government for the launch of the "Badr-1". The Air Force Strategic Command decided to fly the satellite by using one of its C-130 aircraft in 1986 to Florida, United States. The "Delta 3000" was selected by NASA's administration as its launch vehicle. Preparation was made and its crew and satellite was stored at the aircraft, however, it was delayed due to unknown reasons. The "Badr-1" was never shipped to United States and its launch was delayed for until next four years. As aftermath of the Challenger disaster in 1986, the United States Government and NASA had halt all the flights of the rockets carrying spacecraft and satellite payloads until the investigations were thoroughly completed. The satellite was stored at the Instrumentation Laboratories (IL) and SUPARCO began to negotiate with other space powers. In 1990, representatives of Chinese government offered Government of Pakistan to launch the satellite on one of its Long March Rockets and its facility. SUPARCO did not want to wait any longer, therefore, the Air Force Strategic Command flew the satellite, in sub-assembly form, to People's Republic of China. The satellite was re-assembled by Air Force Strategic Command and Suparco's official who visited the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The satellite was load at the Launch Area 2 and final preparations were made. The Chinese Government used Long March 2E, a three-stage orbital carrier rocket designed to commercial communications satellites, to launch the "Badr-1" who also took its first maiden flight with the launch of "Badr-1" on 16 July 1990.
On July 29, 1958, Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing NASA. When it began operations on October 1, 1958, NASA absorbed the 43-year-old NACA intact; its 8,000 employees, an annual budget of US$100 million, three major research laboratories (Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory) and two small test facilities. A was approved by President Eisenhower in 1959. Elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the United States Naval Research Laboratory were incorporated into NASA. A significant contributor to NASA's entry into the Space Race with the Soviet Union was the technology from the German rocket program led by Wernher von Braun, who was now working for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), which in turn incorporated the technology of American scientist Robert Goddard's earlier works. Earlier research efforts within the US Air Force and many of ARPA's early space programs were also transferred to NASA. In December 1958, NASA gained control of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a contractor facility operated by the California Institute of Technology.
Earth observation satellites or Earth remote sensing satellites are satellites specifically designed for Earth observation from orbit, similar to spy satellites but intended for non-military uses such as environmental monitoring, meteorology, map making etc. 
The first occurrence of satellite remote sensing can be dated to the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. Sputnik 1 sent back radio signals, which scientists used to study the ionosphere.
NASA launched the first American satellite, Explorer 1, in January 31, 1958. The information sent back from its radiation detector led to the discovery of the Earth's Van Allen radiation belts.
The TIROS-1 spacecraft, launched on April 1, 1960 as part of NASA's TIROS (Television Infrared Observation Satellite) Program, sent back the first television footage of weather patterns to be taken from space.
, more than 150 Earth observation satellites were in orbit, recording data with both passive and active sensors and acquiring more than 10 terabits of data daily.
As a result of the space race between USA and the Soviet Union in the 1950s, NASA was created in 1958 from NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, formed 1915) and other related organizations.
In 1957, the Russian flight of Sputnik 1 prompted the United States to accelerate its fledgling space program. On July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established NASA and subsumed NACA within this newly created organization. Langley Research Center became a part of NASA, as did Langley employees such as Kraft. Even before NASA began its official existence in October, Kraft was invited by Gilruth to become a part of a new group that was working on the problems of putting a man into orbit. Without much hesitation, he accepted the offer. When the Space Task Group was officially formed on November 5, Kraft became one of the original thirty-five engineers to be assigned to Project Mercury, America's man-in-space program.
The history of game making begins with the development of the first video games, although which video game is the first depends on the definition of "video game". The first games created had little entertainment value, and their development focus was separate from user experience—in fact, these games required mainframe computers to play them. "OXO", written by Alexander S. Douglas in 1952, was the first computer game to use a digital display. In 1958, a game called "Tennis for Two", which displayed its output on an oscilloscope, was made by Willy Higinbotham, a physicist working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1961, a mainframe computer game called "Spacewar!" was developed by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students led by Steve Russell.
Eventually communication reached an electronic state, and the telegraph was invented. Harrison Dyar, who sent electrical sparks through chemically treated paper tape to burn dots and dashes, invented the first telegraph in the USA. The telegraph was the first piece of equipment that allowed users to send electronic messages. A more developed version came from Samuel Morse, whose telegraph printed code on tape and was operated using a keypad and an earpiece. The pattern of communication soon became known as Morse code.
Thomas Joseph O'Malley (October 15, 1915 – November 6, 2009), better known as T. J. O'Malley, was an Irish-American aerospace engineer who, as chief test conductor for the Convair division of General Dynamics, was responsible for pushing the button on February 20, 1962 launching the Mercury-Atlas 6 space flight carrying astronaut John Glenn, the first American in orbit. Five years later, NASA asked North American Aviation to hire him as director of launch operations to help get the Apollo program back on track after the Apollo 1 command module fire on the launch pad killed three astronauts. O'Malley continued to play a leadership role in the United States' space program through the first space shuttle launch in 1981.
In addition to ARPA, various groups within the US government had been considering the formation of a civilian agency to handle space exploration. After the Sputnik launch, these efforts gained urgency and were quickly moved forward. NASA was formed on July 29, 1958, and immediately set about studying the problem of manned space flight, and the launchers needed to work in this field. One goal, even in this early stage, was a manned lunar mission. At the time, the NASA panels felt that the direct ascent mission profile was the best approach; this placed a single very large spacecraft in orbit, which was capable of flying to the Moon, landing and returning to Earth. To launch such a large spacecraft, a new booster with much greater power would be needed; even the Saturn was not nearly large enough. NASA started examining a number of potential rocket designs under their Nova program.
The necessity for better satellite television programming than TVRO arose in the 1980s. Satellite television services, first in Europe, began transmitting K band signals in the late 1980s. On 11 December 1988 Luxembourg launched Astra 1A, the first satellite to provide medium power satellite coverage to Western Europe. This was one of the first medium-powered satellites, transmitting signals in K band and allowing reception with small(90 cm) dishes for the first time ever. The launch of Astra beat the winner of the UK's state Direct Broadcast Satellite licence, British Satellite Broadcasting, to the market, and accelerated its demise.
Alan Shepard became the first American and second person in space on May 5, 1961, on a 15-minute sub-orbital flight. The first American to orbit the Earth was John Glenn, aboard Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962. The first American woman in space was Sally Ride, during Space Shuttle Challenger's mission STS-7, on June 18, 1983. In 1992 Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to travel in space aboard STS-47.
In the late 1980s, Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for simple and immediate information-sharing among physicists working at CERN and different universities or institutes all over the world.
In 1945, the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket. The first food deliberately cooked with Spencer's microwave was popcorn, and the second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters. To verify his finding, Spencer created a high density electromagnetic field by feeding microwave power from a magnetron into a metal box from which it had no way to escape. When food was placed in the box with the microwave energy, the temperature of the food rose rapidly. On 8 October 1945, Raytheon filed a United States patent application for Spencer's microwave cooking process, and an oven that heated food using microwave energy from a magnetron was soon placed in a Boston restaurant for testing.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency was to have a distinctly civilian orientation, encouraging peaceful applications in space science. Since its establishment, most US space exploration efforts have been led by NASA, including the Apollo Moon landing missions, the Skylab space station, and later the Space Shuttle. NASA is supporting the International Space Station and is overseeing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, the Space Launch System and Commercial Crew vehicles. The agency is also responsible for the Launch Services Program which provides oversight of launch operations and countdown management for unmanned NASA launches.
The first microphone that enabled proper voice telephony was the (loose-contact) carbon microphone (then called transmitter). This was independently developed around 1878 by David Edward Hughes in England and Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison in the US. Although Edison was awarded the first patent in mid-1877, Hughes had demonstrated his working device in front of many witnesses some years earlier, and most historians credit him with its invention.
The experimental Gloster E.28/39, built to test Whittle's engine, made the UK's first jet-powered flight in May 1941, and subsequent development led ultimately to the Gloster Meteor, the twin-jet fighter that entered RAF service in 1944. During the development of Whittle's engine, Harry Ricardo had declared that he would waive any patent royalties on devices connected with the jet engine. Whittle himself was fiercely protective of his design, and both were unhappy when the General Electric Company in the US, which had been allowed to copy the engine, itself patented the unit and the Ricardo Barostat.
The United States was in a Cold War Nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union to build bigger and better bombs. The next series of tests over Bikini Atoll was code named Operation Castle. The first test of that series was Castle Bravo, a new design utilizing a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. It was detonated at dawn on March 1, 1954.
The first civilian in space was Valentina Tereshkova aboard Vostok 6 (she also became the first woman in space on that mission).
Tereshkova was only honorarily inducted into the USSR's Air Force, which did not accept female pilots at that time. A month later, Joseph Albert Walker became the first American civilian in space when his X-15 Flight 90 crossed the line, qualifying him by the international definition of spaceflight. Walker had joined the US Army Air Force but was not a member during his flight. 
The first people in space who had never been a member of any country's armed forces were both Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov aboard Voskhod 1.
On March 1, 1954, the U.S. detonated its first practical thermonuclear weapon (which used isotopes of lithium as its fusion fuel), known as the "Shrimp" device of the Castle Bravo test, at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. The device yielded 15 megatons, more than twice its expected yield, and became the worst radiological disaster in U.S. history. The combination of the unexpectedly large blast and poor weather conditions caused a cloud of radioactive nuclear fallout to contaminate over . 239 Marshall Island natives and 28 Americans were exposed to significant amounts of radiation, resulting in elevated levels of cancer and birth defects in the years to come.
Already delayed significantly beyond the first satellite's planned 2014 launch, on April 27, 2016, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), in Hawthorne, California, was awarded an firm-fixed-price contract for launch services to deliver a GPS III satellite to its intended orbit. The contract included launch vehicle production, mission integration, and launch operations for a GPS III mission, to be performed in Hawthorne, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and McGregor, Texas. In December 2016, the Director of the U.S. Air Force's Global Positioning Systems Directorate announced the first satellite would launch in the spring of 2018. In March 2017, the US General Accounting Office stated "Technical issues with both the GPS III satellite and the OCX Block 0 launch control and checkout system have combined to place the planned March 2018 launch date for the first GPS III satellite at risk." The delays were caused by a number of factors, primarily due to issues found in the navigation payload. Further launch date slippages were caused by the need for additional testing and validation of a SpaceX Falcon 9 which ultimately launched the satellite on December 23, 2018.
In 1984, Salim Mehmud quickly launched the Badr satellite program. The development and the construction of Badr-1, Pakistan's first domestically-built digital communication satellite, was started. A small team of SUPARCO scientists and engineers who had studied and trained in University of Surrey were the part of the university's UO-9, UO-11 and UO-22 hamsats miniature satellite development and program, began the development of the satellite. Mehmud, then briefed the General Zia and suggested to launch the satellite from Pakistani Satellite Launch Vehicle. However, having found difficulties in SLV-required technology, the idea of Pakistani SLV was postponed and later was cancelled. Mehmud retired from SUPARCO in 1989 as a chief scientist and was transferred in DESTO. In 1990, Badr-1 was finally launched via Long March 2E rocket from Xichang Satellite Launch Center.
United Launch Alliance is providing launch services for the first three satellites. Satellite processing for the first two satellites was handled by the Astrotech Space Operations subsidiary of SPACEHAB. The first satellite was launched at 22:34 GMT, on 8 June 2007, aboard a Delta II 7420-10 rocket from Vandenberg AFB. An identical rocket launched COSMO-2 at 02:31:42 GMT on 9 December 2007, the launch having been delayed from 6 December due to bad weather, and problems with the rocket's cork insulation. COSMO-3 launched at 02:38 GMT on 25 October 2008, also aboard a Delta II 7420-10. A Delta II flying in the 7420-10 configuration will also be used to launch COSMO-4. Launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on November 5, 2010 at 1920L.
Unfortunately for the timely success of the satellite project, many of the most experienced people at Martin were shifted to the high-priority Titan ICBM program, and the mature Viking team was largely lost to Project Vanguard. The resulting shock to US pride and perceptions of national security, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial earth satellite, on October 4, 1957 (on the much larger R-7 rocket, developed as an ICBM), combined with the spectacular launch failure of the first complete Vanguard test launch December 6, 1957, is well known and recounted elsewhere. Thus the first US satellite, Explorer 1, was launched January 31, 1958 by a substantially larger Army Jupiter-C rocket, based on the Redstone missile, which had been developed by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) at Huntsville, Alabama under the leadership of Wernher von Braun. The first successful Vanguard satellite launching came on March 17, 1958. Its payload, Vanguard 1, is the oldest satellite currently in orbit, in addition to its upper launch stage.