I'm driving home today from a latte at that coffee superchain - the one that offers T-Mobile Hotspot access in most of its locations.

Then, a 1962-vintage instrumental came on the radio. The song was named after one of the transcendant telecommunications infrastucture leaps we have made as a species.

I am talking about the satellite Telstar, and the song that honored the device.

Upon Telstar the satellite's launch on July 10, 1962, the free Internet-base encyclopedia Wikipedia notes, "Telstar (became) the first active communications satellite, the first satellite designed to transmit telephone and high-speed data communications, as well as the first privately owned satellite."

Despite all of Telstar's deserved acclaim, I thought that well, it must have done its job for a few years, and then either was decommissioned or fell to earth as newer birds got launched.

No. There have been nearly 20 Telstars, including at least a dozen in current use for a variety of telecommunications and satellite television applications.

Now here's an irony. As livery, Telstars promise to outlast its original developer, AT&T- set to be merged into SBC Communications in months.

Oh, and the whirring "sound" of Telstar, as rendered in the recording of the same name by the Tornados?

I always thought it was a spiffy sound effect, but "Telstar" the record was released a year before the Moog Synthesizer was invented. Composer Joe Meek generated the sound by -get this- running a pen around the rim of an ashtray, and then playing the tape of it in reverse