On August 12, 1960, NASA launched Echo 1, turning the night sky into humanity’s first passive orbital router. Looking less like a complex satellite and more like a giant, 100-foot aluminized Mylar balloon, Echo 1 possessed no onboard transmitters, transponders, or computer chips. It was pure hardware abstraction: a reflective sphere designed simply to bounce telephone, radio, and television signals across the continent. By reflecting a recorded voice message from President Eisenhower off its metallic skin, Echo 1 proved that global wireless communication was a solvable engineering problem. It established the conceptual foundation for low-Earth orbit connectivity decades before modern satellite constellations. Echo 1 served as a stark reminder that sometimes the most revolutionary network infrastructure requires nothing more than a bright mirror placed in the ultimate high ground.