When did NASA stop relying on ground stations for thier unmanned spaceflights?

[lextacy]

With the hype of remote tech for KSP I have ran into a bump in the road about the time period when geostationary sats where finally used to communicate with unmanned crafts. I did some research and all I can find is that Relay 1,2 and Syncoms 1-3 where all attempts at geostationary and some were used to broadcast tele/vision , but no mention of spacecraft. Ive found the TDRS series which was launched in the early 80's are a confirmed network that did this type of communication, but no cookie in earlier space times during the space race. I really hope that in the late 60's this was implemented? For the sake of remote tech, I really want this. Discuss and thank you for your time my fellow kerbobots.

[Harry Rhodan]

[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network[/url]
[url]http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html[/url]

Never.

[Phineas Freak]

NASA (as all other space agencies) never stopped relying to ground stations for communicating with spacecrafts. In fact, all communications that are further than the Earth - Moon distance are done only with ground stations (DSN is the perfect example of this). Satellites cannot carry an antenna big enough and with kW - range transceivers to reach far enough.

Geostationary orbit satellites are used for spacecrafts that are in a low Earth orbit (the low orbit altitude means high orbital speeds and requires high speed tracking dishes or omnidirectional antennas) and, of course, for commercial satellite TV.

TDRS is now used to cover the high bandwidth ISS communications and a gap between the deep space tracking stations where the dish angle and the dish tracking speed are too low to allow any kind of contact with a low orbiting spacecraft. Another example is the Progress: it can communicate only when it is in the range of a ground station. Future upgrades (Progress MS) will allow it to communicate with the Luch relay satellites and overcome this problem.

[Kryten]

TDRS isn't even mostly used by NASA; they build it and operate it, but they've admitted a few times that most of the traffic is DoD.