Beyond the Ionosphere; Fifty Years of Satellite Communication. NASA SP-4217

Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA History Office, 1997. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxxiv, 321, [1] pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Tables. Reading list. Chronology. Index. Andrew J. Butrica, a graduate of the doctoral program in the history of science and technology at Iowa State University, is a research historian and author of numerous articles and papers on the history of electricity and electrical engineering in the United States and France and the history of science and technology in nineteenth-century France. He is the author of a corporate history, Out of Thin Air: A History of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., 1940-1990, published by Praeger in 1990, and a co-editor of The Papers of Thomas Edison: Vol. I: The Making of an Inventor, 1847-1873, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1989. Prior to writing this history of planetary radar astronomy, Dr. Butrica was a research fellow with the Center for Research in the History of Science and Technology, Cite des Sciences et de l'Industrie (La Villette), Paris. This book is a collection of papers originally presented during an international symposium held in Washington DC at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Clarke's 1943 article proposing the use of satellites placed in geosynchronous orbit for worldwide communications relay. This book is essential for anyone seeking to understand the history of global telecommunications in the twentieth century. The year 1995 marked a number of anniversaries in the development of satellite communications: The thirty fifth anniversary of the launch of Echo 1, the first passive communications balloon; The thirtieth anniversary of the April 1965 launch of Early Bird (Intelsat I), Comsat's first satellite, which effectively began global satellite communications; The twenty fifth anniversary of the launch of NATOSAT, the first satellite stationed over the Atlantic Ocean to carry military traffic between the United States and its NATO allies; and most notably, the fiftieth anniversary of Arthur C. Clarke's article published in Wireless World, in which he proposed the use of geosynchronously orbiting satellites for communications relay sites. Satellite communications are at the very heart of the notion of a "global village" and constitute continually growing, multibillion dollar, nearly ubiquitous civil and military enterprise deserving recognition. Much fanfare accompanied the first satellite television broadcasts. Yet, as the technology has grown increasingly pervasive, satellites have became an almost invisible part of the cultural landscape. Simultaneously, satellite communication has become a tremendous international commercial success, currently worth around $15 billion dollars per year; it is on the verge of expanding spectacularly in the near future, perhaps to $80 billion per year by the end of the decade. Despite the expanding network of fiber optic cables, approximately 60 percent of all overseas communications pass via satellites. More than 200 countries and territories rely on nearly 200 satellites for defense, direct broadcast, navigational, and mobile communications, not to mention data collection and faxing, via domestic, regional, and global links. Despite the commercial success and ubiquity of satellite communications, far too little attention has been paid to its development. For the most part, scholars have focused on politics and policy studies of the period roughly from 1958 to the mid 1970s (customarily centering their discussions on the passage of the Communications Satellite Act of 1962 and Intelsat negotiations), neglecting economic and technological questions and slighting the earlier work of the 1940s and 1950s. The symposium served as a forum for presenting not only the research results of scholars, but also the experiences of practitioners. Indeed, on of the motives for organizing the symposium was to create a vehicle that would facilitate fruitful interaction among scholars and practitioners. A few papers not presented during the symposium have been included in this book to provide additional temporal, geographical, and thematic coverage of the symposium's vast subject the development of satellite communications. While complete coverage of such a subject is impossible at present, these "proceedings" attempt to present a broad, but systematic survey of the evolution of satellite communications. This work will have achieve its goal of it stimulates others to take up research on satellite communications history.