Category Something New Under the Sun

I think we very likely face the embarrassing situation that, say, next spring, we have one or two [satellite tracking] cameras and the Russians have one or two satellites———————————————–

—William Pickering, October З, 1957

ickering drank the toast. He felt curiously detached from his surround­ings. What thoughts did the shock loosen? Probably something like,

“ … it could have been us, what now, they said imminent, they told us—- ”

Certainly he knew better than anyone else present that his laboratory, working with von Braun’s team, might already have had a satellite aloft. And he had speculated often enough with colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that the Russians must be ready for a launch soon. They’d feared the event, but they hadn’t truly believed it could happen.

Pickering remained deep in thought. When he looked around, his colleagues had gone. He knew where. Pickering followed to the IGY’s offices a few blocks from the Soviet embassy in downtown Washington D. C. There they sat, Dick Porter, Homer Newell, John Townsend, and Lloyd Berkner. Three years earlier, some of them had been together in a hotel room in Rome, where they had plotted late into the night how they would win backing from the General Assembly of the International Geo­physical year for a satellite launch. All had an emotional investment in the unfolding events. All had campaigned to persuade their government to build a satellite. And when President Eisenhower gave the go-ahead, they’d fought amid the turbulent waters of internecine and interservice rivalry. They had not wanted the same launch vehicle and satellite, but in the end they had found common cause. Together, they faced a bitter moment.

They looked at one another and asked, Now what? Into this intro­spection the telephone blared. NBC had interrupted radio and television programs with the news. At the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, the phone rang every minute. Most calls were from people wanting to know how to tune into the satellite’s signal or when they could see it. For the first night at least, curiosity was uppermost, though some called to say that the stories couldn’t be true, the Russians could not have
beaten the U. S. As yet there was no panic or concern; that came the fol­lowing week.

At the United States’ headquarters of the IGY, the little group remembered its priorities, decided early in their planning of Vanguard. First, place an object in orbit and prove by observation that it was there. Second, obtain an orbital track. The satellite’s path would give valuable knowledge about the earth’s gravitational field and the density of the upper atmosphere. Finally, perform experiments with instruments in the satellite. Here, too, orbital tracking and prediction would be important. An instrument isn’t much good if you don’t know where it is when it records a measurement.

All of this was for the future. That Friday night, the first priority had to be met. It wasn’t an American satellite, but something was aloft. Was it in a stable orbit, or would it plummet to Earth within hours? They let the task of learning as much as possible about the satellite’s orbit chase bitter­ness and disappointment away for a short time. The task was difficult, because the launch had caught them unawares.

And what was the task? They wanted to find and follow an object of indeterminate size, traveling several hundred miles above the earth at about 17,000 miles per hour. Ideally, they would have liked first to pinpoint Sput­nik’s position (to acquire the satellite) then to observe parts of its orbit (to track the satellite) and to determine from those observations the parame­ters of that orbit.

So that they would know when and where to look to acquire the satellite, they needed to know the latitude and longitude of the Soviet launch site, and the time, altitude, and velocity at which the satellite was injected into orbit.

Imagine an analogous situation. Hijackers have taken control of an Amtrak train and no one knows where or when this happened, nor which track the hijackers have coerced the driver to follow. How does Amtrak find its train? The company could alert the public to look for its train or, if the train had a distinctive whistle, the public could listen for it. When the alert public had called in the times and places at which they spotted or heard the train, Amtrak could calculate roughly where the train would be, given an estimate of speed and a knowledge of the network of tracks. The greater the accuracy with which observers recorded the time and place of the train’s passing, the more accurately Amtrak could predict its train’s future location.

With an exact location of the launch site and information about the position and time of the satellite’s injection into orbit, the group at the IGY could have predicted Sputniks position, then tracked its radio signal and determined an orbit. But the Soviets did not release this information. In fact, they did not publicly give the latitude and longitude of the launch site for another seventeen years.

Even if they had released the information, there would have been another problem. The Russian satellite was broadcasting at 20 and 40 megahertz, frequencies that the network of American radio tracking sta­tions set up to follow U. S. satellites—Minitrack—could not detect, even though every ham radio operator in the world could hear the satellite’s distinctive “beep beep.” The more sophisticated Minitrack stations, designed for the more sophisticated task of satellite tracking, could only detect signals of 108 megahertz. This was the frequency that the American satellite designers had adopted as the optimum, given available technology. Changing Minitrack to locate the Soviet signals involved far more than twiddling a tuning knob on a radio set.

In the days following the launch of Sputnik, Western newspaper sto­ries speculated that the Soviets had chosen the frequency purely for propa­ganda purposes. Early histories quote some American scientists as saying that perhaps the Soviets chose these frequencies because they had not the skill to develop electronics to operate at higher frequencies.

Yet at the rocket and satellite conference, before the launch of Sput­nik had colored everyone’s view, the Soviets’ choice of frequencies was considered in the context of science. One American delegate pointed out that the lower frequencies were better for ionospheric studies, though less good for tracking. A British delegate put forward a proposal for an iono­spheric experiment with the Soviet frequencies, which found unanimous backing. During the conference, the Soviets explained a little about their network and specified the type of observations they would like other nations to make.

None of which, of course, means that propaganda did not con­tribute, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that in addition to the political envi­ronment, there were also Soviet scientists and engineers with scientific agendas of their own.

Whatever reason or combination of reasons the Soviets had, Mini­track could not acquire and track the satellite. It was to be a week from that night before the first of Vanguard’s radio tracking stations was success­fully modified to receive the Soviet frequencies. The data, however, were not good, and the American scientists voiced their frustration to one another the following January as they prepared for their own satellite launch.

In the meantime, the phone at the IGY’s headquarters rang again. The caller had seen lights in the sky; could they be the satellite? At the IGY they didn’t know, but it seemed unlikely. For all of the men at the IGY’s head­quarters, the intensity of the public’s response was a shock. Many of the calls, with their conflicting reports, were a hindrance to the task of deter­mining where the Soviet satellite was and whether the orbit was stable.

Eventually, they realized that the best information was coming from the commercial antenna of the Radio Corporation of America near New York. Engineers there recorded a strong signal at 8:07 P. M. and again at 9:36 P. M. Pickering and his colleagues considered this information, assumed a circular orbit, and then calculated a very rough orbit from the time between signals. They concluded that it was stable. They wrote a press release, then, realizing they’d made a basic mistake in their calcula­tions, recalculated and rewrote. They finally fell into their hotel beds at eight o’clock the next morning. Years later, after numerous glittering suc­cesses in space science, Pickering still wonders why he didn’t spot the sig­nificance of the RCA data sooner. He wonders, too, about the basic error they made, one that was too simple for this group to have made. Yet how could it have been otherwise when they had lost a dream?

Today, when military tracking equipment can locate an object the size of a teacup to within centimeters, when some antennas are set up to follow potential incoming missiles, and track across the sky at ten degrees a second, it is hard to imagine the situation the American scientists faced that night.

Had the satellite been American, elaborate plans for acquisition and tracking would have kicked in. These plans included both optical and radio techniques. Optical because, reasoned many scientists, satellites are heavenly bodies, and who better to track a heavenly body than an astronomer. Radio tracking because this was the obvious next technical development. Radio could work at any time of the day or night, unlike optical tracking, in which observations could be taken only at dawn or dusk in a cloudless sky. For both radio and optical techniques there was to be a reiterated cycle of observation and prediction, gradually refining the orbital calculation.

The scientist knew that the initial acquisition would be difficult because of the anticipated inaccuracies with which the rockets would place the satellites in orbit. The Vanguard team calculated that there would be an inaccuracy in the launch angle of perhaps plus or minus two degrees. Thus, there could be a horizontal position error in a 300-mile – high orbit of about 150 miles at any time. Added to this, the satellite would be traveling at an average of 4.5 miles per second. Further, the anticipated inaccuracy in the satellite’s eventual velocity would be equivalent to plus or minus two percent of the minimal velocity needed to stay in orbit. These errors would change a nearly circular orbit into one with some unknown degree of ellipticity.

For the sake of comparison, today’s Delta rockets can place a satellite into a low-Earth orbit with a horizontal accuracy of a little under four miles. The angle and velocity of the launch vehicle’s ascent to the point where the satellite will be injected into orbit are worked out in preflight computer simulations. Inertial guidance controls monitor the ascent, mak­ing whatever angular corrections are necessary to the path to orbit. Such was not the case in the 1950s.

In December 1956, Pickering had told the IGY’s planners that the problem they faced was whether they would ever see the satellite again once it had left the launch vehicle.

But of course, the planners worked hard to solve this problem. Mini­track would acquire the satellite, and later Minitrack observations would be complemented by optical observations.

The Vanguard design team at the Naval Research Laboratory took on the radio work under the leadership of John Mengel. Mengel’s group used a technique known as interferometry. Several pairs of antennas are needed for this technique, and the distance between each pair depends precisely on the frequency that the array is to detect. Because new posi­tions for the antenna pairs had to be surveyed, it took a week to prepare some of Vanguard’s tracking stations to pick up Sputnik.

As soon as Mengel heard of the launch, he and his experts on orbital computation set out for the Vanguard control room in Washington D. C. He ordered modifications to the Minitrack stations so that they could receive Sputnik’s signal. These stations were located along the eastern seaboard of the United States, in the Caribbean, and down the length of South America. Within hours, additional antennas were on their way to Minitrack stations. The technicians at these sites worked round the clock, improvising in ways they would never have dreamt of the day before. In the Vanguard control room in Washington D. C., others were beginning a seventy-two-hour effort to compute the Russian satellite’s orbit from observations that were far less accurate than what they would have had, had their network been operational. The Vanguard team had planned to conduct that month the first dry run of their far-flung network’s commu­nication links. Now Minitrack was getting what an Air Force officer called “the wettest dry run in history.”

Nearly everyone agreed that radio interferometry would be the best way to acquire the satellite. But radio techniques with satellites were unproven. The transmitters might not survive the launch or might fail. Nor were radio techniques as accurate as optical tracking. Optical tracking was the job of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Under the leadership of Fred Whipple, the SAO had plans both for acquisition and tracking. Hundreds of amateur astronomers around the world were to be deployed to find the satellite (the Soviets were involved in similar efforts as part of the IGY). The amateurs’ observations would allow the computers at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to make a crude prediction of the satellite’s course, but a prediction that was precise enough for the precision camera, specially designed by James Baker, a consul­tant to Perkin-Elmer and Joseph Nunn, to be pointed at the area of the sky where the satellite was expected to appear. These precision cameras, roughly the same size as their operators, would photograph the satellite against the background of the stars. The satellite’s position would then be fixed by refer­ence to the known stellar positions also recorded in the photograph.

While Berkner was toasting Sputnik at the Soviet embassy, Fred Whipple was on a plane from Washington to Boston. He had been at the conference on rockets and satellites and was on his way home. When Whipple boarded his plane late that afternoon, there was no artificial satellite in space. But satellites can’t have been far from his mind. Perhaps he thought fleetingly of the gossip among the American scientists about Soviet intentions. From this thought, it would have been an easy step to recall the previous day’s meet­ing of the United States IGY’s satellite committee. They’d tackled the vexed question of delays in production of the precision tracking cameras. Perkin- Elmer was fabricating the optics for these cameras, while Boiler and Chivens in Pasadena were building the camera proper. The press had reported that delays were holding up the Vanguard program. These reports were irritat­ing to Whipple. Vanguard had been held up and would have been irrespec­tive of the cameras. But production of the cameras was also delayed. In fact, as far as Whipple could tell, the cameras would not be ready until August 1958, only four months before the IGY was scheduled to end.

This news had not pleased Whipple’s colleagues. Dick Porter had summed up, pointing out that by August, there would be only four months of the IGY left to run. If the satellite program was discontinued at the same time as the IGY packed up, the public was going to get a very poor return on the $3.8 million it was spending on precision optical tracking. They’d discussed at length whether they should cancel the cameras but had finally decided to continue because they believed that the space program would continue. That Thursday, the day before the space age began, the IGY par­ticipants seriously considered that the satellite program might be canceled.

The big unknown that Whipple must have pondered was the Soviets. Perhaps he remembered Bill Pickering’s remarks during the meeting: “I think we very likely face the embarrassing situation that, say, early next spring, we have one or two cameras and the Russians have one or two satellites. We can live with it, but it would be embarrassing; but I think, nevertheless, it is desirable for us to have cameras as quickly as possible.”

As far as Whipple was concerned, the problem was that Perkin-Elmer had not put its best people on the job. During the meeting Porter said that he felt like going up to the plant and beating on tables, but that Whipple had discouraged such a move. Whipple’s reaction was one of incredulity. He told Porter that he would now encourage this.

Later that month, when Porter did visit Perkin-Elmer, he found that the company had underbid and was now reluctant to pay for overtime when they expected to lose money on the contract. Porter renegotiated the contract so that the company would break even. Together with the launch of Sputnik, this greatly speeded up the camera program.

By October 4, 1957, Whipple was battle-scarred. Besides the frustra­tion of the cameras, he faced budgetary problems in the optical program. He was constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul (not that Paul always got paid on time) and he had a lot of explaining to do to both Peter and Paul. Yet he was excited. There were still things to do. It is plausible that Whipple made a mental note to check how the debugging of the computer pro­gram for orbital calculations was coming along.

Whipple knew that even if there were still a few wrinkles in the soft­ware, his staff were ready to track a satellite. On July 1, the opening day of the IGY, he had told them to consider themselves on general alert. What he did not know was that all of his preparations were at that moment being put to the test. No one enlightened him at Logan Airport, but when he got home his wife was waiting on the doorstep. Within minutes he was on his way to the Observatory.

That evening it looked as though optical acquisition was going to be more important than had been anticipated. Clearly, there could be no radio acquisition and tracking for the time being. RCA’s commercial antennas gave enough information to establish that the orbit was stable, but not enough to do any useful science or to predict the orbit with enough accuracy for aiming the precision cameras. Admittedly there were no pre­cision cameras yet, but that was about to change.

Whipple arrived to find Kettridge Hall, which housed the tracking offices, humming with activity. At some point during the evening a fire engine arrived because a woman had reported that the building was on fire. Perhaps she thought that some nefarious activity was underway.

The news of the Russian satellite had reached the observatory at six fifteen. Everyone but J. Allen Hynek and his assistant had gone home for the weekend. Hynek was the assistant director in charge of tracking and had worked with Whipple on the tracking proposal that they had sent to the IGY satellite committee in the fall of 1955. He was discussing plans for the following week when the phone rang. A journalist wanted a comment on the Russian satellite. When the journalist had convinced Hynek that the question was serious, Hynek cleared the line and started recalling those staff who were not already on their way back to work. Those who were members of the Observatory Philharmonic Orchestra were still in the building, rehearsing for a concert. They quickly abandoned their musical instruments for scientific ones.

Hynek was particularly keen to reach Donald Campbell, Whipple’s man in charge of the amateur astronomers. Campbell, too, had been at the satellite conference but had remained in Washington because he was leav­ing the next day for a meeting of the International Astronautical Federa­tion in Madrid. Part of Campbell’s job was to ensure that all the amateurs were notified when the time came. The amateurs were called Moon – watchers, after the official name for their venture, Project Moonwatch.

Hynek eventually reached Campbell in Springfield, Virginia, about fifteen miles south ofWashington, where he was visiting one of the groups of amateurs. That night, they were conducting a dry run to demonstrate their methods to Campbell. Campbell took Hynek’s call, then told the assembled group, “I am officially notifying you that a satellite has been launched.” They were thrilled to be part of the first group in the world to hear these words from Campbell. Campbell went on to make a few remarks, the coach rallying the team, but someone stopped him and set up a tape recorder to catch what he said. The next morning the Springfield Moonwatchers were at their telescopes before dawn, but they saw noth­ing, and would not until October 15.

Whipple had wanted armies of amateurs, but he had had to defend the idea against his colleagues’ charges that the amateurs would not be suf­ficiently disciplined. Ultimately, these amateurs provided invaluable infor­mation to teams operating the precision cameras. Although the Moon – watchers had not expected to begin observations until March 1958, when the first American satellite was expected to be in orbit, they were well enough organized that night to begin observing. The first confirmed Moonwatch sightings were reported by teams in Sydney and Woomera on October 8.

During the first night, Whipple, like Bill Pickering and John Mengel, tried to make sense of confusing reports, reports that were not the sort that a professional astronomer was used to. Where were the precise measure­ments of azimuth (distance along the horizon), elevation (height above the horizon), and time of observation? And, of course, the observatory’s pro­gram for orbital computations had still to be debugged. IBM, which was under contract to provide hardware and software support, came to their assistance the next day, dispatching experts who helped to debug the program.

Early Saturday morning, Whipple received his best observations so far from the Geophysical Institute, in College, Alaska. By nine o’clock Sat­urday morning, Whipple was ready for a press conference. He was dressed in a sober suit and accompanied by the props of a globe and telescopes. He gave the appearance of a man who knew what the satellite was doing. Of course, by his own standards, he had no idea.

Over that first weekend, Whipple considered the observations: the object seemed brighter than it should be. He called Richard McCrosky, a friend and colleague at the Harvard Meteor Program, and asked whether the Alaskan observation might be a meteor. McCrosky said no, and specu­lated that the final stage of the Russian rocket was also in orbit. Whipple contacted the Russian IGY scientists in Moscow, who confirmed that the final rocket stage was indeed in space, trailing the satellite by about six hundred miles. The rocket was painted brightly and had the luminosity of a sixth-magnitude star—bright enough to be visible through binoculars. The official nomenclature for the rocket and Sputnik I gave them the names “1957 alpha one” and “1957 alpha two.” The rocket, being the brighter object, was “alpha one.”

Eventually, Whipple concluded that Sputnik I itself was probably painted black. Although he was wrong, it is doubtful that any of the ama­teurs ever spotted the satellite; their observations, about two thousand of them by the end of 1957, were probably all of the rocket. Certainly, the Baker-Nunn precision cameras never picked up Sputnik I, though special meteor cameras that McCrosky lent to Whipple until the Baker-Nunns were ready did acquire the satellite on Thanksgiving day.

The observatory published its first information of scientific quality October 14; the document was called The preliminary orbit information for satellites alpha one and alpha two. Later the Observatory issued regular pre­dictions of the time and longitude at which alpha one would cross the for­tieth parallel, heading north. More detailed information was available to Moonwatch teams so that they would know when to be at their telescopes to make observations.

One of the Springfield Moonwatchers was a teenager named Roger Harvey. On the evening of October 4, he was driving his father’s 1953 Ford back from Maryland, where he had picked up a mirror for a ten-inch telescope that he was building for a friend. He was listening to the radio. When he heard about the Russian satellite, he was exhilarated. Someone had really done it—sent a satellite into space. Now, he thought, we’ll see some action.

When President Eisenhower had announced that the United States would launch a satellite, Harvey and his fellow amateur astronomers had wondered what it would mean to them. They’d decided that they would establish an observing station on land owned by the president of their local astronomy club, Bob Dellar. Nowadays Springfield is part of the seemingly endless conurbation of Washington D. C. and northern Virginia. Then it was rural and had a beautifully dark sky for observing.

The group had modeled the layout of their observing station on one that they’d seen in Bethesda, Maryland. One weekend, they’d arranged the observing positions in a single straight line, extending on either side of a fourteen-foot high, T-shaped structure. Harvey thought that the T, which was made out of plumber’s pipe, looked like half of a wash-line support for the Jolly Green Giant. The six-foot crossbar was aligned with the merid­ian, with the north-south line immediately overhead. A light shone pre­cisely where the T crossed the upright. Like most of the Moonwatchers, they’d made their own telescopes, each of which had a 12-in. field of view. The fields of view overlapped one another by fifty per cent, so that it wouldn’t matter if one observer fell asleep or missed something.

If one of the team was lucky enough to see the satellite, he would hit a buzzer and call out the number of his observing station at the moment when the satellite crossed the meridian pole. Bob Dellar would have his double-headed recorder switched on. One channel would be recording the national time signal from a shortwave radio, while the other channel would record their buzzers and numbers. The T would determine the meridian; they knew their latitude and longitude; the double-headed tape would have recorded the time of the observation accurately; and they could work out the satellite’s elevation to within half a degree by measur­ing the distance between the central light and the point where the satellite crossed the meridian. Thus they would have elevation for a specific time and place. When they made an observation, Dellar would call the operator, speak the single word, Cambridge, and be put through to the observatory. After that it would be up to the professionals.

There had been dry runs. The Air Force had flown a plane overhead at roughly the right altitude and speed to simulate the satellite’s passage. The aircraft had trailed a stiff line with a light on the end. It was important that the Moonwatchers not see the light too soon, so the Air Force had taken the rubber cup from a bathroom plunger, threaded a loop through it to attach to the line to the aircraft, and put a small light and battery in the plunger. The practices had worked well. The plane had flown over with its navigation lights out, which, while strictly illegal, was necessary.

When Harvey got home, he was anxious to hear from Dellar. The arrangement was that the observatory would call team leaders with pre­dicted times that the satellite would cross the equator. Dellar would work out at what time the Moonwatchers needed to be at their telescopes. Of course, it would be a little different now, because it wasn’t their satellite and the observatory might not have good predictions. All the same, Har­vey was ready when Dellar called the next morning. For the next few weeks, Harvey lived at a high pitch of excitement. He felt himself part of history. Even the police seemed to be on his side. When he was stopped for speeding, he told the officer he was a Moonwatcher, and he was sent on his way without a ticket. The Springfield Moonwatchers felt great cama­raderie, and no one pulled rank. On cloudy nights, they would swear at the sky on the principle that if they generated enough heat, they would dissi­pate the clouds.

On the other side of the continent, in China Lake, California, the skies were much clearer and very, very dark—ideal for observing. Florence Hazeltine, a teenage girl, who was later to become one of the first doctors in the United States to use in vitro fertilization techniques, would bundle up against the cold and ride out on her bike to answer the same calls that drew Harvey to Dellar’s house. Like Harvey, she was buoyed by her sense of being part of history.

In Philadelphia, sixteen-year-old Henry Fliegel reported to the roof of the Franklin Institute. He wrote in his observing notes:

“On October 15, I saw with all the other members of the station a starlike object move across the sky from the vicinity of the pole star across Ursa Major to Western Leo. It attained a magnitude of at least zero when in Ursa Major, but then rapidly faded and finally became too dim to see when still considerably above the horizon, disappearing very near the star Omicron Leonis.”

The Philadelphia Moonwatchers had seen Sputnik’s rocket. When the news hit the papers, sightseers and reporters turned up and sat at the telescopes, sometimes taking the telescopes out of their sockets as soon as anything appeared.

Elsewhere, the initial confusion was beginning to sort itself out. By the fifteenth, the first precision camera was nearly ready to begin opera­tion. Moonwatchers deluged Cambridge with news of sightings. These were of the rocket, but it didn’t matter. It was a body in orbit and the teams were honing their skills. Engineers were ironing out the inevitable wrinkles of the Minitrack system.

The space age was underway.

I remember that when we were working towards Telstar, Harold Rosen and some colleagues came to visit. He was arguing for a geosynchronous satellite and putting forward every reason he could think of. I thought he was a whippersnapper, that he was

just saying anything he could to get support______ He turned out

to be an inspired electrical and mechanical designer.

—John Pierce to author, speaking about Harold Rosen on October 2, 1995.

Looking back, you have to admire them.

—Robert Davies, chief scientist at Ford Aerospace, formerly with Philco, in an interview with the author.

at Hyland is one of those people who are referred to as larger than life.

He died in 1992 at the age of 95, having lived in a world where gals were gals and alcohol had yet to be banished from the corporate board­room. In his time, he made some spectacular mistakes, succeeded spectacu­larly, and knew and influenced the “great and the good.” By 1958, he was running (and rescuing) the Hughes Aircraft Company, operating, so he recalls, an open-door policy through which any of his staff could walk. Through that door, one morning, walked Harold Rosen and Donald Williams.

This is how Hyland recalled the story in 1989.

He had known that Rosen and Williams, who were comparatively junior engineers, had some “harebrained” scheme for putting up a satellite, and that they thought it was pretty good but couldn’t get anyone to spon­sor it, and that it was going to cost a lot of money. Hyland, therefore, had not been surprised when they wanted to talk to him.

“Harold got up to the easel, like that, and drew all the stuff out and explained it. … I think I understood what he was talking about pretty well, although I can’t describe it… and they seemed pretty confident
about what they were doing. .. and they told me it had to go up on the equator, or very near to it. . . .”

Hyland realized that Rosen and Williams were saying they would need to put a launch site on Christmas Island. Recalling that Christmas Island was British territory, he seized on this as his defense, pointing out that Britain was not notable as a place that let people in, especially out­siders that might be in competition with them.

. you can’t get on the damn island with any heavy equipment; it’s a rockbound coast, and it’s going to be very hard to get at, and it’s going to take a lot of money, and furthermore.. .”

Hyland was, he remembers, beginning to like the sound of his own voice, “talking about these immense things, you know, and I convinced myself that what I was saying was true, and I thought that I had convinced them.” Rosen and Williams retreated.

And regrouped.

Hyland, in the meantime, was not happy at having discouraged two young engineers with innovative ideas. He needn’t have worried. Shortly afterwards, Williams turned up with a check for $10,000, saying that this was his contribution to the development of the communications satellite and that colleagues wanted to contribute too.

“Well,” said Hyland, “this posed a real problem because this guy was really serious. I had met him two or three times in the interval; he was a great guy, a magnificent mind, and I was kind of flabbergasted inside, but I couldn’t do anything about it because I knew this guy was serious and that somehow or other I’d have to put it in a palatable form.” Hyland had learned “how to do a hell of a lot of talking without saying anything,” and he did so now, stalling until he made a decision. In making that decision Hyland says that he found out what his job in running the company should be.

“I could no longer keep up with them. I was a pretty good engineer in my day and time… but the art had gone beyond me, and the contribu­tion I could make was to provide… an environment in which young guys like that should work. I was no longer capable firsthand of making deci­sions of that sort. They had made the decisions about what they could do, and I had to back it up or deny it. So, I decided to back it up.”

And Hyland did back the project. Rosen and Williams were vindi­cated. Their satellite was built and launched. The Hughes Aircraft Com­pany is now the world’s largest manufacturer of satellites.

How accurate is Hyland’s recollection of events? It contains a lot of truth, in essence if not literally: Without Hyland’s support, the satellite would not have progressed beyond paper studies; Rosen and Williams were brilliant engineers; they (and Tom Hudspeth) did offer to invest $10,000 of their own money in the development; and Hyland did allow engineers room to do their job.

The whole story, though, is both more and less colorful, and Rosen and Williams needed far more persistence than Hyland’s recollection demonstrates.

The Hughes Aircraft Company was not one of the first to see com­mercial promise in the space age. The company’s executives watched with amusement, perhaps with a little schadenfreude, the tribulations experi­enced by the Vanguard team. Even after Sputnik I was launched, satellites did not immediately seem to promise great business opportunities. Their launch vehicles failed routinely. Satellites that did reach space did not attain their nominal orbits. They tumbled. Their components failed.

But at the beginning of 1958, the Advanced Projects Research Agency was formed, and later in the year, NASA came into being. Com­panies like RCA, Lockheed, General Electric, Ford Aerospace, and Philco were exploring the opportunities that satellites offered. Scientists and the Department of Defense were keen to exploit the new frontier. The Soviet Union’s achievements challenged the nation’s sense of itself.

So by 1959, when Harold Rosen was asked to think of new business ventures to replace the radar contracts that Hughes was losing, space was an obvious area to consider. Rosen discussed the situation with Tom Hud­speth, who as a keen amateur radio operator knew of the parlous state of international communications and of the upcoming solar minimum. Rosen talked, too, with John Mendel. Both wondered whether communi­cations satellites might not be the thing to get involved with. Both men were to make crucial contributions to Rosen’s proposal for a twenty-four – hour satellite.

Rosen also talked with Don Williams, whose contribution to the twenty-four-hour satellite was to be the subject of a thirty-year patent bat­tle between Hughes and the government, Intelsat, and Ford Aerospace. Hughes won the battle in the mid 1990s.

Williams, by all accounts, was brilliant, technically very broad, but socially a little narrow. He saddened colleagues and friends when he killed himself in 1966. Bob Roney, who recruited him to Hughes, said, “You asked me if I could remember where I was when Sputnik was launched. I can’t. But I remember that day, when I heard about Don.”

Williams applied to Hughes from Harvard. The position he was interested in had already been filled, but Roney, after reading his resume, decided that “this was not the sort of person you waited until a vacancy came up to employ.” Roney offered Williams a job. But then Williams, whose legacy of memos and technical notes suggest an acutely active and restive intellect, left Hughes to set up his own business with an entrepre­neurial friend. There was some story at the time about bugs in Coca Cola bottles, recalled Roney. Williams and his friend developed an inspection device for bottles and were doing quite well.

Rosen watched and waited. When he sensed that Williams was ready to return to Hughes, Rosen set about enticing him back. Hughes had heard from its Washington office that there was a need for radar to detect Soviet satellites. “We wanted to build a giant radar that would look up into the sky and determine an orbit very quickly, and I knew that Don, who was a wonderful mathematician, would be really great at this work. And besides, he was the only one I knew who had any training in astronomy— it was a kind of astronomical problem. So I figured he’d be good for the job, and that’s how I lured him back into the company. I told him that space was really hot.”

Nothing came of this project, but Williams became interested in nav­igation satellites and started to think about geostationary orbits. This was a problem that interested Allen Puckett, one of Hughes’s senior executives, who would take over the company when Hyland retired.

Rosen, in the meantime, had searched the sparse literature on com­munications satellites and had found an article by John Pierce that pre­dicted that it would be decades before communications satellites could operate from geostationary orbit. Pierce was perhaps hampered by his more intimate knowledge of the unfolding debacle that would be Advent and his concerns about whether people would find the time delay and echoes intolerable. Unhampered by these doubts, Rosen was convinced that the job could be done much sooner. Knowing ofWilliams’s interest in geostationary orbits he went to talk to him, and the two began working on some ideas for a twenty-four-hour satellite. Thus a formidable engineering partnership was born, with Rosen as the senior partner. Rosen decided that Hughes should develop a small, lightweight, spin-stabilized communi­cations satellite for a twenty-four-hour orbit that could be developed and launched in a year on an existing, comparatively cheap launch vehicle. His suggestion today would be about as revolutionary as observing that cars might have a significant role to play in transportation. In September 1959, his idea was provocative.

The most important decision Rosen made was that the satellite would attain and maintain its stabilities by spinning.

The only other method of stabilizing a satellite in a twenty-four- hour orbit is by spinning wheels arranged internally on each orthogonal axis—three-axis stabilization. For various technical reasons, which hold true for satellites constructed with today’s technology, three-axis stabiliza­tion is the better choice for large satellites in a geostationary orbit. Even Hughes, which built its reputation by taking spinners to their design limits, now makes three-axis stabilized communications satellites.

To the military, which in 1959 was sponsoring the only twenty- four-hour satellite, three-axis stabilization seemed like a good idea. A three-axis stabilized, twenty-four-hour satellite keeps its antennas point­ing directly toward the earth and its solar cells oriented towards the sun. Thus high-gain directional antennas can be mounted, and all the solar cells provide power. By contrast, a spinner in 1959, before the days of de­spun antenna platforms, needed an antenna that radiated a signal in all directions, thus dissipating a lot of power to space, and because it was spinning, only about a third of its solar cells could be directed toward the sun at any time.

On the face of it, then, there were good reasons for the Army’s deci­sion to make its twenty-four-hour satellite a three-axis stabilized space­craft. Nevertheless, the choice was a poor one given the technology of the day. First, three-axis stabilized spacecraft below a certain size are more complex than comparable spinners. Second, the twenty-four-hour satellite (which would be called Advent) relied on triodes, which are weighter than transistors. Finally, the limitations of the existing launch vehicles and guid­ance and control made weight an even more critical consideration than it is today.

By choosing spin-stabilization, Rosen automatically saved weight compared with a three-axis stabilized satellite of comparable size. There were immediate weight savings—in the thermal subsystem, for example.

Having decided on a spinner, Rosen was left facing the difficult issue of how to provide a detectable signal from an omnidirectional antenna at geosynchronous altitude. What they realized was that they could provide a usable signal if they selected an antenna that radiated a signal like a giant doughnut rather than the spherical signal of an omnidirectional antenna. Such an antenna would yield higher gain than an omnidirectional antenna even if the gain were not as high as that of the focused antenna that can be mounted on an three-axis stabilized spacecraft.

If the signal were to be usable, however, the satellite, which would be spinning on injection into orbit, had to be stopped (de-spun), turned through ninety degrees, and spun up with its antenna correctly oriented with respect to the earth. Then it had to be moved into position and to keep that position (station keeping). One of the ingenious aspects of the Hughes twenty-four-hour satellite was how this attitude control and sta­tion keeping were achieved, and the enabling technology was the subject of the controversial Williams patent.

Williams’ idea took advantage of the fact that the satellite was spin­ning. The Williams patent describes a satellite with two thrusters, one radial and one axial. These could be controlled from the ground and instructed to expel compressed nitrogen, say, during carefully calculated portions of successive revolutions. These spin-phased thrusts would thus move the satellite to the desired attitude or position in orbit. The spin – phased pulses were Rosen’s idea, but it was Williams who developed the concept into a feasible technical solution.

In addition to being lighter and simpler than the elaborate system of station keeping and attitude control employed by three-axis stabilized spacecraft, the Rosen-Williams approach had no need of a complex sys­tem to deliver the fuel to the thrusters, because the satellite’s centrifugal force did the job.

That Rosen should consider a spinner was not that surprising. In his days at Caltech, which he had selected not because of its academic reputa­tion but because of an article in Life about Southern California beach par­ties, Rosen became intrigued by the dynamics of spinning bodies. Sid Metzger, then at RCA, who later headed Comsat’s engineering division, said that when RCA’s engineers heard about the Hughes spinner they could have kicked themselves for overlooking this approach.

The electronics in the Rosen—Williams proposal were equally important. First, John Mendel suggested that the traveling wave tube’s magnet should comprise a row of tiny ceramic magnets, which would weigh less than a solid magnet. Tom Hudspeth’s goal was to ensure that this was the only tube in the satellite, which in 1959 was a tall order. His toughest job was finding a way to provide the local oscillator that con­verted their uplink frequency of five hundred megacycles to a downlink frequency of two kilomegacycles (more familiar today as two gigahertz). Transistors did not work at these frequencies, so he used transistors that operated at lower frequencies and designed a cascade of frequency multi­pliers into what Rosen calls “a genius geometry.” Hudspeth is a reticent man who says little about those early days and even finds it depressing to talk of the past. Nevertheless, he still had one of these early frequency mul­tipliers in a brown paper bag under a desk in his lab.

Rosen and Williams wrote up their proposal for a twenty-four-hour satellite in September 1959, the same month that Leroy Tillotson sent his proposal for a medium-altitude active repeater to Bell’s research depart­ment. On September 25, Rosen’s immediate superior Frank Carver, who had asked Rosen to think of new business ventures, took the proposal to Allen Puckett, a senior executive. Though not immediately convinced, Puckett did not kill the idea. In October, Rosen and Williams’s proposal, “Preliminary design analysis for a commercial communication satellite,” was circulating internally. It contained the principles that would become Syncom, though they were embodied in what would seem to today’s eyes to be an unfamiliar design. The satellite, a spinner, was to be a cube seven­teen inches on each side because, because, they argued, a cube was easier than a cylinder to construct. It would be equipped with a gun and bullets or powder charges capable of imparting four different thrusts for station keeping. The gun would be triggered from the ground at the moment in a revolution that would impart the necessary velocity correction. The gun could be either “an automatic type firing multiple shots from a single bar­rel, or a multiple-barrel device using electric primers.” An amended pro­posal envisaged bullets or charges capable of imparting sixteen increments of thrust. Not until early 1960 did the satellite begin to look familiar to a modern eye. By then it was cylindrical and expelled compressed nitrogen for attitude control and station keeping.

They were not sure in their first proposal whether they needed to correct for lunisolar gravity, but they had calculated how much the satellite would drift if they did not get quite the right velocity for a geosynchro­nous altitude.

Thomas Hudspeth, Harold A. Rosen and Donald D. Williams pose with the Syncom satellite they pioneered and which led to the era of commercial communication satellites. Dr. Williams holds the travelling wavetube that was a crucial component of the satellite.

The satellite, they said, would weigh twenty pounds, be developed in a year, and cost $5 million. It would have sufficient bandwidth for either TV transmission or 100 two-way telephone channels. The weight grew during the next few years, but still Syncom was about a tenth of the pro­jected weight of Advent.

Like Pierce, Rosen wanted to exclude the government and to keep the twenty-four-hour satellite as a private business venture. The proposal suggested that Hughes should build a launch site on Jarvis Island (not Christmas Island), close to the equator, and buy some Scout rockets to launch the satellite.

“When Harold came up with the idea,” said Roney, “there was inter­nal tension. Some people in the communications lab thought it should be theirs, not over m the radar lab.” But not Samuel Lutz, who headed the communications lab. “He was,” says Roney, “fascinated by Harolds work.” He was also deeply ambivalent.

During 1956 and 1957, Lutz had presented his own ideas for com­munications satellites to Hughes’s executives. Amused as they were by Vanguard, the executives concluded that Lutz’s ideas were romantic. He was, however, an obvious person to examine the concepts outlined in the Rosen-Williams proposal. From the beginning he saw the innovativeness of what Rosen and Williams were doing, but then he would fret that the design was “far from conservative.” Sometimes he saw market opportuni­ties; at other times he was skeptical of Hughes’s involvement in a field that AT&T dominated with such assurance. As for Rosen’s plans for live inter­national television, he had profound doubts.

“Undeniably,” he wrote on October 1, 1959, “they [live TV pro­grams] would have novelty and propaganda value, and there always would be occasional events of international interest. Many race-crazy Europeans would stay up all night to watch our Indianapolis races, while some of our wives might get up before breakfast to watch a live coronation or royal wedding—but not very often. … Most of the few programs of interna­tional interest are already being flown by jet or transmitted at slowed down rates via cable, with the time difference in its favor. Thus Rosen’s estimate of an hour per day of TV revenue appears optimistic. An hour per week seems more realistic. …”

Nine days later, Lutz was one of five people given two weeks to review the proposal. Rosen was the chairman of the small panel. By Octo­ber 12, they had made good technical progress but were struggling with the economics. On October 22, they concluded unanimously that the project was technically feasible in close to the time and price suggested and that it should not encounter any legal or technical problems. Mendel’s assurance that the travelling wave tube was feasible won Lutz’s backing.

They said that the economics needed further study, but that popula­tion increase, the shrinkage of travel time via commercial jet, increasing foreign industrialization and international commerce, and the forthcoming decrease in high-frequency communication because of solar minimum all made the proposal economically attractive.

Four days later the plan was put to Hyland. He ordered “an immedi­ate and comprehensive study of patentability” and an inquiry to determine NASA’s position with respect to commercial rights. From the beginning Hyland wanted the satellite to be a government rather than private project.

On October 29, 1959, Hyland learned that there might be pat­entability in the attitude control and station keeping method, and the company’s lawyer advised that it should be reduced to practice before any presentation was made to NASA; otherwise, NASA might seek to patent anything made during a contract with them.

On November 2, Rosen and Williams signed an invention disclosure that stated, “a series of discrete impulses obtained from the recoil of a mul­tiple shotgun are used to provide vernier velocity control and position adjustments.” Three days later, Williams traveled to Washington to brief Homer Joe Stewart. Williams, wrote Edgar Morse in a NASA historical document m 1964, was “very conscious of Hughes commercial plans and began by establishing that Hughes would not lose its proprietary and patent rights by having the discussions.” Williams’s caution, as three decades of litigation show, was well placed.

On his return to Culver City, Williams immersed himself in work stemming from Stewart’s critique. Allen Puckett approached Roney to conduct another review. Puckett was fascinated but was hearing technical criticisms and cautions that communications satellites were a bad idea politically for Hughes. Could he, Puckett asked Roney, stake his reputation on this idea?

To men of Rosen’s and Williams’s disposition these and other studies must have been a sore trial. Rosen was not a diplomat. Even though the satellite was his idea, it was Allen Puckett, not Rosen, who carried news to congressional hearings. “No one in their right minds,” said Roney, “would have let Harold testify. He was volatile.” And once the twenty-four-hour satellite had become Project Syncom, C. Gordon Murphy was the project leader, Rosen the project scientist. Gordon Murphy was needed, it seems, because by then, “Harold had alienated so many people in Washington.” The memory, when Roney talks, is clearly affectionate.

Nor was Rosen much more conciliatory within Hughes. When the company decided in January 1961 that it would respond to NASA’s request for proposals for Relay, Rosen would have nothing to do with it, nor with the company’s bid for Advent. Williams was equally unbiddable and bombarded Hyland with memos critical of the company’s policy.

As 1959 turned to 1960 what patience they had was already being severely tested. They had up until then done their work with discretionary funds. To go further they needed the company to adopt the project.

On December 1, 1959, Hyland decided not to commit funds “at this time.” Rosen, Williams, and Hudspeth were not acquiescent, nor were they clear about what he could do, but they decided to put up $10,000 each of their own money and to seek outside support. “I invited John Mendel to join us but he didn’t have the, uh, he said he wasn’t gutsy,” said Rosen. They tapped any contacts they could think of. Rosen had a friend who was the chief engineer at Mattel. “Mattel had just come in to a lot of money with a Barbie doll. And I thought they might be looking for some good investments. It turned out they weren’t. They invested in Ken instead.” Hudspeth had a more likely contact in the aerospace industry who had hit it big on some company. “That was frustrating, because he led us on a little bit, but he was really full of hot air,” said Rosen.

No one was biting. “Those were the days,” recalled Rosen, “when our boosters used to blow up in front of the television regularly.” Rosen “stewed and brooded.” Then he contacted his old boss, Tom Phillips, at Raytheon. In February 1960, Rosen and Williams flew to Boston. Yvonne Getting, later head of the Aerospace Corporation, was there, and he was skeptical about the whole idea. “He didn’t even want us to talk to him about it, because he thought we’d get involved in future patent disputes. He eventually listened, but I don’t think he was very enthusiastic.”

But Tom Phillips was, and he told Rosen and Williams that if they would come and work for him, he would give the project his personal attention. Phillips was, at that time, on his way to becoming the president of Raytheon. They also met Charles Francis Adams, who was running Raytheon. Phillips tweaked Rosen and Williams about Howard Hughes, saying, “here you are talking to the president of Raytheon when you haven’t even seen the president of your own company”

Back in Culver City, Rosen told Frank Carver that he was going to work for Tom Phillips. Carver immediately took him to see Allen Puckett, who took him to see Pat Hyland. Who knows whether Rosen’s machina­tions won the day, but, says Rosen, “Mr. Hyland said he was going to sup­port us right here at Hughes, which was great. I was really happy to hear that.” When Rosen told Williams of Hyland’s response, Williams sent his cheque for $10,000 to Hyland asking whether he could invest his money in the new Hughes project.

Hyland authorized an in-house project to develop the spacecraft and the traveling wave tube amplifier on March 1, 1960. He would not order a booster or sign a contract for a launcher. All the same, Williams took a trip to Jarvis Island, where “he got some very nice photographs of birds,” recalls Rosen.

When Hyland authorized the in-house project, Rosen, Williams, and Hudspeth asked the company to release them from their usual patent agreement if Hughes decided not to develop the satellite. Puckett was sympathetic. But in the end, there was no need to release them. Once they were committed to the project, Hyland and Puckett were wholehearted in their support and in their efforts to sell the satellite to the government.

During two trips to Wisconsin in the summer of 1992,1 spent many hours interviewing Verner Suomi. He provided a lot of background and color to the early story of meteorology satellites. True to his experi­menter’s approach to life, he was at the time trying a novel therapy fol­lowing three heart operations. He had the same degree of curiosity about the experiment he was participating in as he had in his meteorological work.

Others interviewed for this section include

Dave Johnson, Robert White, Joseph Smagorinsky, Pierre Morel, P. Krishna Rao, Bob Sheets, Leo Skille, Bob Sutton, and Bob Ohckers.

When I interviewed P. Krishna Rao and Bob Sheets, I was considering writing a book that brought the story of meteorology satellites right up to date. In the end, that wasn’t possible but these interviews helped give me a sense of the evolution of the technology, and what I learned from them is, I hope, implicitly present in this section.

All of us living beings belong together.

—Erwin Schrodinger

hat does the space age offer, and what might it yet be? Perhaps it is no more than an age in which new tools and weapons expand our knowledge and ability to trade and fight wars. A glorified Stone, Bronze, or Iron Age, during which our usual activities will be different only in that they extend beyond Earths atmosphere. Or is the space age essentially dif­ferent; was the launch of Sputnik I the turning point Tsiolkovsky predicted when he wrote of mankind leaving the earth in pursuit of light and space? Not Russians, Chinese, Frenchmen, or Americans, but mankind, building cities together in space, as he advocated in his science fiction book Beyond the Earth.

Space clearly has defense and commercial implications. On the other hand, the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe, and Japan are joindy planning an international space station. The beginning of Tsiolkovsky s vision? Perhaps.

From the beginning, the space age has been home to a well-known threesome: science, human exploration (of which the international space station is the most recent example), and the application of science to mili­tary and commercial technologies for Earth. One might expect that the first two, science and exploration, would be the aspects of the space age that would lead toward Tsiolkovsky s vision of a unified humanity. But maybe space science and exploration are not so different in the ways that they can influence our outlook than are science and engineering in other arenas of endeavor—the international effort to map the human genome, for example, or all of the exploration that humanity has undertaken to date. Perhaps in the end it will be the third, at first glance the least different and least glamorous aspect of the space age, that will contribute most to an alternative outlook on the world.

Both space science and exploration have caught our attention with the vastness of their aspiration. Pioneers 10 and 11, the first spacecraft to be sent to study the outer planets, have done their job. Pioneer 10 is now rac­ing down the sun’s magnetotail, heading for the interstellar medium and away from the galactic center. Pioneer 11 is heading for the interstellar
medium with the galactic center lying beyond. (William Pickering and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, incidentally, contributed significantly to these early successes of NASA.) The whole was grandly conceived and has since been surpassed by spacecraft with even grander ambitions.

The Pioneers each carry plaques with drawings of a man and a woman, showing their size with respect to the spacecraft. There is a draw­ing of a hydrogen atom (intended to show our familiarity with the most abundant gas in the universe, but also—unintentionally—a symbol of one of our more devastating weapons). Two other drawings give the space­crafts path through the solar system from Earth and show our sun’s posi­tion relative to fourteen pulsars—messages launched from a remote island in space to unknown recipients who may never receive them and, if they do, may not understand them. The urge is familiar, as is the spirit of that blithe inclusion of a return address and the need to believe that the addressees, if they are in a position to respond, are essentially benevolent.

What might that expectation of benevolence be based on? Humility in the face of eternity? “Eternity… like a great ring of pure and endless light”; the awe expressed in Henry Vaughan’s lines written three centuries ago appeared on the faces of the mission controllers in Houston as they gazed at the pictures that the Apollo spacecraft had relayed to Earth of Earth.

Here was form for a poetic metaphor. Yet the view of Earth against the blackness was so spectacular that it has itself become a metaphor.

Science and exploration cannot sustain poetic awe in this or any other age, for all their glamor and beauty.

So what does the application of space technology to solving earth – bound concerns have to offer? When men looked to Earth (women were, for the most part, still waiting in the wings in 1957) and asked what value the space age might have, they thought about tasks they had thought about for millennia: among others, navigation, weather forecasting, and commu­nication—enterprises that in the tradition of previous ages improve the quality of life and facilitate warfare. The hilltop fire flashes news of a battle or of the birth of a child. The general and the farmer have always wanted the weather forecast. Both the master of a merchantman and the captain of a nuclear submarine benefit from better navigational aids.

Of the men and few women who did these things, some were more brilliant than others. Some worked with passionate belief or fascination, others to pay the mortgage. Some had an eye to the main chance, aware that there was money to be made, reputations to be built. Most, doubtless, reconciled more purposes than one. Nor is it possible to say who held what motives in what proportion. At the best of times, the motives of oth­ers are difficult to discern and classify. Across time, in a different world, the task is almost impossible. Certainly those in America believed in the importance of their work to the welfare of the United States of America.

The world of 1957 gave good cause for such an outlook. When James Reston interviewed Nikita Khrushchev for the New York Times after the launch of Sputnik, Khrushchev’s speech was littered in all seriousness with descriptions of Westerners as reactionary bourgeois and imperialist warmongers. The background noise included Korea, the Suez crisis, the Hungarian revolution, hydrogen bombs, and advertisements for nuclear shelters in suburban backyards. The searing images then were of the Holo­caust and of atrocities in China.

The memory to be lived with and the crucible that formed the par­ticipants and in which relationships were forged, was the Second World War. Nearly every nation on Earth was involved. Pearl Harbor had been an unimaginable shock to the American psyche, and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were known but not fully realized. Some Ameri­cans saw those atomic bombings mainly as a reprieve from witnessing fur­ther horrors in the Pacific.

Against this background, when Vietnam, with its legacy of doubt was a thing of the future, America developed a determination to keep the peace through military and economic strength. In defense laboratories, university departments, and industry, scientists and engineers developed satellites that would improve navigation, weather forecasting, and communication. Each now has its place in everyday civilian life as well as in defense.

The military application of providing more accurate positioning for nuclear submarines was the impetus behind the development of navigation satellites. Today, there are more civilian than military users of space-based navigation. This trend began with Transit, the long-lived first generation of navigation satellites. A similar duality exists in the history of communica­tion and weather satellites. Ostensibly, commercial and military applica­tions were developed separately, but the scientists and engineers working on civilian satellites often worked on military projects as well. There was an inevitable cross-fertilization of ideas.

These satellites, pointing to the earth, were truly earthbound in their conception and inception. They were rooted deeply and consciously in defense and commerce and the competition of nations—no transcending idea of mankind in pursuit of light and space. Yet unexpectedly, and in practical ways, these technologies are building from the messy foundations of confused human motives a picture of the earth and its inhabitants that is harder to dismiss in daily life than are the inspirational views revealed by Apollo. Wonderful though that inspiration is, the mundane application satellites are beginning—only beginning—to encourage a practical appre­ciation of one Earth.

The hurricane that devastates the eastern seaboard of the United States begins as an innocuous atmospheric disturbance over Africa. Navi­gation satellites can be used worldwide. Satellites make communication possible with places landlocked among political enemies (as in some African countries) or from war and disaster zones that we might otherwise be able to ignore. Faced by the reality of global physical phenomena as revealed by the unique bird’s-eye view of satellites, international organiza­tions have sprung up to manage satellites. At the height of the Cold War, ideological enemies cooperated with varying degrees of amity within groups like the International Telecommunication Satellite Organization and the World Meteorological Organization.

Thus these inward-looking satellites offer more than we have yet realized. They are for the first time, and in a very practical sense, a technol­ogy that can be fully realized only by considering the earth as an intercon­nected whole. On October 4, 1957, the first step was taken. Later, as the technology of navigation, weather, and communication satellites evolved, it became clear that the greatest gains or advances in knowledge would come from a holistic view of the world. Of course, the knowledge gained can still serve confrontational purposes. Yet, irrespective of our motives, we see that the nature of the technology itself urges cooperation rather than confrontation. Cooperation might become a habit that sustains the promise inherent in Apollo’s luminous images of a blue-green earth.

Navigation

4 4 Л /e had from our first presentation improved the control system У У quite a lot and we continued to improve it over the years. We got it down to two thrusters; then we started to work on the precession capabilities of one thruster. I had at first thought it would take four, but Don had come back very quickly with a major improvement. We had four for redundancy, but we still could precess it with one jet. NASA was skep­tical about the single-pulse thruster.” Thus Rosen thirty years later.

NASA, which had some contact with Hughes in February 1960, was skeptical about considerably more than the single-pulse thruster. Rosen had proposed that the inexpensive Scout rocket, which Richard Kershner also favored for Transit, should launch the twenty-four-hour satellite. In the same month that Hyland authorized an in-house program, NASA’s Langley Research Center completed an analysis of the Scout rocket, and concluded that it could not place a twenty-five-pound satellite (the Rosen-Williams satellite had now grown from twenty pounds and would put on more weight, but not as much as Advent) in a twenty-four-hour orbit. Nor could any other launch vehicle.

But Puckett and Hyland were now supportive. Puckett coordinated the marketing, keeping Hyland informed of his progress. There were approaches to GTE (a common carrier) and CBS, attempting to promote interest in the idea of a communications satellite, and to E. G. Witting, the director of research and development in the Department of the Army.

On April 1, 1960, Puckett briefed Herb York, formerly the head of the Advanced Projects Research Agency, now the director of defense research and engineering, and John Rubel’s boss.

In May, the month that the first attempt to launch Echo failed, Williams was immersed in dynamic analyses of the satellite. Rosen was preparing another proposal, specifying Thor-Delta, which had a greater lift capability than Scout, as the launch vehicle. Hughes sent an unsolicited copy of the revised proposal to NASA on June 15, 1960. NASA, however, was confined to work on passive satellites at the time by its agreement with the Department of Defense.

In July, AT&T disclosed its $170 million plan for a constellation of fifty medium-altitude satellites and argued that the Federal Communica­tions Commission should reserve frequencies for satellite communication. Williams was as usual preoccupied with engineering, this time concentrat­ing on calculations of moments of inertia. Hughes made a presentation soliciting support to the space science panel of the president’s science advi­sory committee. They received a polite letter of thanks, but no encourage­ment.

In the meantime, Hughes’ man in Washington had also been busy. He knew one of Vice President Nixon’s bodyguards, and the vice president, said Rosen, owed the bodyguard a favor. He arranged for Hughes to make a presentation to the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who told them that they looked like nice people—surely they didn’t want to get mixed up with politics. They did, however, get a meeting with NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan out of the encounter. “So you can see,” said Rosen, “we were grasping at straws.”

In August, the policy confining NASA to work on passive commu­nications satellites was formally abandoned. Within days, John Pierce and senior AT&T executives briefed NASA on Bell’s experimental active satel­lite plans. On the same day, Hughes executives, by now contemplating a joint venture, had another meeting with GTE.

A few days later Puckett, in the meeting that resulted from the encounter with Hall of the Republican National Committee, briefed the NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan. Glennan said that Puckett was talking through his hat and recommended that Hughes work on medium – altitude satellites.

Glennan’s comment must be judged in context. NASA’s Langley Research Center concluded that the Hughes proposal was marginal, and the new agreement with the Defense Department, signed only days earlier, would soon preclude NASA from involvement in communications satel­lites in twenty-four-hour orbits.

Despite Glennan’s negativity, NASA’s head of communication satel­lites, Leonard Jaffe visited Hughes on September 1. To Samuel Lutz, it looked as though Rosen and the supporters of a twenty-four-hour satellite now thought that they had a NASA contract in the bag. If they did, they either did not know some important things, for example the agreement between NASA and the Defense Department, or there was a high degree of wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, Puckett was hearing negative views from colleagues within the company. Critical memos reached him saying that Hughes was presenting a fragmentary approach to potential military customers and that the best role for Hughes was as a supplier to AT&T. On the other side of the country, at AT&T’s corporate headquarters in New York, the issue of the Hughes repeater surfaced at a meeting of Bell’s engineers on Sep­tember 1, 1960. A report of the meeting says “Hughes is supposed to have an ingenious twenty-pound repeater (TV bandwidth is claimed).” Those at the meeting agreed that if the repeater was any good, Bell should try to obtain it for trial.

The supporters of the twenty-four-hour satellite within Hughes continued to try to involve GTE, and GTE’s technical staff spent four days at Hughes in early September. They made no commitments, but Rosen sensed that GTE would join Hughes. At Hyland’s request, Hughes briefed the RAND Corporation. Puckett warned his people to say nothing about the discussions with GTE. And later that September, John Rubel, who had worked at Hughes before moving to the Office of the Director of Research and Engineering in May 1959, visited his old workplace. Puckett had already briefed Herb York about the Hughes twenty-four-hour satel­lite in April, and presumably, Rubel now learned more.

On October 2, in a meeting that must have been full of tension, Rosen, Williams, and Hudspeth briefed the engineers at Bell. Among those present were John Pierce and Leroy Tillotson. As Pierce listened he became convinced that Rosen was a wild-eyed dreamer, willing to say anything to sell his satellite.

Shortly afterwards, Witting, the Army’s R&D director, wrote to Hughes. He was unapologetically dismissive of the Hughes proposal and fluent in his condemnation of the weaknesses of many of the satellite’s sys­tems. Rosen was infuriated. He called Witting and wrote a deeply sarcastic letter, pointing out the errors in Witting’s evaluation. Just under a year later, Witting’s successor would respond to this letter, reaffirming every­thing that Witting had said. It was written on the day that NASA, sup­ported by the Department of Defense, placed a sole-source contract with Hughes for a twenty-four-hour satellite.

In November 1960, Puckett, Rosen, and Williams briefed ITT, Gen­eral Bernard Schriever, the British military, and Stanford Research Labora­tory. At the Cosmos Club in Washington D. C., Puckett talked enthusiasti­cally of the proposal to Lee DuBridge, the president of Caltech. But, despite the flurry of technical and marketing activities; the optimism and confidence of Rosen, Williams, and Hudspeth; and the support of Hyland and Puckett, the Hughes Aircraft Company was by the end of the year no further for­ward. No one wanted their satellite. GTE had made no more moves towards a joint venture. By the next spring, GTE would be in partnership with RCA and Lockheed, and that group would be proposing its own ideas for satellites in a twenty-four-hour orbit. Hughes had no contract, nor any likelihood of a contract, with NASA, which was bound by its agreement with the Defense Department not to develop twenty-four-hour satellites. The Army had rejected them, and in such a comprehensively dismissive way that there could be no hope remaining from that quarter. The Air Force said that the proposal was marginal and overoptimistic with regard to payload capability. These two branches of the military were engaged in one of their frequent skirmishes, with control of the development of communications satellites the disputed territory. Rosen’s proposal would not have been welcome.

Rather desperately, or so it seemed to some within the company, Hughes announced late in 1960 that it had an off-the-shelf satellite for sale. During the three months at the beginning of 1960 when Hyland had had the project on ice, Rosen, Williams, and Hudspeth had continued their work. Hudspeth had worked on breadboards for the electronics, while Rosen and Williams refined the mechanical structure and ideas about the satellite’s control mechanism. As soon as Hyland had given the go-ahead, they’d put together a little project lab and started making things. In May, Hughes had begun construction, and by the fall, they’d demonstrated the control mechanism in the lab and had tested the satellite’s ability to trans­mit television signals. Thus, with their ideas embodied in hardware, they sought a wider audience. They demonstrated the satellite in December at a meeting of the American Rocket Society.

During the winter of 1960 — 61, very few people were working on the satellite. Bob Roney wrote to Puckett seeking assurances that there would be money in the coming year for further development. Puckett, however, was under pressure to switch the Hughes effort to medium-altitude satellites and to bid in the forthcoming NASA competition for Project Relay. NASA put out its request for proposals in January, and with the same reluctance that characterized AT&T’s response, Hughes prepared to compete. Rosen and Williams remained aloof.

Yet the tide of their fortunes was changing, had probably been chang­ing all through that dismal Christmas in a way that is discernable only with hindsight. Between October 1960 and March 1961, three Centaurs blew up, which set back the Centaur development schedule and thus the sched­ule for Advent, the Army’s twenty-four-hour satellite. There were several downward revisions of the amount of payload that Centaur could lift, yet Advent was getting heavier. John Rubel, of DDR&D, was unhappy about these things and knew that the Department of Defense needed improved communications. Rubel had also visited Hughes in September 1960, and must have learned more about the twenty-four-hour satellite, and he respected Harold Rosen’s work. Together these events and Rubel’s attitude must have influenced circumstances in favor of the Hughes satellite.

An early indication of the changing tide came when Rosen was asked to brief the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) on January 11, 1961, about the Hughes twenty-four-hour satellite. The IDA was evaluat­ing communications satellites for the Office of the Director of Research Engineering. Rosen’s report of the meeting, written the next day, records that the IDA made generally favorable remarks about his presentation and was critical of Advent. He wrote that one panel member had said that pro­gram managers apparently placed more faith in the development of the Centaur rocket than of a traveling wave tube, and that the panel member did not consider the attitude justified.

This comment alluded to the reservations some felt about John Mendel’s prospects of successfully developing his lightweight traveling wave tube. In February, Rosen, in response to questions for Rubel, sent a telegram saying that the traveling wave tube had been chosen because of its superior performance. He cited publications by Bell and comments from John Pierce to bolster his case. If there were to be problems with the tube, Rosen wrote, it could be replaced with a triode even though the satellite would then operate at reduced power and bandwidth.

In California, Williams was preoccupied by the recently discovered tri-axiality of the Earth and its influence on the motion of satellites in geosynchronous orbit. During that same February, Hughes executives were discussing what the company should do if it did not win the Project Relay competition. And Samuel Lutz, at Puckett’s request, was again reviewing the twenty-four-hour satellite. This time Lutz was much more negative. The satellite, Lutz wrote, had not shown “the high degree of engineering conservatism which would give it sales appeal to the common carrier.” Competitors, he pointed out, offered satellites with a longer life for very little extra delay in development. Lutz recommended that no effort be spared to win the NASA competition for Relay. If successful, the company would save face and recover some of its half-million investment. Lutz’s report clearly shows that he was intimidated by AT&T’s monopoly position, by its financial resources, and by the technical resources of Bell. “Do we,” he asked, “want a future in this field badly enough to make the effort it will require?”

Even as the words clattered out of his typewriter, the moves were being made that would set the Hughes Aircraft Company on its path to Syncom, Early Bird and a preeminent position among satellite manufactur­ers. The hard work of balancing out on a limb had, though they did not know it, been done.

At the end of March 1961, Hughes made a presentation to Rubel in Washington. For the next few months Puckett and other Hughes execu­tives would hang on Rubel’s every word. If they talked with him over din­ner or at a meeting, a memo was circulated, reporting either what was said or what they read between the lines.

Puckett had learned from Rubel that the administration was con­cerned that the country was not moving quickly enough toward a com­munications satellite capable of either military or commercial operation. The current plans, Rubel had told Puckett, were for a system that was “a long way downstream” as well as “very expensive,” and it would be appro­priate to seek an interim system. Puckett had asked what Hughes could do, and Rubel had replied that the Department of Defense had received proposals in varying degrees of formality, but had no reasonable means of choosing among them. Hughes, he said, could perhaps produce a white paper providing a historical and technical context for a decision.

On May 8, Puckett sent Rubel a letter, making no reference to their previous discussion. In it Puckett wrote that Hughes had prepared a special research study dealing with various aspects of the military communication problem. The study’s purpose, he wrote, was to examine the possible value of a lightweight spacecraft as an interim communications satellite. Puckett offered to submit a full proposal “if you believe this deserves continued consideration.” Hughes was at this stage close to having completed the pro­posal mentioned, and Puckett already knew from C. Gordon Murphy what would be an acceptable date for submission of the proposal to DDR&D.

It seems that the contents of these discussions did not filter down to Williams, who on May 11 wrote a long, critical memo to Hyland. It began, “You are aware of my bullish outlook regarding commercial com­munication satellites and my confidence in the Hughes stationary satellite concept. For the past several months, I have been concerned that Hughes is letting its technical advantage slip away for political reasons…He wrote persuasively and at length, but his views were at odds with company policy because he still hoped that Hughes would undertake the project without government involvement.

In Washington events moved apace. The policy debate provoked by monopoly considerations and by Berkner’s assertion that communication satellites would be a billion dollar business was well underway, and a decision had been taken that Advent would continue. But Hughes’s star was still rising.

On June 6, 1961, events had reached a stage allowing Jaffe to recom­mend that NASA negotiate with Hughes to develop a twenty-four-hour satellite. Jaffe thought there was no doubt as to the ultimate desirability of twenty-four-hour satellites even though he remained convinced they would not be operational for years.

Given the division of labor that NASA and the Defense Department had agreed to, this recommendation was possible only because Rubel, along with Robert Seamans, NASA’s associate administrator, was plotting the agreement’s abolition. Seamans viewed the idea of an operational com­munications system based on tens of medium-altitude satellites as imprac – tical. Where, he had asked Bell, do you propose to get all your computers from? Rubel, of course, knew that the Defense Department needed an interim satellite to provide some cover during the solar minimum, but he judged that the time was not right for canceling Advent. If, however, the agreement between NASA and Defense could be set aside, NASA could place a contract with Hughes to explore the alternative technology of a lightweight twenty-four-hour satellite.

On June 17, Rubel was holding discussions with NASA. Another senior Hughes executive, A. S.Jerrems, happened to be in Washington that weekend, and he met Rubel in the evening. Jerrems wrote to Puckett, “He was inscrutable about the detailed content of the meeting, but he made a statement to the effect that, in his opinion, HAC’s [Hughes Aircraft Com­pany] proposal for getting a geosynchronous satellite funded are better now than they have ever been.”

On June 21 the odds in favor of Hughes improved again. The Institute for Defense Analysis met to discuss the merits of an experiment with a light­weight satellite. The IDA concluded that if the country decided to have only one program in active satellites in addition to Advent, then that program

Thomas Hudspeth (left) and Dr. Harold A. Rosen stand atop the Eiffel Tower during the Paris Air Show of 1962. Between them is the prototype Syncom satellite which they and Dr. Donald D. Williams fought so hard for.

should be for medium-altitude satellites. Further, they said that an experiment with lightweight satellites should not interfere with Advent (the Army) or Project Westford (ne Needles—the Air Force), nor should it affect the deter­mination to pursue medium-altitude satellites. Having saved everyone’s face, the panel said that the experiment with a lightweight active repeater was

Harold A. Rosen (right foreground) and Thomas Hudspeth hold the prototype of Syncom, the world’s first synchronous orbit satellite. Behind them is IntelsatVI, a later generation of communication satellite. The tiny Syncom would fit in one of the fuel tanks which Dr. Rosen is pointing toward.

unique and should be undertaken. Two days later, the deputy secretary of defense, Roswell Gilpatrick, wrote to James Webb effectively releasing NASA from its tacit agreement not to work on active satellites in geostationary orbit.

There was still much for the administrators to do, but the Hughes twenty-four-hour satellite was now secure. On July 27, Abe Silverstein,

NASA’s director of spaceflight programs, told Goddard to put together a preliminary project plan for Hughes that was to be prepared with the Army’s Advent Management Agency. On August 11, NASA announced that the Hughes Aircraft Company had been chosen on a sole-source basis to build a twenty-four-hour satellite. Goddard decided that the satellite should be called Syncom (for synchronous communication). The first launch attempt failed. Somehow, it seems almost obligatory that it should have done so. It was a black day for Harold Rosen—elation followed by despair. The second attempt, on July 26, 1963, succeeded. It was launched into a “quasi-geostationary” orbit, which was easier to reach than a true geostationary orbit: it was at geosynchronous altitude but was not coplanar with the equator. Still, Syncom proved that communication was possible via a radio relay at geosynchronous altitude. It had just one voice channel. But together with Syncoms II and III, it demonstrated the technology and led to the selection of one of Harold’s spinners as Early Bird, which opened the still unfolding era of global telecommunications.

But all of you have lived through the last four years and have seen the significance of space and the adventure of space, and no one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be—

—John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

The promise of satellites for weather prediction was intuitively obvious to a few engineers and scientists in the 1950s (page 130). See RAND publi­cations itemized under chapter thirteen.

Harry Wexler’s extensive work in promoting Verner Suomi’s experiments to the IGY and in the early days of satellite meteorology (page 131) is obvious from the minutes of the IGY’s TPESP, from Wexler’s letters to Verner Suomi, from his role as a consultant for Suomi’s and Parent’s radia­tion balance experiment (shown by TPESP minutes), and from minutes of the National Research Council’s Committee on Meteorological Aspects of Satellites in the immediate post-Sputnik days. Wexler died at the age of 50 in 1962.

Sig Fritz’s role in the early days (page 131), including his assignment of a broom cupboard for an office, is expounded on in Margaret Courain’s Ph. D. thesis, Technology Reconciliation in the Remote Sensing Era of US Civil­ian Weather Forecasting, Rutgers University (1991).

Dave Johnson’s participation in both the civilian and defense weather satellite programs is well known among satellite meteorologists (page 131). An unsigned letter to Dave Johnson dated July 29, 1991, which being from Wisconsin must be from either Thomas Haig or Verner Suomi, says, “Delighted to hear that you are about to set the record straight and tell the whole truth about the early met sat days. I’m espe­cially glad that you are the one who is going to do it, because you are really the only one who knew both the civilian and the military programs from the beginning.”

The writer puts his finger on the difficulty with writing about the early meteorological satellite days and makes the case for declassification, saying, “I have no clear idea what is still considered to be classified, and I can’t imagine why any of the old program history should still be under wraps except perhaps to hide some old CIA—AF feuding that no-one is interested in anyway.”

Information about numerical weather prediction (pages 135 and 136) came from my interviews with Joseph Smagorinsky, director of the Geo­physical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1970 to 1983. Smagorinsky has been involved in meteorology since his days with the Army Air Corps. He joined the meteorology group of the Insti­tute of Advanced Studies in Princeton in 1950. The group made its first numerical weather predictions on the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC);

The beginning of Numerical Weather Prediction, by Joseph Smagorinsky, in Advances in Geophysics 25, p. 3 (1983);

John von Neumann, by Norman Macrae, Pantheon Books (1992).

A variety of publications about the Global Atmosphere Research program (pages 132 and 133) are to be found in the library of the National Acad­emy of Sciences. One, published by the International Council of Scien­tific Unions and the World Meteorological Organization, provides an introduction to the program. It is No. 1 in the GARP Publication series.

Further, less formal, information about the potential role of satellites in the GARP is to be found in a presentation Verner Suomi made to a sym­posium in October 1969 (the paper doesn’t say which symposium, or where). The paper demonstrates Suomi’s abilities as a salesman for satellite meteorology.