Category Something New Under the Sun

“I think there is very little doubt that the Russians intend to start firing [satellites] sometime on or before the first of the year [1958].”

—Richard Porter, chairman of the U. S.Technical Panel on Earth Satellites,

October 3, 1957

“As it happened, the public outcry after Sputnik was earsplit­ting. No event since Pearl Harbor set off such repercussions in public life.”

—William McDougall,.. .The Heavens and the Earth, a Political History

of the Space Age

ieutenant General Anatoly Blagonravov sipped vodka. In Tyuratam it was the early hours of Saturday, October 5, 1957. But in Washington, D. C., it was still the evening of Friday, October 4, and Blagonravov was hosting a reception at the Soviet embassy for delegates to the IGY’s con­ference on rockets and satellites. Sputnik I was in orbit, had, in fact, already passed undetected over America. It would not again go unnoticed.

The people at the Soviet embassy did not yet know that the space age had begun. As the guests circled the buffet of Russian delicacies spread beneath sparkling chandeliers, the Americans probed Blagonravov for hints of when his country planned to launch a satellite.

Although Blagonravov headed the Soviet delegation, the Americans could not have known quite how ideally placed he was to answer them. He was an academician and chair of the Soviet Academy’s Interdepart­mental Commission of Interplanetary Communication; as such he knew what the Soviet scientists wanted to do with satellites. He was a former head of the rocketry and radar division of the Soviet Academy of Artillery Sciences, to which Sergei Korolev had been elected in 1954. Finally, Blagonravov was a member of the State Commission and one of the VIPs who had listened to Prosteyshiy Satellite’s test signal in the assembly build­ing at Tyuratam little more than a week earlier.

What no one who saw Blagonravov that night can say is whether he knew at the beginning of the reception that Sputnik was already aloft. The white-haired, scholarly figure mingled genially with his guests, his demeanor much the same as it had been all week. His blue eyes masked an inner intensity. His Russian cigarette was tilted between his lips.

What is indisputable is that Blagonravov knew that a launch was imminent. So did the American scientists—at least intellectually—includ­ing William Pickering, a native New Zealander of great charm and under­lying sharpness. In 1957, Pickering was a veteran rocket scientist and had been the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for three years. He worked closely with the German rocket pioneer Wern – her von Braun. These two knew that with comparative ease they could convert one of the intermediate range ballistic missiles (range 2,000 miles) they were developing into a satellite launcher.

Pickering had first become involved with rocketry in 1942, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The lab had analyzed intelligence reports about a V2 rocket that had landed in Sweden. In 1943, Army Ordnance asked JPL to investigate the possibility of developing an American long – range rocket, which in those days meant rockets that could fly at least one hundred miles.

When the war ended, von Braun surrendered to American troops and was moved eventually to the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. The U. S. Army also shipped home about one hun­dred V2s, which von Braun had designed. These rockets were distributed to groups around the U. S. that were interested in upper-atmosphere research and rocketry. A group of scientists known as the Upper Atmo­sphere Research Panel selected and analyzed the experiments that the rockets would carry Members of this group, including James Van Allen, went on to head the IGY s satellite efforts.

Pickering, in cooperation with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and von Braun, was soon testing the V2s while JPL—known as the “army smarts”—simultaneously continued its own rocket development. At times, as rocket after rocket exploded, it seemed to Pickering that rocketry was an unpredictable art, not a science. But JPL and the Army persevered.

By the early 1950s, the V2s were proving the truth of what Sergei Korolev had said in 1934 in his book Rocket Flight in the Stratosphere: “ … a rocket is defense and science.”

Von Braun, too, had always known this. Like Korolev, he dreamed of space and worked on missiles. In his new country, von Braun was a highly visible advocate of space exploration. In the early 1950s, he drew headlines by promoting grandiose ideas of space stations and Martian colonies at a time when the general public and most scientists thought that even a sim­ple satellite was science fiction.

While the idea of a space station was indeed science fiction at that time, the technical pieces that would make the launch of a satellite a prac­tical project were in place in 1954. That September, von Braun and a small group of scientists drew up a plan for a satellite that would become famous in the annals of space history. His idea was that a Redstone rocket would lift a five-pound satellite from Earth and that an upper stage, comprising a cluster of Loki rockets atop the Redstone, would give the satellite its final kick into orbit. If the small satellite was successful, a second, larger, “bird” carrying scientific instruments would follow. This proposal was called Project Orbiter.

The result of the first shot would be five pounds of metal circling hundreds of miles above the earth at a speed of roughly 17,000 miles per hour, more than four miles per second. Impressive, but how could they prove that such a small, swift, and distant object was really in orbit?

Nowadays, of course, radio links satellites to observers on the ground. Then radio was not an obvious choice. Von Braun turned to astronomy. The satellite would, after all, be a new heavenly body.

No one was better qualified for the job of finding a body speeding through space than the man he turned to, Fred Whipple. Whipple was the director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A tall, slender man with a widow’s peak and steel-rimmed glasses that gave him an air of erudition, he was expert at tracking meteors and comets. Whipple concluded that optical tracking could follow a bur­nished satellite at an altitude of two hundred miles, even though the satel­lite would be visible only for the twenty minutes at dawn and dusk that the sun would illuminate it against a dark sky. So the proposal for Project Orbiter included no plans for radio tracking, a decision that—seemingly— was to tell against von Braun less than a year later.

Von Braun sent the proposal to the Department of Defense, JPL, and branches of the armed services. Whipple approached the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences.

The proposal came at a time when others with influence were strongly advocating that the U. S. should begin a satellite program. Among these were the scientists who had gained the support of the international scientific community for the inclusion of a satellite in the IGY, and, secretly, those in the Air Force who wanted satellites for reconnaissance. In addition, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in Washington D. C., made its own pitch for a satellite program and launcher.

The NRL had been one of the groups to receive V2s, and under the technical leadership of Milton Rosen, it had developed its own rocket—the Viking—for upper-atmosphere research. Rosen persuaded a few forward­looking thinkers to write about the job that satellites could do when rock­ets were developed that could reach orbit. Among these was John Pierce, from AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, who, along with Harold Rosen from the Hughes Aircraft Company, would later be christened “the father of com­munication satellites” by the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.

It was the IGY’s scientists who won Eisenhower’s public support, and on July 29, 1955, the president announced that the U. S. would launch a satel­lite as part of the IGY. He deferred a decision as to which of the armed services would provide the launch vehicle.

The day before the formal announcement, the White House press office summoned journalists, telling them that the briefing was embargoed for the next day. The day’s grace was to allow American scientists time to notify their colleagues overseas. One scientist flew to New York to give a letter for Sydney Chapman, president of the IGY, to a friend who was fly­ing to London.

In a two-hour background briefing at the White House, James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s press secretary, announced that America planned to launch ten basketball-sized satellites sometime during the International Geophysical Year. The journalists rushed to the phones, only to be brought up short by the locked doors. Hagerty was determined that the journalists should understand that the story was not to be broken until after the official announcement the next day. One journalist asked what he, a crime reporter, was supposed to do with the story.

Jet Propulsion, the sedate journal of the American Rocket Society, stopped the presses. The editor wrote, “We cannot imagine anything more exciting than to look up and see through our binoculars the brilliant point of light in the sky that will represent a new astronomical body created by man. We expect to be deeply moved.”

Until the announcement, only about a hundred people knew of the satellite plans. Now the secret was out. But the launch vehicle decision was still pending.

The unenviable task of recommending a launch vehicle fell to a panel of scientists headed by Homer Joe Stewart. Stewart, widely referred to as Homer Joe, was well respected for his technical expertise. He was an aerodynamicist from the California Institute of Technology and a prime mover on the Upper Atmosphere Research Panel. Homer Joe s panel was guided in its deliberations by two precepts: satellites must not interfere with missile development, and the project should have a strong civilian flavor and scientific component. Both charges to the Stewart committee must surely have stemmed from the more secret deliberations within the White House that the Killian report stimulated.

The first requirement was largely taken care of when the Air Force, which had earlier been assigned responsibility for military space projects, dropped out of the competition, saying that it could not develop a rocket in time to launch a satellite during the International Geophysical Year without compromising its missile development. Not a surprising decision, given that the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles had top priority with the Department of Defense and that parts of the Air Force were lobbying for funding to develop reconnaissance satellites.

The second requirement was more difficult to fulfill. Only the mili­tary were then sponsoring launcher development.

But the Army and the Navy squared off: the ring, the committee rooms ofWashington D. C. and private offices in the Pentagon.

In one corner was Wernher von Braun with an updated version of Project Orbiter. At his back, the formidable figure of General John Medaris and the technical expertise of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The laboratory had suggested important changes to the upper stages of the launcher, but the size of the proposed satellite—five pounds—stayed the same.

Nevertheless, the Army’s proposal had an immediate strike against it, because the Army was developing intermediate-range ballistic missiles. While not as high a priority as those that the Air Force was developing, they were undoubtedly missiles and compromised perception of Orbiter as a civilian project.

In the opposing corner was the Naval Research Laboratory with its proposal, called Project Vanguard. That proposal contained a much stronger scientific component than the Army’s, a component that the Naval Research Laboratory, with its strong background in upper atmo­sphere research, was well qualified to implement.

The laboratory had additional advantages. It had successfully devel­oped the Viking sounding rocket as a replacement for the V2. The Viking was not part of a weapons system but was intended for scientific explo­ration of the upper atmosphere—albeit in support of military purposes.

Further, the Viking project had provided the lab with a record of developing a large project on time and to cost. The Glenn L. Martin Company had been the contractor for Viking, and the laboratory pro­posed to work with them again on Vanguard.

Finally, the NRL had what was for that time a sophisticated radio tracking plan, whereas the initial Project Orbiter included only optical tracking.

Much of Project Vanguard was technically innovative, relying on miniaturization to beef up the satellite’s capabilities. While miniaturization is today a technological cliche, in 1955 the concept was new. Vanguard would have tiny batteries and radio equipment and in principle would be able to carry ten pounds of scientific instruments, far more than Project Orbiter offered. The batteries were chemical because the designers decided that solar-battery technology, generating electricity from sunlight, was unlikely to be practical in the time available.

The Navy won the first round, but the Army bounced back with a plan that took account of technical criticisms, including an improved tracking proposal. Milton Rosen, who had headed the Viking develop­ment and would be the technical director of Project Vanguard, listened to them argue their case for most of an afternoon. He watched tensely, afraid that von Braun’s eloquence was swaying the panel.

In the event, Homer Joe’s committee confirmed its original decision, and on September 9, the secretaries for the Navy, Army, and Air Force were notified that the Navy would head the three services in the develop­ment of a satellite launcher. When the news reached the NRL’s site by the Potomac in Washington D. C., there was jubilation, some surprise, and a conviction that they could do the job.

The decision of Homer Joe’s panel was not unanimous. Homer Joe himself was one of two who thought that the Army should get the job. The nation could save time and money, he thought, by piggybacking the satellite program on the Army’s missile work. Many, then and now, believe that he was right, and that if the U. S. had picked Project Orbiter, America would have been the first into space.

Thus Project Orbiter became famous as the proposal that could have begun the space age but did not. In retrospect, and in the light of the emerging evidence concerning the Eisenhower administration’s desire to establish the freedom of space by launching a civilian scientific satellite, one suspects that the Army could not have won. Certainly, the guidance given to the Stewart committee seems to have been fashioned to favor the somewhat less militaristic Navy proposal.

The administration’s decision to back Project Vanguard has pulled down much vilification on President Eisenhower’s head. Though it seems now that Eisenhower’s decision was more subtle than it appeared at the time, he did underestimate the blow to America’s self-esteem and the con­comitant gain in the Soviet Union’s international prestige that would fol­low the Sputnik launch.

During 1955, as wheels of policy turned within wheels, the scientists who in the fall of 1954 had won backing from the international scientific com­munity for the inclusion of satellites in the IGY had also been busy. Early in 1955, the executive of the national committee had established a rocketry panel to evaluate the feasibility of producing a rocket that could launch a satellite. The task was delegated to William Pickering, Milton Rosen, and a young hawk, also from the Naval Research Laboratory, John Townsend.

They met in Pasadena in February of 1955. This trio concluded— unsurprisingly—that a satellite launch was feasible. Milton Rosen reported their findings to the rocketry panel in March 1955. He outlined three pos­sible rocket configurations, which, unbeknownst to many scientists of the IGY, had much in common with proposals which were then vying for attention at the Pentagon.

On March 9, Joseph Kaplan, chair of the U. S. IGY, sought approval from the U. S. executive committee for the IGY for the inclusion of satel­lites in their research plans.

He met opposition. The debate, recorded in scribbled, handwritten notes, is hard to decipher, but the language suggests that some of the scien­tists knew or had an inkling that national security issues were at stake. Merle Tuve, director of the Department for Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution (and founder of the Applied Physics Laboratory, which would develop the Transit navigation satellites), was very uncom­fortable with the idea of tying the satellite project to the IGY. Others, like Fred Whipple and Harry Wexler, who as chief sci’entist of the weather bureau would be a strong supporter of meteorology satellites, argued persuasively that satellites would expand the science that could be undertaken by the IGY.

His colleagues asked Tuve—wouldn’t it be better for satellites to be part of the IGY so that the data collected by the spacecraft would be unclassified and freely available? If the Department of Defense were to lead the way, there would be less opportunity for international collaboration. They could do an enormous amount of science with satellites, they argued. And if they were to exclude everything from the IGY that had a possible military application, there would be nothing left. Who were they, asked one scientist, to hold up progress?

Hugh Odishaw, the indefatigable secretary of the national commit­tee, finally summarized their options: say no, irrespective of whether the satellite project had scientific merit or not; embrace the satellite project as part of the American contribution to the IGY; decide whether it had merit and, if it was geophysically useless, say that the satellite program was more appropriate to the Department of Defense.

Clearly, satellites do have considerable potential for geophysics, and what seems to have persuaded Tuve to endorse the satellite project was that if the Pentagon took the initiative, cooperation with other countries would be difficult. Eventually, the executive committee approved the inclusion of satellites in the IGY.

The National Science Foundation then requested funds from Con­gress on behalf of the National Academy of Sciences, which was organizing the IGY (the National Academy of Sciences does not request funds directly from Congress). The National Science Foundation and the National Acad­emy of Sciences gave Donald Quarles, assistant secretary of defense for research and development, what he needed, two bodies with indisputable credentials in the world of civilian science. He now had a formal request for a civilian satellite as had been recommended by the Killian committee.

Kaplan sent a letter to the National Science Foundation explaining that the satellite project would need $10 million in addition to the nearly $20 million that congress had by now authorized for the IGY. At the same time, the IGY s satellite proposal was sent to the White House and the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, Quarles looked at Kaplan’s figures and doubled them. Even that turned out to be a serious underestimation of the ultimate cost (elevenfold what Kaplan requested, excluding the Pentagons expendi­ture), inevitably, perhaps, because no one had any idea of the technical dif­ficulties and costs of space exploration.

It was now May 1955, and the IGY’s organizers needed the money as soon as possible if they were going to launch a satellite before the comple­tion of the IGY at the end of 1958. But the project stalled. At least, that is how it appeared to the staff of the U. S. national committees secretariat, who were frustrated as phone calls went unanswered and unsatisfying memos arrived in response to requests for information about the satellite budget.

In fact the IGY was now a pawn in a bigger game. The chain of events was in progress that led ultimately to the National Security Coun­cil’s endorsement of the plan at the end of May, to the formation of Homer Joe Stewart’s committee, to President Eisenhower’s announcement of July 29, and to the September decision that Project Vanguard would launch America’s first satellite.

From the IGY’s perspective, things started to move again after Eisen­hower made his announcement. Despite not knowing which launch vehi­cle the administration would select, the national committee asked Richard Porter, a technical consultant to General Electric, to form a panel to over­see the IGY’s satellite work. Porter’s committee spawned two more. One, led by William Pickering, was responsible for radio and optical tracking and orbital computations. Fred Whipple was one of his committee mem­bers, and he took on the responsibility of organizing optical tracking for the IGY. James Van Allen chaired the second group, which was responsible for choosing the experiments that would fly.

As 1956 advanced, the cost of the satellite program escalated. Eventu­ally, one of the IGY scientists complained that the satellite program was costing as much as if each satellite had been built from solid gold. Berkner assured him that the value of the satellites to the international community and to the United States was worth far more than digging that much gold out of the earth.

Despite such enthusiasm, development of the Vanguard rocket was experiencing technical and financial difficulties. Milton Rosen, Van­guard’s technical director, was convinced that the Glenn L. Martin Com­pany was not giving the NRL its best efforts. He attributed this to the company’s also having the contract for the Air Force’s Titan ICBM. Whatever the reasons, the pitfalls and colossal nature of undertaking to develop and build a three-stage rocket from scratch in so short a time were now apparent.

These technical difficulties were compounded by the cutbacks in the program. By October 1957, Van Allen’s committee could count on only six launch vehicles, possibly far fewer.

Sputnik was about to change all that.

On Friday, October 4, 1957, Walter Sullivan, a science correspondent for the New York Times, filed a story for Saturday’s paper. After a week at the rockets and satellite conference he felt fairly certain that he had taken the right line. He’d written that the Soviets were close to a launch attempt.

Sullivan says that before going to the reception he called his office. He was told that the paper’s Moscow office had heard Radio Moscow announce that a satellite was in orbit. He was told to find out what he could.

Sullivan hurried to the embassy. He found the American scientists: Pickering, Richard Porter, Lloyd Berkner, and John Townsend. When Sul­livan told them the news, they looked at one another in consternation. To this day, Pickering believes that the Soviets at the reception did not know of their own successful launch.

The Americans went into a huddle and decided that they must con­gratulate their hosts. As the senior American scientist present, the task fell to Lloyd Berkner. Leaving his colleagues to assimilate the news as best they could, he took his glass and a spoon and climbed on a chair. He rapped the glass for attention. Slowly the conversation died down, and the guests turned to Berkner. His announcement was simple, and it caused a sensa­tion. He said, “I am informed by the New York Times that a satellite has been launched and is in orbit at an altitude of nine hundred kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.” With that, he raised his glass. Blagonravov was beaming as he drank the toast.

Telstar captured the popular imagination in a way that it is hard to believe any satellite, especially a communications satellite, could do today Perhaps it was the name; euphonious enough to make the satellite the eponymous star of its own pop song, released by the British pop group the Tornados. Certainly AT&T’s impressive publicity machine, one that rivaled even that of NASA, aided the process.

Telstar was launched at 8:35 GMT on July 10, 1962. According to AT&T, more than half the population of the U. K. watched its first transat­lantic transmission, a remarkable percentage given that far fewer people than today owned television sets. Only two Telstar satellites were ever launched, because even before the first went into orbit it was clear that Comsat, not AT&T, would be responsible for operating international com­munications satellites.

Instigating the Telstar project was one of the boldest moves ever made by a private company. Fred Kappel, chairman of AT&T, said that the company would spend $170 million—a considerable sum for the time— on an international communications system if the government would either step aside or facilitate development.

Project Telstar had five objectives: to test broadband communication, to test the reliability of electronic components under the stress of launch into space, to measure radiation levels (electronic components fail and data are lost if radiation alters the dopants in semiconductor material), to pro­vide information on tracking, and to provide a test for the ground station equipment.[19]

A. C. Dickieson was appointed to head Telstar development in the fall of 1960. In his unpublished manuscript he says that he was told to go ahead in the shortest possible time and that he had whatever power and authority he needed to do his job. The team immediately started “spend­
ing with gusto.” For a while Dickieson did not know to the nearest $5 million just how much money was pouring into the project. But by early in 1961 he had spending under control.

The project’s starting point was the early work by Pierce and Kompfner.

On January 6, 1959, while Bell and NASA were still discussing whether they would collaborate on a communication experiment with a passive satellite, John Pierce was arguing internally that Bell should assume a leading role in research in satellite communication, because it seemed likely that “satellites will provide very broad band transoceanic communi­cation more cheaply than submarine cables.” He wrote, “Active repeaters in twenty-four-hour equatorial orbits stationary above one point of the earth have many potential advantages but pose severe problems of launch­ing, orientation, and life, whose solutions lie beyond the present state of the art.” On the other hand, passive satellites were within the state of the art. Bell could, argued Pierce, undertake a program of research because more knowledge about low-noise MASERs and horn antennas would be valuable irrespective of the orbit that communications satellites would eventually occupy. There was so much activity in the field, wrote Pierce, and so little was known.

A few months later, Pierce and Kompfner were contemplating medium-altitude-active rather than twenty-four-hour satellites. There seemed to be just too many technical obstructions to developing the latter.

To John Pierce and his colleagues at Bell, the greatest drawback to twenty-four-hour satellites was the six-tenths of a second that would pass between one person speaking and the other person hearing what was said. The listener, thinking that a pause meant the speaker had finished, might then interrupt. Nothing could be done about the delay because that is how long it takes a signal to travel to and from a satellite in a twenty-four – hour orbit. Also, at that time, the equipment that suppressed echoes from the far end of the telephone line was not very effective, and Pierce was concerned that poor echo suppression coupled with the time delay would make communications via twenty-four-hour satellite intolerable. If, that is, one could have placed a satellite in a twenty-four-hour orbit in the first place. The launch vehicles and guidance and control systems needed to place a satellite in such an orbit were only then being developed.

Power was another problem. Imagine that power is distributed over the surface of a sphere and that the greater the distance of the receiver from the antenna, the greater the surface of the sphere over which the same power is distributed. Thus, if the distance increases by a factor of two, the power available at a particular point will be reduced by considerably more than twice—the square of the distance between transmitter and receiver.[20]

The thinking was that if one was to receive a usable radio signal on Earth from a satellite 22,300 miles away, one needed a high-gain, direc­tional antenna on the spacecraft that would not waste power by broadcast­ing needlessly into space (high-gain directional antennas are common today). But if the satellite was to carry a directional antenna, then the satel­lite’s orientation with respect to the earth—its attitude—would have to be controlled so that it remained constant relative to the earth. This called for a more complex, weightier design. Even at the best of times, satellite designers do not like to add weight. When no launch vehicle yet exists that can reach the desired altitude, the potential weight of a satellite is an even greater problem.

And then there was the all-important question of station keeping, which is essential for a satellite in a twenty-four-hour orbit. The satellite must maintain its position in orbit relative to the subsatellite point despite radiation pressure, lunisolar gravity, and inhomogeneities in the earth’s gravitational field. If the twenty-four-hour satellite was to be constantly accessible to many ground stations and its antennas were to stay pointing toward those ground stations, then some mechanism for station keeping was needed as well as the fuel to operate that mechanism: again, extra weight.

Finally, launch vehicles do not place satellites directly into a twenty – four-hour orbit. The satellite is injected first into an eccentric orbit with its perigee at the altitude at which it separates from the launch vehicle and its apogee at geosynchronous altitude. So a twenty-four-hour satellite would need a motor that could fire at apogee and circularize the orbit: yet more weight.

Pierce and Kompfner were aware of all these problems and the possi­ble poor quality of communication via a twenty-four-hour satellite. Fur­ther, Pierce, who from the beginning had participated in the panels plan­ning military satellites, was aware of and unimpressed by the Advanced Project Research Agency’s (later the Army’s) plans for a twenty-four-hour satellite.

So, in March 1959, when Pierce and Kompfner wrote a paper demonstrating the theoretical feasibility of active broadband satellite com­munication, it was a constellation of medium-altitude satellites that they had in mind, not twenty-four-hour satellites. Bell still intended to work first with passive satellites simply because they would be ready first, but, wrote Pierce, the research department would work towards simple active repeaters. “If we manage to make better components than others and if we make a sensible design, we might take the lead in this field with a compar­atively modest expenditure of money and effort. The tendency of ARPA has been to project elaborate and complicated schemes… our own course has been to get into actual experimental work with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as early as possible. In this way we will encounter in an experimental way certain problems such as large antenna, low-noise receivers, tracking, modulation systems, orbit computations and the relia­bility of components which we believe will be important in all satellite communication systems.”

Even though active satellites were at the forefront of Pierce’s mind from the spring of 1959, he was publicly cautious, writing in June of that year to Hugh Dryden, the deputy administrator of NASA, “Right now, we don’t feel we are able to evaluate the merits of active satellite systems as compared with passive systems well enough to propose any concrete steps as the next desirable thing to do.”

Bell’s efforts in the field of active repeaters began to solidify when Leroy Tillotson completed a major memo on active satellite repeaters on August 24, 1959. Much of what he described was similar to what would, after the launch of Echo in August 1960, become an internal Bell project, labeled TSX, which was later renamed Project Telstar.

Central to Tillotson’s plan was the development of a six-gigahertz traveling wave tube. Pierce and Kompfner requested more information and were briefed in October and November 1959. An active-satellite plan­ning committee was formed. Kompfner and Tillotson, but not Pierce, who was more senior, were members. They continued to meet until the re­search effort on active repeaters turned into a full-fledged development project in the fall of 1960.

At the beginning of 1960, the work on Echo was proceeding well and the research staff were considering what to do next. One possibility was a larger passive satellite with enough antenna gain (on the ground), band­width, and transmitter power to relay television signals across the Atlantic. An internal ad hoc group put together an outline of such an experimental system for NASA. As it became apparent what kind of technical pirouettes would be needed for the successful transmission of even the lowest quality TV signal, those working on the proposal became convinced that active satellites were needed.

Thus consensus emerged at Bell that the main effort should be on active satellites—along the lines suggested by Tillotson. A memo from Pierce to Jaffe says that Bell would be putting a major effort into active satellites during the next couple of years. Another letter from Kompfner to Jaffe reviews Bells research on a long-life traveling wave tube and on the effects of radiation damage to solar cells and microwave circuitry. This work continued at a modest level in Bells research department until after the successful launch of Echo on August 12, 1960.

News of Bell’s interest in medium-altitude satellites did not filter out widely until the spring of 1960. When it did, some speculated that the pas­sive scheme had been a smoke screen to cover Bell’s real intentions. If it was, it had not been embarked upon as a smoke screen, though perhaps it was allowed to become one.

While Bell’s scientists and engineers pursued theoretical calculations, AT&T’s management in New York had been working on policy issues. In July 1960, AT&T argued before the Federal Communications Commis­sion that frequencies should be reserved for satellite communication because the company was convinced that satellites would be more eco­nomical than submarine cables for transoceanic communication. A filing on July 8 disclosed AT&T’s plans for a global communication satellite sys­tem costing $170 million. This plan called for fifty satellites without atti­tude control in a three-thousand-mile polar orbit. During the next twelve months the number of satellites, their altitude, and their design would change, but the idea of medium-altitude orbits remained.

In the midst of its political and technical preparations for an active satellite system, on August 9, 1960, the Department of Defense finally released NASA from its agreement to develop only passive satellites.

AT&T now focussed on persuading NASA to select its ideas for an agency led project to develop active communication satellites. On August 11, Pierce and colleagues were briefing senior NASA staff at headquarters in Washington on Bell’s medium-altitude active repeater work. They told NASA of AT&T’s discussions with the communication administrations of Britain, France, and Germany, and of those countries’ interest in joining AT&T in satellite communication experiments. Bell’s idea was that the Bell System would pay all costs, except those of general interest to the space community, such as investigating radiation effects. There was some discussion, too, about the technical difficulties of providing two-way chan­nels (with Echo, voice went via satellite one way and came back over a ter­restrial link).

The day after that meeting, Echo was launched. It was the brightest object in the night sky. In Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called, Arthur C. Clarke looked upwards and followed its passage with wonder. In the United States, AT&T’s highly efficient publicity machine ensured that when the public gazed upwards, it was AT&T’s name rather than NASA’s that sprang to mind.

AT&T’s publicity capsized discussions with NASA about launching a satellite based on AT&T’s ideas. A little over two months after Echo’s launch, in a meeting about Bell’s plans for transoceanic communication via active satellite, T. Keith Glennan told senior staff from Bell and AT&T that the company’s methods of publicizing its plans, including making mislead­ing statements, had created difficulties for NASA. Glennan’s remarks about publicity were only a small portion of the criticisms he made. He said that AT&T was not taking account of the “facts of life” and acknowledging through its planning the limited availability of launch vehicles, the prob­lems of scheduling launches, and the aims of NASA’s research and devel­opment program.

By the time of this meeting, on October 27, 1960, NASA’s plans were known publicly to include medium-altitude active repeaters, and AT&T was now one of several companies waiting for the agency’s formal announcement of a competition. Whichever company won, NASA also intended to further the development of communications satellites through “cost reimbursable launch support for private industry.”

So, despite Glennan’s stern admonishments in October 1960, the auguries were not entirely unfavorable for AT&T. NASA, under the lead­ership of T. Keith Glennan, favored the involvement of private industry in the development of communication satellites. AT&T had a vibrant research effort in the supporting technology for medium-altitude active repeaters, and Echo had been a spectacular success.

The days of the Eisenhower administration, however, were numbered. Transition to the Kennedy administration would soon be underway. Though both administrations were concerned about the antitrust implications of policies that favored AT&T, some in the Kennedy administration, notably James Webb, were additionally concerned about the strategic implications of communications satellites and thought that government should retain con­trol over their development. The difference between the two administrations was apparent in a small but telling difference in the budgets that each sub­mitted to Congress for FY62. Eisenhower called for private industry to con­tribute $10 million toward NASA’s communication satellite program. Kennedy’s budget allocated that $10 million from the public coffers.

This was the first faint stirring of the policy upheavals that would exclude AT&T from providing international satellite communications, a role that the company saw as its own as a matter of public trust. In the end, AT&T would have to be content with being one of the common carriers owning Comsat stock.

In January 1961, when John Kennedy was inaugurated, and for sev­eral more months, AT&T moved confidently forward with its plans. Bell Labs was working on ways to keep the satellites’ weight down by develop­ing sensitive ground-based antennas that would allow the satellites to transmit at as low a power as possible. That month NASA issued a request for proposals for a medium-altitude satellite to be known as Relay. During the Relay competition, AT&T and NASA suspended discussions about the possibility of the agency launching the telephone company’s satellites. Bell, along with six other competitors, prepared a proposal. The others included RCA, which eventually won, and an outsider with no experience manu­facturing satellites—the Hughes Aircraft Company.

Bell, which did not think much of NASA’s technical specifications, submitted three versions of its proposals. One matched what NASA wanted, including frequencies and a radiation experiment as specified by the agency. The second retained NASA’s radiation experiment but worked at the frequencies that Bell (AT&T was discussing frequency allocation with its overseas partners) thought would eventually be selected for an operational system (AT&T and Bell were correct). The third proposal was Bell’s own design.

On May 18, NASA announced it was awarding the contract to RCA. At the technical debriefing, NASA told Bell that it was the best of the “amateurs” to submit a proposal. Bell’s weaknesses in its bid, according to NASA, were many. The agency awarded the lab poor marks for solar cells made from n-on-p semiconductors rather than p-on-n. Yet Bell’s sci­entists knew that the Evans Signal Laboratory had found that n-on-p semiconductors were more resistant to proton and electron bombardment than p-on-n semiconductors. Bell had fabricated n-on-p solar cells in December 1960 and confirmed the finding (these are what are used now).

The Bell proposal got a particularly low score for the low power of its transmitters, which would call for a low-noise ground antenna, and par­ticularly for further improvement of the MASER that was used for Echo. The agency considered that Bell’s tough specifications for a low-noise ground antenna would make the ground stations that NASA and others might build marginal. Its own course of action, said the agency, did not press the state of the art quite as hard. NASA judged, however, that Bell’s traveling-wave-tube design was excellent and that its radiation experiment was good. The agency asked Bell to design the radiation experiment for Relay. Bell’s view of this critique was that only one criticism—about a VHF antenna—was valid.

Preparing the stack of printed material for its proposal, wrote Dick – ieson, cost several hundred thousand dollars and “chewed up the time of a lot of key people who were sorely needed in designing the company’s own satellite and ground station. But we really had no choice but to bid; with­out launch support, all of our work would be wasted, and NASA con­trolled the launching.”

To the engineers at Bell, NASA’s announcement that RCA had won the contract meant that they could revert to their own ideas for what would be known as Project Telstar. The announcement also left them with one rather major difficulty—the matter of a launch vehicle. Pierce and Kompfner joked with a visiting Soviet scientist that perhaps his govern­ment would launch the satellite.

A more practical discussion was going on between James Webb and Fred Kappel. Webb had called Kappel on May 18 to notify him that RCA had won the contract for Relay and to say that NASA was prepared to launch AT&T’s satellite. Kappel responded that it was important for AT&T to go ahead with its satellite plans. Hard negotiations, led by Webb and Dryden, followed. NASA insisted on being reimbursed for launching the two satellites and that AT&T should assign any patents resulting from the development to NASA. AT&T agreed, and Telstar, which Wilbur L. Pritchard later said was superbly engineered, was underway.

An important aspect of the Telstar project was the two ground sta­tions that Bell Laboratories built. The sophistication and sensitivity of these stations enabled Bell to put less power on the satellite. One station was in Andover, Maine, and the other in France. Britain used its own exist­ing antenna but was unable to receive signals on the first night because of an unfortunate misunderstanding about the polarization of the signal.

The ground station in Maine was 170 feet long and three stories high, and rotated to follow the satellite from horizon to horizon. It was intended to be part of the eventual operational system and had to work in any weather, so Bell contracted for a radome (a radio transparent, domelike shell) to protect the antenna. The wall to which the radome was to be fixed was a massive structure. Someone quipped that in a thousand years, scientists would debate why the entrance door was in precisely that place. Excavation for the antenna foundations began in May 1961, and in January 1962, the antenna was complete. A temporary radome was erected until the special air-supported fabric of the final structure could be delivered. It sagged under the New England snow. Efforts to dislodge the snow failed until someone took a shotgun from the trunk of his car and shot holes in the temporary cover.

Testing of Telstar began in November 1961 and took 2,300 hours. The satellite was due at Cape Canaveral in May 1962 but was delayed for two weeks until a loose wire could be traced. The launch was set for July 10. In late May Bell heard about Project Starfish, a high-altitude atomic – bomb test. They were worried that if Telstar was in orbit, radiation from the explosion would seriously damage its electronics. They relaxed when they heard that the explosion was set for the day before their launch, believing that by the time Telstar reached orbit, the worst would be over. They later learned, as did APL, which had its TRAAC satellite aloft, that fallout persisted and precipitated along magnetic field lines. Telstar began to falter on November 18, 1962, and failed the following February.

Nonetheless, Telstar allowed an examination of the signal after pas­sage at various angles through the ionosphere, the earths magnetic field, and the atmosphere. Different methods of frequency modulation were tested, and the impact on available bandwidth assessed. These and other results were published in the open literature. Harold Rosen, of the Hughes

Aircraft Company, said, “Telstar showed that there were no propagation anomalies, that it was easy to calculate what the propagation would be like. It was a confidence builder.”

Telstar attained orbit despite antagonism and suspicion between AT&T and Bell on the one hand and NASA on the other. Exactly how these tensions, which also existed under T. Keith Glennan, played out in the decision to select RCA for Project Relay is not easy to discern. Robert Seaman, who was NASA’s associate administrator at the time, said in his exit interview that the message came through loud and clear from the Kennedy administration that the AT&T design was not the one to pick. In 1966, Webb said that the RCA proposal was clearly the best proposal for the research requirements of NASA, even if it was “… not necessarily the best as the first step towards an operational satellite system as desired by AT&T.” Webb’s phrasing is telling.

The disagreements between NASA and AT&T covered everything from choice of frequency to operation of the ground stations and negotia­tions with foreign telecommunications companies. AT&T was particularly jealous of the relationships it had built over the years with common carri­ers in other countries. The transatlantic submarine cable TAT-t, for exam­ple, was a joint venture with the British and Canadians. A British cable ship had laid the cable.

It is also clear from Dickieson’s unpublished manuscript in the AT&T archives that Bell’s technical people did not respect the technical ability of some of those with whom they dealt at NASA and that they thought much of the required paperwork pointless. Dickieson wrote, “the NASA people assigned to receive this paper were interested in the shadow, and not the substance, so we were able to keep them happy without [hav­ing them] interfere with our work.”

The attitude of the Bell engineers comes through best in this follow­ing anecdote related by Dickieson. The National Physics Laboratory in the U. K. wanted to use Telstar in an experiment with the U. S. Naval Observa­tory to synchronize clocks in the two countries (this was before atomic clocks). Dickieson set things up. The experiment was performed and the results published. “At a subsequent meeting, Leonard Jaffe brought up the subject, and made it clear that the approved method was: first, discussions between the state departments of the two countries; second, reference to the technical organizations of the two governments, and finally down to scheduling by the Ground Station Committee.” Says Dickieson, “I did not argue the matter, because I thought that if another useful experiment appeared, we would do it first and argue later.”

Despite all this, the two organizations successfully launched the two Telstar satellites.

From February 1962, when President Kennedy submitted his Com­sat bill to Congress, it was clear to Bell’s engineers that the lab and AT&T were out of international satellite communication. They still had both satellites to launch, and the team worked on, fueled by the need to prove that private enterprise could operate in the field. To the public, the battles behind Telstar were unimportant. To them Telstar was the satellite that first broadcast live transatlantic television and promised a new era of interna­tional communication. Among those watching were a group of engineers at the Hughes Aircraft Company, in Culver City, California. After rejec­tions and ridicule, they had won a contract for their ideas for a twenty- four-hour satellite in August 1961—nearly a year before Telstar went into orbit. The engineers watching Telstars broadcast were envious. They had dispatched a telegram of congratulations to Bell but were eager to see their own satellite in orbit. One of them, Harold Rosen, said “It was interesting in two respects, one was the beautiful picture coming from overseas. And two, it didn’t last very long.” They knew their satellite would be altogether different.

Khrushchev’s belligerent attitude toward the United States, which pre­sumably set the tone for the excerpt from Soviet Fleet (page 119), is clear in an interview with James Reston for the New York Times that appeared on October 9, 1957. In the interview, Khrushchev said that the U. S. was causing all the trouble [between the two countries] because it negotiated with the USSR as if it were weak. Khrushchev told Reston that the USSR had all kinds of rockets for modern war and spelled out the fact that since the USSR could launch a satellite, it had the technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles. In his interview, Khrushchev uses the terms “imperialist warmongers” and “reactionary bourgeoisie” when speaking of the U. S.

Eisenhower’s attitude to this rhetoric is apparent in his State of the Union message on January 9, 1958. He said, “The threat to our safety, and to the hope of a peaceful world can be simply stated. It is communist imperialism. This threat is not something imagined by critics of the Soviets. Soviet spokesmen, from the beginning, have publicly and frequently declared their aim to expand their power, one way or another, throughout the world.”

The failure of the launch of Vanguard on December 6, 1957, (page 120) is retold in Green’s and Lomask’s book in the NASA History Series, Van­guard, A History.

General Medaris’s call to JPL et al. (page 121) is discussed by William Pickering in his oral history in the archives of the California Institute of Technology.

Pickering’s attempts to contact James Van Allen are discussed both in Pickering’s oral history at Caltech and in James Van Allen’s oral history in the National Air and Space Museum (page 121 — 122).

In the oral history and in his interview with me, Pickering described the journalist who tracked him down in New York immediately prior to the launch.

The account of the launch of Explorer 1 (pages 122-123) comes from the oral histories of Pickering and Van Allen, from Pickering’s interviews with me, from the Green and Lomask book (Vanguard—A History) and from accounts in the New York Times.

James Van Allen describes his isolation and concerns on the launch of Sputnik in his oral history at the National Air and Space Museum.

In his oral history and when talking to me, Pickering describes the wait for the acquisition of Explorer 1 and his trip to the NAS to face the world’s press once the satellite was in orbit.

Details on pages 123 — 125 are a synthesis of extracts from minutes of the USNC for the IGY, the executive committee of the USNC, the TPESP, the Technical Panel on Rocketry and the Working Group on Internal Instrumentation.

An ad hoc meeting of the TPESP, November 10, 1955, discussed the bud­get for the whole satellite program. Homer Newell emphasized the importance of allocating money quickly for optical and radio tracking and for scientific instrumentation.

The need to understand the organizational relationship between the different official bodies was mentioned. This was an early warning of a struggle for control of the program. The NRL was emphatic that it retain control of the launch vehicle and to a large extent over the scientific instrumentation. A formal statement said, “The NRL desires the advice and guidance of the USNC with respect to scientific instruments…. advice will be followed in so far as is possible without compromising the achievement of a first successful launch.”

The question of organizational relationships and responsibility resurfaced nearly a year later. In an attachment to the minutes of the sev­enth meeting of the TPESP on September 5, 1956, a note records an informal meeting at the Cosmos Club between Richard Porter and Admiral Bennet during which there was discussion about whether the satellite program was a DOD program with IGY participation or vice versa.

The third meeting of the TPESP took place in the Founders’ Room at the University of Michigan. The panel discussed the possibility that the

Soviets might launch a satellite in 1956 and agreed to make formal en­quiries through the CSAGI, the international organizing body for the IGY.

During the third meeting of the TPESP, the chair, Richard Porter, appointed James Van Allen to head a working group on internal instru­mentation. The panel’s job was to review the proposals for experiments submitted to the panel.

At the fifth meeting of the TPESP on April 20, 1956, Homer Newell said that a master schedule for the development of Vanguard was being drawn up and would be circulated to the TPESP as soon as it was ready. He described several satellite configurations and reported on development of the rocket’s first stage. During the same meeting there was discussion of budget overruns.

During the meeting, Richard Porter also discussed the concerns that there might be only one satellite launched. He said,“. .. if the plan really is to stop after you get one good one, then we had best discontinue most of the work of this panel. In fact, my own feeling is that the program would not be worth doing if this were the intent.” The DOD observer replied, “It is the feeling of the executive branch of government that our present job is to get one up there, and it is most unlikely… that we will answer in any other way than to say it is a future not present decision [how many satellites are launched] (page 124).

The meeting went on to question whether they had a right to spend taxpayers’ money on a tracking system when there might only be one satellite.

In an attempt to justify six launch attempts, Dr. Porter said, “Actu­ally, the six rides was determined by another group headed by Dr. Stewart as being the minimum that ought to be fired to get one good one. This is the best guess of some guided missile experts.”

Porter argued that there should be more ideas put forward for satel­lite experiments because he believed there would be an extended pro­gram of satellite launches and that once in place, the tracking system would be cheaper to operate than it was to set up.

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.