Whippersnapper

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.

P

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.