Communications section

There was so much material for this section that the only way to make sense of it was to put it all together into one big pot, to arrange it chronologically, and to construct a series of calendars for the years in which I was interested. I also put the dates of major importance for world events and other developments in the space program on the same calen­dars. This gave me a good feel for what was happening when, and high­lighted some nice ironies between the Telstar and Syncom programs that I would otherwise have missed.

Primary source material came from AT&T, the Hughes Aircraft Com­pany, John Rubel, Bob Roney, the NAS, NASA, and the American Her­itage Center.

Interviewees were John Pierce, Harold Rosen, Tom Hudspeth, Bob Roney, Robert Davis.

AT&T’s highly professional archive yielded masses of information about Telstar and some, though to a lesser extent, about Echo.

The НАС archives give a good sense of the work that Harold Rosen and Don Williams et al. did, as well as demonstrating the company’s internal wrangles and its lobbying of NASA and the DoD.

Bob Roney had personal papers that supplemented the more extensive records from the НАС archive.

John Rubel’s papers cover the ground from the perspective of the Office of Defense Research & Engineering. The view from this office is not always the same as that from other departments of the DoD.

NASA’s records (thanks once again to David Whalen for these) gave, not surprisingly, the agency’s side of the story

I had more material from AT&T and the НАС and John Rubel than from NASA, so the story unfolds primarily from their perspective, though I have tried to synthesize different policy and technical viewpoints.

Chapter sixteen: The Players

TAT-1 capacity (page 171) from Signals, The Science of Telecommunication, by John Pierce and Michael Noll. Scientific American Library (1990).

The Space Station (page 172), Its Radio Applications, by Arthur C. Clarke, 25 May 1945 (typed manuscript).

“Extra-Terrestrial Relays, Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage,” by Arthur C. Clarke, published in Wireless World, October 1945 (page 172) (From John Pierce).

“Orbital Radio Relays,” by J. R. Pierce, Jet Propulsion, April 1955 (pages 172-173).

Pierce’s views of Rudi Kompfner, medium-altitude satellites, and Harold Rosen (pages 174—175) from interviews with Pierce, his oral history at Caltech, memos, and his autobiography (see notes for chapter 17).