Page 53 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

3 Telesatellite Policy and

DBS, 1962-1984

The history of the Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) in the United
States from 1962 to 1984 involves a paradox. The year 1962 was the
one in which the Communications Satellite Act was passed. By 1984
most of America's first DBS license holders either had failed to
establish viable domestic systems or had given up their direct broad-
casting plans altogether. It also was the year in which the United
States withdrew from UNESCO - then the most troublesome and
perhaps also the most vulnerable of UN agencies opposing US foreign
communication policy.
The paradox of US policy over these years most visibly involved
ongoing schisms in the relationship between public sector investments
in the development of DBS on the one hand, and the efforts of public
sector agencies to derail its commercial application on the other.
Without government funding, mostly through National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) research and development con-
tracts, direct broadcasting probably would not have become techno-
logically feasible when it did- in the mid-1970s. Yet, as Delbert D.
Smith recognized in 1976, the 'capabilities of direct broadcast satell-
ites are so countervailant to vested interests and represent such a
spectrum of controversial applications' that efforts to develop DBS
services were repeatedly suffocated over the course of this formative
period. 12
NASA's mandate was to fund the preliminary development of non-
commercial outer space technologies. It had relative independence
(along with the Department of Defense) in the allocation of these
contracts. There was, at first, a limited threat posed by aerospace
manufacturers interested in developing DBS technologies in relation
to the interests of AT&T and Comsat. These were significant factors
facilitating the preliminary development of direct broadcasting. In this
effort, aerospace companies such as Hughes Aircraft and Fairchild
Industries had early access to public sector research and funding. But
the DBS prototype ATS-F system was never put into commercial
service. Instead, this first direct broadcast satellite was used in a
much-publicized series of educational television experiments for the

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