Page 57 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Te/esatellite Policy and DBS, 1962-1984 45

and from the United States, it held an absolute monopoly over all
domestic US long-distance telephone calls, and about 80 percent of
the local US telephone market was under its control. 18 In sum, the
GSO alternative - beyond its technological uncertainties - entailed the
potential of excluding significant components of the AT&T infrastruc-
ture altogether. AT&T executives thus became champions of the kind
of telesatellite system they assumed would minimize competitive
incursions. 19
At the same Congressional hearing in which C. Gordon Murphy
promoted the Hughes Syncom project, the Director of Research and
Engineering for the Department of Defense argued that because the
'business' of the DoD 'is to look to the future and try to hedge our
bets' both kinds of technologies should be developed as quickly as
possible. 20 Moreover, given that the DoD spent US$1 billion on
telecommunications in 1962 alone, and due to its overwhelming
reliance on relatively high-cost cable-based systems that are 'dis-
tance-sensitive,' the DoD considered the rapid development and
implementation of various telesatellite systems to be both a cost-
savings and a security priority. 21
Beyond these military interests and beyond the commercial aspira-
tions of a select number of US corporations, the emergence of the
Telstar system generated an interest in the political implications of
telesatellites. According to the 1962 Congressional testimony of the
Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, G. Griffith John-
son, while telephone service developments were widely recognized to
be the most important commercial application of these new techno-
logies, from a general foreign policy perspective, 'I am sure that the
possibilities offered for the international broadcast of television pro-
grams will loom the most important. m In reference to the Soviet
space program and the perception ·that its success had damaged
America's international reputation, the Chairman of the same Con-
gressional hearing, Representative Ken Hechler, remarked that 'the
average man in the street in nations around the world would ... be
inspired' by the first international telesatellite television transmission
in history. 23 Indeed, with this propaganda dimension in mind, the
United States Information Agency (USIA) commissioned a Gallup
poll to trace the reactions of the British public to Telstar. A repres-
entative of the USIA told Congress that 'half or more of the total
British public rated the new satellite a "very good" scientific achieve-
ment ... and indicated that their opinion of scientific development in
the United States has gone up as a result of Telstar.' 24