Page 60 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

48 Communication, Commerce and Power

by public shareholders, and three were to be Presidential appointees.
At the request of Comsat, NASA launch facilities and other services,
including research and development funds, were made available to the
new monopoly on a cost reimbursement basis. 33
The Kennedy administration's publicly stated justification for this
arrangement included its desire to avoid the potentially wasteful
duplication of costly satellite and ground-station facilities; the desir-
ability of establishing a system whose components were technologic-
ally compatible; and the more political desire to establish eventually
the 'fruitful exchange of communication between all co\lntries' in
order to 'avoid destructive competition' between different countries
tied to different 'political blocs.' 34 However, Comsat was also estab-
lished as the vehicle through which US interests could directly guide
the development of a future international telesatellite system. As
discussed below, the predominance of AT&T and smaller common
carriers in Comsat was to become a significant bottleneck in DBS
developments and in the conception and implementation of US for-
eign communication policy in general. Again, the overwhelming prior-
ity at the time of Comsat's creation was the rapid development of
American technological (and hence military) capabilities in relation to
the Soviet Union. Less crucial, but also present, was the fear of
potential space-based Soviet propaganda activities. In 1962, for
instance, Senator Wayne Morse told Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
'Russia in the not too distant future will be in competition with us in
exporting her enslaver philosophy of communism through the satellite
communications system. ' 35
In the end, Congress, the DoJ, the FCC and the White House
accepted the claims of common carriers that the text of the Satellite
Communications Act prevented Comsat from eventually controlling
prospective domestic telesatellite services if, indeed, these were ever to
be developed. Congress and the Kennedy administration also
accepted the carriers's arguments that they would have to be the
unchallenged leaders in commercial telesatellite developments as a
byproduct of their existing expertise and capital holdings. One reason
for the legislature's final acceptance of these assertions involved the
presence of a gap in knowledge. As Senator John Pastore put it in
1962, specifically on the subject of proceeding with the development
of the AT&T elliptical Telstar system:

I am not a technician or a scientist, I am a member of Congress
who listens to the experts. We have been assured by those who are