Page 11 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

x FOREWORD

Not long after Sputnik (and a later companion that took a dog on a one-way trip
into orbit—and sent animal rights people nearly into orbit as well), I got an early
introduction to how interdisciplinary the field of space already was. After school,
I would take a bus downtown to sit in the back of a large University of Wisconsin
lecture hall and listen to a series of slide-illustrated lectures on developments in
satellite and space technology. A lot of this was way over my head, especially the
engineers and their fascination with equations, but others were gripping in their
projections of what was coming. One of the speakers was Werner von Braun, well
before he was widely known in the United States. Those lectures were packed,
and the talks were followed by avid question-and-answer sessions. My own fasci-
nation did not, however, help boost my math or science grades any, and thus it
quickly became clear I was not going to be doing anything in this field. At least I
could read about the latest developments and watch them on TV. Thus, I saw the
attempt to launch the pencil-thin U.S. Navy Vanguard missile (from a strange
place called Cape Canaveral), only to see it come crashing down on the launch
pad when its rocket engines malfunctioned. Even on black-and-white TV, that ex-
plosion was pretty impressive. The failed launch made clear just how close to the
edge of technology satellite engineers were working.
Most exciting, of course, were the steps to place man in space. The selection of
the first seven astronauts was headline news, and they quickly became "skygods."
President Kennedy electrified us with his promise to place a man on the moon by
the end of the 1960s. Soon we all watched TV network coverage of Scott Carpen-
ter and then John Glenn in early Mercury one-person orbital missions. These were
followed by the first "space walks" in the mid-1960s from Gemini two-man cap-
sules. Yet the risks were high, the terrible space capsule fire that killed the three
Apollo 1 astronauts on the launch pad in 1967 being but one tragic example.
By this time, of course, satellites and space travel were of interest to more than
star-struck kids and the military. When Communications Satellite Corporation
(Comsat) was formed in 1962, its stock was quickly grabbed up by a technology-
happy investment community. We watched in amazement as AT&T's Telstar
made possible the first experimental two-way TV links from Europe to the United
States only a few years after undersea telephone cables had entered service across
the Atlantic. That satellites might have continuing practical applications was
dawning on a growing number of people.
Flash ahead to Christmas Eve 1968, as millions of us watched network TV re-
lay pictures from the formerly unknown far side of the moon. Astronaut Frank
Borman aboard an Apollo vehicle orbiting the moon read from the Bible as we
saw something no human had ever observed before—the earth rise over the sur-
face of the moon. It was a magical moment, and memories of it still give me chills.
Six months later, the world was watching again as astronauts Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin became the first two men to walk on the surface of the moon. Then
completing graduate school, several fellow students and I jury-rigged three TV
sets side by side so we could monitor what each of the networks was showing on