Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race: The Origins of Global Satellite Communications by Hugh R. Slotten (review)

NASA Administrator James E. Webb asked a pointed question in 1964: "How did we get so much communication satellite technology for so little money?" Webb's question could not be satisfactorily answered at the time; this important new book offers the best explanation yet.

Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race explores how government and industry shaped policy, expanded capabilities, and used this envisioned space-based telecommunications capability to propound the American way to the peoples of other nations, as well as to enhance American commercial profitmaking at the same time that it facilitated American geopolitical ends in the American-Soviet Cold War. Sometimes these objectives clashed, most of the time they coexisted, and, as Hugh Slotten demonstrates, more often than not the various actors agreed on a solution beneficial to all.

Slotten's focus on the nexus between government and industry in the building of an entirely new space-based communications system in the 1960s revectors the time-worn story of Cold War space rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead of NASA and the race to the moon, Slotten uses the creation of a system of global communications with space-based components as a study of something equally critical to America's Cold War objectives: the soft power of technological verisimilitude that could help sway nonaligned—and especially emerging—nations to the American side of the global conflict. Like so many other "hearts and minds" efforts by the superpowers in the Cold War, the establishment of a worldwide satellite communications network represented war by another means, but one in which no one died—at least not intentionally.

Appropriately, Slotten makes clear that satellite communications was the first truly commercial space technology developed in the first fifty years of the space age, generating billions of dollars annually in sales. His first chapter relates the efforts of John R. Pierce at AT&T's Bell Labs, who argued before Sputnik that a space communications system could be worth billions and could ensure AT&T's primacy as a communications company. At Pierce's insistence, AT&T filed in 1960 for permission to launch an experimental communications satellite. Although embraced by the Eisenhower administration, when Kennedy became president in January 1961, this decision made some senior officials wince. They opposed AT&T's seeking to extend its telephone monopoly into the "new high ground" of space. They also saw the opportunity to use this as a powerful nonmilitary means of persuading other nations to ally with the United States against the Soviet Union.

The Kennedy administration sponsored the Communications Satellite Act of 1962, authorizing the public-private COMSAT Corporation to oversee the development and operation of an international communications satellite system. Slotten offers an in-depth account of how the COMSAT Corp. became the primary actor in the establishment of the International Telecommunication Satellite Consortium (INTELSAT), which brokered international agreements and oversaw the development of Intelsat 1 in 1965, the first satellite pioneering a global space-based communications network.

With this satellite system in orbit, the world became a far different place. There is no question, and Slotten emphasizes this in his final chapters, that communications satellites helped to shape the course of the Cold War. Many nations wanted to be part of the system, and the building of Earth stations to communicate through the satellites to other stations was cause for celebration in many regions of the world. Within a few years, telephone circuits increased from five hundred to thousands, and live television coverage of events anywhere in the world became commonplace. With this, one could make the case that the most notable change to the life of the ordinary Earthling coming from our ability to fly in space was global instantaneous telecommunications. Slotten ably examines how this first constellation of communications satellites came to be and offers a compelling argument for their importance as a...