Article from Chicago Tribune Commentary 07/ 23/2012 | US Iran Affairs

Miracles in space \ Communication satellites connect the world in wondrous ways. By Newton N. Minow, a Chicago lawyer and senior counsel at Sidley

Austin LLP.

Fifty years ago today, we took a giant step in communications history with the first transatlantic live television broadcast connecting Europe and America. For the first time, Europeans saw the Statue of Liberty, the Chicago Cubs playing the Philadelphia Phillies at Wrigley Field, President John Kennedy?s news conference, buffalo roaming the Great Plains and a boy admiring a Sioux chief in North Dakota in real time. Americans saw the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and reindeer in the Arctic Circle. . According to ?Cronkite,? by Douglas Brinkley, Walter Cronkite said, ?We had to keep telling ourselves it was happening. It was happening because the United States had launched the first communications satellite, Telstar, in space. When President Kennedy appointed me a year earlier to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, I had never heard of a communications satellite. On my first day on the job, a senior FCC commissioner, T.A.M. Craven, came to see me and asked if I knew anything about communications satellites. After I said no, he groaned that he was afraid that would be the case. Craven, who had been in charge of naval radio transatlantic communications in World War I, was an FCC veteran who had been appointed to the FCC by both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. He told me of his frustration at being unable to get anyone in the FCC or elsewhere in the government to become interested in communications satellites. He told me we were ahead of the Russians in research about communications satellites. The Russians had launched Sputnik in 1957 and the United States was trying to catch up, and here was one part of the space race where we could move ahead. He said he would teach me if I promised to do something about it. I promised. After taking Craven?s tutorial, I read Arthur Clarke?s visionary book about communications satellites, and met with Jim Webb, head of NASA, who was very enthusiastic about launching a test. I went to the Bell Labs in New Jersey to see the first prototype of a communications satellite called Telstar. Frank Stanton, president of CBS and a trustee of the nonprofit RAND Corp., told me RAND had some expertise in this field; I saw and heard RAND briefings on communication satellites. When I felt that I knew enough, we pushed an FCC license through a cumbersome process for a test of Telstar to occur in July of 1962. President Kennedy invited me to go with him on a tour of our major space installations. When we were in St. Louis at a McDonnell plant, he beckoned to me to his side and said he heard I was pushing communications satellites and asked me why I thought it was so important. I said, ?Mr. President, communication satellites are more important than sending a man into space because they will launch ideas, and ideas last longer than men and women. The president sent the Communications Satellite Act of 1962 to Congress to create a public-private entity to develop satellites; I testified 13 times before different Senate and House committees. I remember at one Senate hearing that Louisiana Sen. Russell Long said, ?You say this is one area where we are ahead of the Russians in space. What do you suggest we do to stay ahead of the Russians? I replied that we should try to get the Russians to adopt the same bureaucratic regulatory system we have for communications, especially to get the Russians to pass the American Administrative Procedure Act, which will tie them up in red tape. The FCC is, by law, a bipartisan agency of government. We managed to have unanimous votes at the FCC on communications satellite issues. This helped us in Congress to keep bipartisan support all the way for the legislation to pass, for the program to succeed and grow. The day the Senate was to vote on the legislation, Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, called me at home at 7 a.m. to check on one provision in the bill and to thank the FCC for earning wide bipartisan support. Today, communications satellites every day perform miracles we never thought or dreamed of 50 years ago. They connect cable systems and broadcast networks, carry telephone calls and data all over the United States and the world. With the development of computers, digital technology and their marriage with satellites, the world has become much smaller. Satellite communications enlarge television choices for viewers, enable people around the globe to watch the Olympics at the same time, see the Sept. 11, 2001, disaster unfold and make it possible for a woman in Ghana to speak to her son in Chicago. And this is only the beginning. At age 86, I will not be here for the 100th anniversary of communications satellites on July 23, 2062. But I have suggested to my grandchildren that they write that date down and remember that great advances happen when the imagination of science is combined with the bipartisan spirit of cooperation by industry, labor and government ? and that ideas last longer than men and women. ct12 0020 120723 N S 0000000000 00004429. ILLUSTRATION: Photo(s). Photo: In a 1962 photo, technicians from Bell Labs affix Telstar 1 to a rocket that would take the communications satellite into space. Monday marks the 50th anniversary of the Telstar launch. ALCATEL-LUCENT PHOTO.

Source: http://www.usiranaffairs.com/?p=2209

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